HISTORIES/GEOGRAPHIES OF THEORY Theories have histories and spatial locations. Certain foci of anthropological or historical reflection are, unsurprisingly, beholden to specific regions: spirit possession and postcolonialism gathered in relation to Africa, and India; revolution, to France, the U.S., Haiti, and Russia; territoriality and spatial semiotics to indigenous groups of the Americas or Australia; “ethnic nationalism,” to Germany and Eastern Europe; creolization and transculturation, to the Caribbean. These geo-theoretical productions inflect and act recursively on and in the lives of social actors who inherit them in those sites, and who live in their sediment.
In “Generations of Memory: Elements of a Conceptual Framework,” Harald Wydra revisits classic theories of collective memory from Halbwachs, Nora, Elias, Mannheim, Connerton, and especially Koselleck to move beyond the history versus memory impasse and explore the historical making of collective conditions of potential memories as they generate “thresholds of experience.” Wydra argues that generational belonging mediates access to memory as thresholds of experience create “problem spaces,” different temporalities, and frameworks of anticipation. What motivates the desire to belong to “a generation”? Generations of memory, Wydra contends, are a hermeneutic process oriented around marked threshold experiences, or events. Belonging to a generation structures the perception of temporalities, building networks of connectivity, sites and activities of remembering, narrative commitments and cultural memory. Still, this is rarely neat. Complex problem spaces and events may simultaneously produce multiple frameworks of memory, and anticipate multiple futures.
Freddy Foks’ essay, “Bronislaw Malinowski, ‘Indirect Rule,’ and the Colonial Politics of Functionalist Anthropology, ca. 1925–1940,” employs anthropology not only in relation to colonial and metropolitan forces, but also within international politics, especially the League of Nations’ interwar jurisprudence. Within that broad scope, Foks excavates a moment when anthropological theory was at the center of British policy-making, and refigures Malinowski as less a political quietist than historians of anthropology like George Stocking have cast him. If functionalism and the politics of indirect rule were closely enmeshed, Foks shows how these were deployed by Malinowski and other anthropologists in flexible ways, sharing more based on what they both opposed—settler colonialism—than a common ideal of indirect rule. Anthropologists’ and British officials’ visions of indirect rule diverged significantly, though, with Malinowski and his students aiming to weaken colonial rule, while British officials saw indirect rule as a means of extending it.
Edward Simpson, Alice Tilche, Tommaso Sbriccoli, Patricia Jeffery, and Tina Otten’s contribution, “A Brief History of Incivility in Rural Postcolonial India: Caste, Religion, and Anthropology,” compares village life in the 1950s with village life today. They draw on mid-century ethnographies carried out in three different sites and set them in relation to their own recent ethnographic work in the same sites. Fieldwork accounts from the 1950s described growing incivility between caste Hindus and former Untouchables. Returning to the same locales today, the authors show how that inter-caste incivility has now given way to the incivility of religious nationalism, sometimes drawn as Hindu-Muslim, at other times and locales (as in Odisha) as Hindu-Christian. All find that the incivility of caste has been eclipsed by new questions of religious allegiance. Political parties and their intersections with religious sects now provide the lines of difference. Using different methods today, the authors demonstrate how the shift in modes of incivility plays out in everyday routines like street conversations, wedding processions, and building projects. The study offers a window on the research questions, methods, and conditions of the 1950s versus the present, as the authors gained access to mid-century ethnographers’ original notes to compare with their published works. This elegant essay thus presents parallel comparisons along three vectors: between modes of incivility; between village life in the 1950s and today; and between post-war methods and those of our time.
TRANS-FIGURED Pamela Ballinger's article in this issue, “A Sea of Difference, a History of Gaps: Migrations between Italy and Albania, 1939–1992,” suggests a new, complex approach to the study of decolonization. The decolonization of Albania after Italy's fascist occupation of it from 1939–1943, far from transpiring rapidly or all at once, took place in a series of repatriation episodes and gaps across a long half-century, with the last Italians only returning home in the 1990s. Ballinger's work situates Albania in the Adriatic Sea rather than across the Balkan range, and as aquatic neighbor to Italy rather than land-neighbor to Yugoslavia. Her essay helps us to see how the regional configuration of a given history or of a particular analytic changes the story considerably. Adriatic Albania, and the view of it through what Ballinger calls “liquid thinking” over a sea of frictions and gaps, offers a privileged window onto the afterlives of Italian communities in Albania.
Who controlled and coordinated global biomedical research in the second half of the twentieth century? Who brokered the procurement of “human subjects,” and adjudicated the hierarchy of research, and researchers? In “‘Essential Collaborators’: Locating Middle Eastern Geneticists in the Global Scientific Infrastructure, 1950s-1970s,” Elise K. Burton reveals the ways international networks of genetic researchers reinforced regional and national orders, well beyond the direct reaches of colonial or neocolonial control. She explores how the modern natural sciences emerged as a process of mercantile, colonial, and imperial interaction. Genetic research broadly instantiated a hierarchic gap between the West and the rest, as scientists manipulated research subjects drawn from subjugated groups, and linked their results to national narratives. Still, that hierarchic gap was dependent on intermediary regimes enlisted as complicit but mostly subservient partners. On this score, she compares the work of Israeli and Iranian scientists on genetics from the 1950s to the 1970s, as those scientists used subjugated peoples as subjects, yet were themselves marginalized within the larger global order of medical research. Science produced in so-called developing nations was relegated to the status of native “data,” set at a distant remove from the master-theories generated in European or North American metropolises.
Culturalist accounts since Marx and Weber have often posited the emergence of modern capitalism as a result of European, Judeo-Christian traditions allegedly emphasizing, among other things, the import of private property vis-à-vis the state. New institutional paradigms, by contrast, attended to Islam as an ideological and institutional block to capital accumulation. Kristen Alff mounts a devastating critique of both of these models in her essay, “Levantine Joint-Stock Companies, Trans-Mediterranean Partnerships, and Nineteenth-Century Capitalist Development.” The Levantine business community, mostly Christian (Greek Orthodox and Maronite) but also Muslim, created large agricultural estates in the Levant, and a set of highly lucrative business practices. Western and Levantine capitalisms shared common bases of accumulation in coerced labor and long-distance trade. However, the Levantine business community was framed in relation to Ottoman social formations rather than those of Paris or London, and Levantine companies applied methods distinct from those of European companies; for example, of collective sharecropping instead of absolute ownership. Only after World War I did Dutch and English forms of capitalism become dominant, as European capital investment integrated with colonial rule changed the framework of global capitalism, pushing Levantine fortunes and contracts into a secondary and subordinate role. But in the early twentieth century, Beirut and Istanbul were every bit the rivals of London, Liverpool, Amsterdam, or Paris. Alff's essay calls us to rethink the very roots of modern capitalism.
MIMESIS AND FAMILIARITY (RELIGIOUS) What would Bhagat Singh do? Against the idea that humans of the present freely select from the past in order to articulate political projects, Chris Moffat asks us to consider how certain figures of the anticolonial dead in India make demands on the present and spur bold action. The dead themselves conjure politics, as an inheritance. Moffat's article, “Politics and the Work of the Dead in Modern India,” examines the ongoing work of the revolutionary martyr Bhagat Singh (1907–1931) as he acts in and on three distinct political mobilizations. Bhagat Singh shape-shifts into manifold graphic, textual, and digital forms, which all have their forms of agency, their own ways of haunting. Bhagat Singh's “spectral weight” is felt especially in relation to projects that remain unfinished. At the same time, his ongoing presence defines and marks the very consciousness of political struggle as incomplete, an ongoing call to arms.
Tobias Rupprecht presents a compelling argument for the impact of religious movements and institutions on states’ decision making, global politics, and the international order. “Orthodox Internationalism: State and Church in Modern Russia and Ethiopia” excavates a longue-durée history of relations between Russia (or the U.S.S.R.) and Ethiopia to demonstrate the central role the mutual recognition, and sometimes even mimesis of each other as “Orthodox” nations played in their diplomatic, economic, ideological, and sentimental rapport—quite apart from the relative lack of any actual theological accord on what Orthodoxy means. The political obligations cemented and enacted by the mutual recognition of being Orthodox kin endured in substantial ways even after their respective shifts to communism, via a revolutionary vanguard of priests, in spite of official hostility toward religion as such. Rupprecht argues that Russia's post-communist external relations remain heavily influenced by Orthodox internationalism. His essay opens out to address crucial broader questions on the ways mostly specious theories of secularization have blinded scholars to the long-term influence religious institutions have had, and continue to exert, in the making of a global political order.
