Historians of Europe may be generally aware of the former significance of Celtic child-fostering, so prominently documented in the law books and legends of medieval Ireland. Yet there is no comprehensive survey of such fosterage from a comparative historical perspective, nor has its archival documentation been collated for analysis. The present essay aims to redress this neglect: it reviews extant evidence of Celtic fosterage in the British Isles, examined with reference to comparable institutions of adoptive kinship documented throughout western Eurasia, which comprised some of its scarcely recognized “elementary structures” of familial clientage and feudatory state formation (cf. Guerreau-Jalabert 1981; 1999; Mitterauer 2006).

Studies of what we call modern societies frequently take one of two major perspectives. The first emphasizes an ever-increasing constraining or regulatory power (Weber's iron cage [1976], or Foucault's discipline and regulation [1979, 1980]). The second tradition seems to contradict the first by emphasizing trends, such as a “democratic revolution” (de Tocqueville 1969:702–5; Laclau and Mouffe 1985:152) or the extension of citizenship rights (Marshall 1973; Bendix 1977). In this essay I argue that the twin processes of increasing regulation on one hand, and institutionalization of individual rights on the other, are closely linked. I make this argument by interpreting the transformation of relations between the state and peasants in Siam (Thailand) during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and through an assessment of two books which have been particularly influential in comparative studies during the 1980s: James Scott's Weapons of the Weak (1985) and Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities (1983).

In recent years, approaches to legal pluralism have shifted dramatically. One shift comes from within a school of fieldwork-oriented anthropologists, historians, and sociologists known as the law-and-society movement.The Law and Society Review, and to a lesser extent, Law and Social Inquiry, are the main outlets of the movement. Studies of legal pluralism are published in these journals and increasingly so, since its founding in 1981, in the Journal of Legal Pluralism. Before the turn, law-and-society scholars viewed local, national, and transnational legal systems as coexisting but essentially separate. Criticisms of the inherent stasis of this formulation and its failure to explore interactions between the systems or power inequalities among them motivated the shift (Griffiths 1986; Starr and Collier 1994; Merry 1988, 1992). The new legal pluralism, as it is called, now includes an expanded range of normative ordering systems, often labeled private governance, found in all societies, not only those with colonial histories but also those produced by transnational processes (Galanter 1981; Merry 1992). It addresses the dialectic, mutually constitutive relations of these systems rather than their separateness (Arthurs 1985; Benda-Beckman andStrijbosch 1986; Fitzpatrick 1983; Henry 1985; Vanderlinden 1989).

The article systematically assesses U.S.-Native relations today and their historical foundations in light of a narrow, empirical definition of colonial empire. Examining three core elements of colonial empire—the formal impairment of sovereignty, the intensive practical impairment of sovereignty through practices of governance and administration, and the continuing otherness of the dominated and dominant groups—we compare contemporary U.S.-Native political relations to canonical instances of formal colonial indirect rule empires. Based on this analysis, we argue that the United States today is a paradigmatic case of formal colonial empire in the narrow, traditional sense, one that should be better integrated into the comparative, historical, and sociological study of such formal empires. Furthermore, this prominent contemporary case stands against the idea that the era of formal colonial empire is over.

This article analyzes representations of the Koli as aboriginal in colonial Bombay, and explores the ends to which various actors have narrated Koli aboriginality. It examines the relationship between the historical deployment of the concept of aboriginality and its mediating role in the power of capital and state-making practices in one colonial urban context. The article shows how the Koli, as Bombay's “aboriginals,” gained concessions that served as an alibi for the market-based dispossession of the remainder of the city's population, and also as a pretext for claim-making by peoples with competing collective identities who used the tale of Koli identity and history as a narrative resource to argue for their own nativity. The Koli case helps us understand the co-emergence of the powers of caste and capital in Bombay, and compels us to revisit important, broader questions about relationships between aboriginal or indigenous peoples, capitalism, colonialism, liberalism, and governance.

Islamic society is ever intriguing. Across broad territories and over millenia oftime, it maintains a constant identity; yet it is always elusive, varied, andchanging. The study of Islamic urbanism, like so many Islamic topics, oscillatesbetween attempts to define what is fundamental and universal in Islamic citylife, and what is ineffably individual about each locality; the contradictoryperspectives seem equally valid. While topography, culture, and history havegiven each locality a unique identity, by the middle ages, Middle Eastern townsbetween the Nile and the Jaxartes—the core area of Islamicsociety—shared common features of social organization. Small communities,such as families, neighborhood quarters, and fraternities were the fundamentalunits of society. Town populations were gathered into loosely organizedreligious bodies, such as schools of law, Shirite sects, and Sufi brotherhoods,who were dominated by ethnically alien elites organized into slave armies andslave-maintained governments, and who garrisoned and extracted revenues from thetowns while remaining separate from local community life. Characteristically,then, Middle Eastern Muslim cities operated on three levels-parochial groups,religious communities, and imperial regimes. Organized urban life depended onthe relationships between person and groups within this three-tieredinstitutional pattern.

This paper examines two intertwined processes that shaped post-war Tehran. One was a ravenous demand for electricity, part of a surge in popular expectations for consumer goods and higher standards of living. The other was the construction of the Karaj Dam to meet that demand. Consumerist expectations, especially among Tehran's bourgeoning middle classes, developed together with a West-centered but ultimately global maturation of mass consumer culture, with the cultural Cold War, and with the shaky post-1953 regime's politics of promising higher living standards. The Karaj Dam became possible when that regime frightened its patron—the U.S. administration that dreaded Soviet influence—into helping pay for the project despite reservations in the U.S. Congress and among technical specialists. The dam was not simply a top-down state (or U.S.) project—it was also caused by and in that sense belonged to Tehranis. I draw on archival and published primary sources, images, and secondary literature to tell a story of society-state and domestic-global interactions that characterized many Third World countries. This paper builds on past studies of relationships between the Cold War and Third World development, and of the transnational history of development/modernization. But it transcends their focus on elites, and that of other scholars’ on subaltern victims, and argues that analyses of Third World development and the Cold War must include the middle classes and, conceptually, social history.

Corporations often claim to be economic actors solely interested in capital accumulation. However, historical and anthropological scholarship has argued they have had outsized political roles, especially during high colonialism when transnational corporations such as the British East India Company and the Dutch East India Company shaped colonial entities. This article explores the case of American mining company Freeport-McMoRan, which runs the world’s largest gold and copper mine in West Papua, and its entanglement with contemporary imperial and colonial projects in the region. Through the study of the company’s decisive role in the transfer of West Papua from the Dutch to Indonesia during the decolonization period of the 1960s, and in the formation of the postcolonial Indonesian state characterized by its militaristic and capitalistic stances, this article argues that Freeport’s operation in West Papua has been central to shaping U.S. imperial policy in Southeast Asia. The company’s relationship with the U.S. government and its contract of work with the Indonesian government reproduce an older form of state-corporation partnership called a charter, which grants a corporate body privileges associated with exploration, trade, and colonization. Combining a historical study of the political role of corporations across time and an ethnographic study of Freeport’s operation, this article rethinks the anthropological and historical study of transnational corporations and their roles in the contemporary politics of colonialism.

This paper addresses the rising suicide rate in Greece since the economic crisis began in 2008. By 2011, Greek and international media were reporting the Greek suicide rate as the fastest rising in Europe; dozens of “spectacular” public suicides were taken as symptoms of an “epidemic.” In this paper, I explore different accounts of this “epidemic”: statistical studies and press reports on suicide since the crisis; notes written by people who committed or attempted suicide in public during the crisis; and narratives of suicidality from psychiatric patients before the crisis, in dialogue with local psychiatric epidemiologies. These accounts summon three axes of comparison around suicide in Greece: historical difference, defined by the economic crisis and the time before; locale, contrasting the public sphere of media coverage and consumption with a particular region distinguished by its “suicidogenic” features; and evidence, moving from the public discourse on suicide to clinical ethnographic research that I conducted in northeastern Greece a decade ago. I show that each way of accounting for suicide challenges the epistemologies and evidence at work in the others; the tensions and the interactions among them are signs of indeterminacy in suicide itself, taken as an object of inquiry. In the public discourse on the Greek crisis, the many meanings of suicide have been condensed and fixed as a politics of protest. Yet, I argue, comparison among epistemologies of suicide and recognition of its indeterminacy generate a space for thinking about suicide beyond the publicity of the crisis.

The contemporary occupation of portering in mountain regions has largely been structured through transcultural contact, contact between two groups historically symbolized by the oppressive dialectic of power relations: master/ servant, “sahib”/“coolie,” trekker/porter, “him who rides”/“him who carries.” The relative position of these groups within the power relations that characterize adventure tourism has altered through time. The oppression exercised by the superordinate group has likely lessened, while the status enjoyed by the subordinate group has likely increased.Here I refer to portering, the carrying of person or baggage for others, specifically as it relates to the adventure travel industry (trekking, mountaineering, and so forth). There are, of course, circumstances in which the lot of the porter has not increased significantly over the past two centuries. A case that springs immediately to mind is the use of forced labour in the construction of a physical infrastructure in the interior of Burma. Nonetheless, these two groups still operate within radically asymmetrical relations of power. Invariably, “the porter” occupies the lower position; “the employer,” the upper. In this essay, I investigate the historical constitution and evolution of these relations in a region of the Karakoram mountain range of what is now northern Pakistan.Many of the insights upon which this essay are based stem from time spent in villages of the upper Braldu valley of Baltistan. These villages, particularly that of Askole, are strategically situated in relation to the adventure tourism industry. Askole, for example, is the last permanently inhabited village on the trail to K2 (8,611 meters). Despite a recent expansion in tourism, many Baltis have long been familiar with the hardships of carrying the baggage of others along mountain trails.

If a question can be mal posée, surely an interpretation can be mal étendue. This has been the fate of the social interpretation of the welfare state. The cousin of social theories of bourgeois revolution, the social interpretation of the welfare state is part of a broader conception of the course of modern European history that until recently has laid claim to the status of a standard. The social interpretation sees the welfare states of certain countries as a victory for the working class and confirmation of the ability of its political representatives on the Left to use universalist, egalitarian, solidaristic measures of social policy on behalf of the least advantaged. Because the poor and the working class were groups that overlapped during the initial development of the welfare state, social policy was linked with the worker's needs. Faced with the ever-present probability of immiseration, the proletariat championed the cause of all needy and developed more pronounced sentiments of solidarity than other classes. Where it achieved sufficient power, the privileged classes were forced to consent to measures that apportioned the cost of risks among all, helping those buffeted by fate and social injustice at the expense of those docked in safe berths.

In this essay I hope to come closer to an understanding of how Mau Mau insurgents created a world in the Aberdares forest composed of individuals and groups who contested the means for which positive social value could be attained.Mau Mau is the name given by whites to the Central Kenyan insurgency that became openly violent in 1952. Most Mau Mau violence was centered in and around the Aberdares Forest, which separated the European “White Highlands” from the African Reserves. Though not entirely a Kikuyu movement, most forest fighters were Kikuyu, and Mau Mau has often been referred to as a “Kikuyu civil war” because so much of the violence was directed at African (mostly Kikuyu) elites and because many Kikuyu (such as chiefs, elites, and Homeguards recruited by the colonial government to fight Mau Mau insurgents) took an active role in denouncing or quelling it. As John Lonsdale (1992) and Bruce Berman (1991) have shown, Mau Mau framed and informed debates about morally appropriate lifeways among a people who were never a cohesive “tribe” and who experienced radically different living and working conditions under colonialism. The world they created was replete with power, and this power was congealed in certain objects and the ability to use them. Many of these objects were literally stolen from the institutions which made up the colonial regime (schools and offices, for example). They circulated within and among groups of insurgents (itungati) in the forest and in some way represented and embodied the enchanted power of the colonial state apparatus.Most authors translate itungati as “freedom fighter” or “guerilla.” Lonsdale (1992) has indicated that the term literally means “rear guard” and probably refers to the self-conception of the original Mau Mau leadership as the rear guard, vis è vis literate nationalists like Jomo Kenyatta, in the struggle for independence. Yet the circulation of these objects into new social space (Mau Mau camps), whose constitution they contributed to, both changed the meaning of these objects and clarified and accelerated divisions within the movement.

One night five years after completing my first field work I had a disturbing dream. In it I returned to my original field site in the Bosavi region of Papua New Guinea to discover that the vast tropical forest with its patches of gardens and isolated longhouses had disappeared. In its place was a sprawling development with rows of tract houses, paved roads, and motels. The whole was dominated by an impressive mission complex with airstrip, schools, dormatories, and a huge church.

One of the great virtues of Charles Tilly's Durable Inequality is that it might be wrong. So often attempts at constructing grand theories in sociology turn out, on close inspection, to consist largely of tautologies and vacuous propositions—conceptual frameworks that are so flexible and indeterminate that no empirical observations of the world would ever count as surprising. This is not the case for the central arguments in Tilly's book. Consider, for example, a claim that the author makes early in the book about the relatively limited significance of beliefs in the explanation of durable inequality:

This paper demonstrates that there have been three distinct waves of Maoist insurgency in India since 1947. We construct an ideal typical model of Maoist insurgency that is used to compare the roles played by local populations, insurgents, and state counterinsurgency measures across space and time. This allows us to demonstrate that the commonly accepted narrative of Indian Maoist insurgency must be fundamentally rethought. The Naxalbari outbreak in 1967 and the subsequent insurgency in West Bengal is generally agreed to be the central point in the history of Maoist insurgency in India. But our analysis demonstrates that it was comparatively short-lived and atypical. We instead trace the genealogy of Indian Maoism to Telengana in the late 1940s. The common feature linking all three waves is the persistence of insurgent activity among various tribal or adivasi communities in the central Indian “tribal belt.” Their overriding grievances are the historically iniquitous relationships produced by the processes of state and market expansion that have incorporated and subordinated adivasi populations who previously had a large degree of socioeconomic and political autonomy. The state's counterinsurgency strategy has consisted of violence combined with developmental and governance interventions. This has pushed Maoist insurgency to the margins of Indian political life but has been unable to eliminate insurgent activity or address the fundamental grievances of adivasis. We conclude by arguing that Maoist insurgency in India should not be considered as crime to be resolved by state violence, or as an economic problem requiring the intensification of developmental measures, but as a matter of politics.

Anthropology, the relativizing countercurrent to Enlightenment notions of civilization and progress, has long challenged notions of backwardness. By contrast, Marxist-Leninist regimes had no doubts about the world-historical backwardness of the largely agrarian societies in which they came to power, which they sought to transform through rapid industrialization. According to some indicators, this socialist civilizing mission was rather successful. Yet memories are mixed, and complicated by the reappearance of typical features of backwardness in the postsocialist era. This article explores changing political economies and the spatiotemporal imaginaries of elites and villagers in Hungary. Historical and theoretical insight is drawn from Ferenc Erdei (1910–1971), a left-leaning populist whose analysis of rural Hungary has more general relevance. Case materials are presented from a region of the Great Plain that in the longue durée exemplifies the “development of underdevelopment” on the margins of Western capitalism. Civilizational transformations were instigated from the east in the socialist decades, but their vehicle was a collectivist ideology that remained alien. The politics and economics of time now render villagers susceptible to populist imaginaries entirely different from those of Erdei.

The conflict in Palestine has been the subject of numerous international investigative commissions over the past century. These have been dispatched by governments to determine the causes of violent conflicts and how to resolve them. Commissions both produce and reflect political epistemologies, the social processes and categories by which proof and evidence are produced and mobilized in political claim-making. Using archival and ethnographic sources, my analysis focuses on three investigative commissions: the King-Crane (1919), Anglo-American (1946), and Mitchell (2001) commissions. They reveal how “reading affect” has been a diagnostic of political worthiness. Through these investigations, Western colonial agents and “the international community” have given Palestinians false hope that discourse and reason were the appropriate and effective mode of politics. Rather than simply reason, however, what each required was maintenance of an impossible balance between the rational and the emotional. This essay explores the ways that affect as a diagnostic of political worthiness has worked as a technology of rule in imperial orders, and has served as an unspoken legitimating mechanism of domination.

This study seeks to illuminate patterns of refugee settlement in the Bengali Muslim diaspora since 1947, which replicate global trends identified by Aristide Zolberg in new nation-states. Based on historical research and oral testimony gathered from over two hundred migrants in different settings in India, Bangladesh, and Britain, it suggests why some Muslims crossed borders after India's partition and others did not; why most moved only short distances within the delta; and why so many huddled in the shadow of the new national borders and so few traveled to the West. I uncover the subtle interplay between migrants' agency and structures of coercion, and between histories of mobility and of affect, in the shaping of migration choices, and explain how the recurrent patterns identified by Zolberg were produced in a regional context of critical but unexplored significance. The essay explores the impact of nation-state formation on older forms of mobility in the region, and the continuing interconnections between local micro-mobilities and regional, national, international, and trans-oceanic migrations. I suggest that the concept of “mobility capital” can help to explain not only patterns of migration, but also patterns of staying on. I conclude by questioning “cumulative causation theory,” which has inadvertently lent credence to fears that the developed countries of the West will be “swamped” by immigrants drawn from ever-expanding migratory networks based in the “third world.”

Revolutionary ideologies of both the left and the right have led to genocide and mass murders of unprecedented scope in this century. The survey by Harff and Gurr shows that genocides and politicides—killings of people in groups targeted because of organized political opposition—between 1945 and 1980 may have caused in this same period over twice as many deaths than wars. Such state killings claimed up to 2.6 times the number of lives lost in the aftermath of natural disasters between 1967 and 1986 (1987). Similarly, Rummel argues that four times as many people have been killed in democides, or state mass murders, of citizens in the twentieth century than have been killed in wars (1992).

The Conquest of Everest, the official film of the first ascent of Mount Everest, opens with the famous summit photograph of Tenzing Norgay holding aloft his ice axe, from which the flags of Britain, Nepal, India, and the United Nations flutter in the wind. Tenzing, a Sherpa raised in Nepal but for twenty years a resident of India, reached the summit with Edmund Hillary, a New Zealand beekeeper, on 29 May 1953, in a British expedition led by Colonel John Hunt. In the film, the summit photograph is followed by the opening credits and the scene in London on 2 June 1953, when news of the ascent was announced on the same day as Queen Elizabeth II's coronation. As crowds wave British flags to the beat of military bands, the Queen's gilded carriage rolls through ceremonial archways on the streets of London. The narrator then announces: “And to add to the cheers, the newspapers reported an extra of extras. Britain had one new victory: Men had climbed Mount Everest.”The Conquest of Everest, (1953), National Film and Television Archive, British Film Institute, London.