Towards the end of Paul Scott's A Division of the Spoils, the final novel of The Raj Quartet, and in the television series as well, Indian people make an appearance and commit acts of unmotivated and horrible violence. The British heroine comments, “Such a damn, bloody, senseless mess … the mess the raj had never been able to sort out.” Making sense, sorting out, was supposed to be the special vocation of British rule, yet here were all the seething, primordial conflicts rising to the surface again in the Hindu versus Muslim partition of India in 1947.

The nineteenth century, a time when world history seemed to accelerate, was the epoch of the Risorgimento and the Unification of Germany. It was also an epoch which saw the last efforts of dynastic ancien régime empires (Habsburg, Romanov, Ottoman) to shore up their political systems with methods often borrowed from their adversaries, the nationalist liberals. Eric Hobsbawm's inspiring recent study has pointed out that, in the world after the French Revolution, it was no longer enough for monarchies to claim divine right; additional ideological reinforcement was required: “The need to provide a new, or at least a supplementary, ‘national’ foundation for this institution was felt in states as secure from revolution as George III's Britain and Nicholas I's Russia.”

The convention for introducing biography in the Chinese textual tradition is to identify the subject not only by his name but also by his native place. The classic formula used for this purpose is set out in the preface to “The True Story of Ah Q,” in which Lu Xun remarks that “when writing biography, it is the usual practice to begin ‘so-and-so, from such-and-such place’ ” (Lu 1959 [1921]: 93). This formula was adopted in official documents, popular stories, obituaries and tomb epitaphs as well as in formal biographies or biographical notices. There were variations in its form, in which the person was identified as being “native of this place, living in that place” or “originally of this place, now of that place.” But in any event, a man was, and still is, normally identified by both his personal name and the name of his place of origin, just as a woman was usually identified by the names of her father and her husband. The problem for Lu Xun as fictional biographer was that Ah Q's name was a matter of debate and his place of origin unknown: He floated unmoored through Chinese society.

This essay compares the two greatest conquest movements of pre-modern times, the Arab and the Mongol, which resulted in the creation of world empires, and analyzes the importance of religion in these events. This attempt is hardly in the mainstream of current cultural anthropology, which does not encourage much comparative study of historical societies separated in time and space. Nonetheless, perhaps this comparison will facilitate a better understanding of some serious conceptual problems that both of these conquests pose for anthropologists and historians. The fact that the Arab society had a strong nomadic component and the Mongol society was firmly based on pastoral nomadism makes this comparison even more interesting.

There is a strange and unacknowledged paradox in the historiography of the Incas. On the one hand, few would deny that theirs was a typically theocratic archaic state, a divine kingship in which the Inca was thought to.be the son of the Sun. On the other hand, the standard descriptions of Inca political structure barely mention religion and seem to assume a formal separation between state and cult.1 I believe that these secularizing accounts are misguided and will show in this essay that the political structure of the pre-Columbian Andes took form primarily around a system of sacred ancestral relics and origin points known generically as huacas. Each huaca defined a level of political organization that might nest into units of a higher order or subdivide into smaller groupings. Collectively they formed a segmentary hierarchy that transcended the boundaries of local ethnic polities and provided the basis for empires like that of the Incas. However, these huacas were also the focus of local kinship relations and agrarian fertility rituals. The political structure that they articulated therefore had a built-in concern for the metaphysical reproduction of human, animal, and plant life. Political power in the pre-Columbian Andes was particularly bound up with attempts to control the flow of water across the frontier of life and death, resulting in no clear distinction between ritual and administration.

By examining three historical stages between 1914 and the late 1950s in the development of African political ideology in Francophone West Africa, this essay will explore the problem represented by the category of the colonized.1 This category, first formulated in 1961 by Frantz Fanon, has increasingly been used to revise understandings of African ideologies formed before 1960 in terms of political economy. Indeed, ever since Fanon published his polemical, The Wretched of the Earth (1968), the rage of the colonized has been naturalized in academic literature as the reaction to colonization. Yet in arguing that the rage of the peasants did not characterize the reaction of the “most completely” colonized (the elites and merchants), Fanon acknowledged that rage did not define the position of his elite predecessors. Fanon's work appeared in the twilight of the colonial era not as a dispassionate analysis but as a call to action. He intended to awaken the peasant's rage, which he considered the legitimate and local reaction to colonialism, within the elites, who did not share this attitude towards the colonizer.

How does any practice become canonized as tradition? What counts as tradition and what does not and to whom? What temporal continuity is required and how is it defined? This essay is about African initiation ceremonies, in particular the practices of the Okiek people in Kenya. Considering the many papers spawned by Hobsbawm and Ranger's book on the “invention of tradition” (1983), it may not be surprising that Okiek also construct their ceremonies as traditional. Despite the attention devoted to the topic, few essays evaluate their own definition of tradition or consider the concept critically and comparatively. An unexamined premise thus incorporated into them takes one of two forms: either the notion of tradition is more or less the same throughout the world, and cross-cultural differences are of no consequence; or some societies (traditional ones) do not have notions of tradition. This essay argues that tradition itself must be explored as an indigenous cultural concept which shapes and is shaped by different perspectives and processes, as shown by the ways Okiek endow their images of tradition on ceremonies to spin their notions of history and identity.

Since the publication of Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities almost a decade ago, historians and anthropologists have become accustomed to think of the nation—that bedrock of our existence as moderns—as an imagined entity.1 Yet it is problematic, at least to this author, that while the spotlight is (once again) on the nation, the other key actor in Anderson's formulation, the language through which a specific nation is subjectively conceived and imagined, appears to have been relegated to the sidelines. By proposing that languages, too, be considered cultural and symbolic entities that are themselves enrolled into projects of imagination, this essay assumes its beginnings in questions provoked by Anderson's analysis. Because languages themselves are subjected to multiple imaginations, how indeed can they enable the harmonious and contention-free imagination of communities? How indeed do they acquire the capacity to generate feelings of “contemporaneity,” “solidarity,” and “belonging,” as Anderson proposes? Do they not just as well have the power to scatter and disaggregate such sentiments? These are questions occasioned by more than just theoretical curiosity. In many parts of the world, the diverse imaginations that cling to languages have frequently sparked off contestation, divisiveness, and even violence, especially in multi-lingual pluralities like India, the focus of this article.

The year 1492 in Spanish history is an unforgettable date. Within the span of a few months, Spain ended a struggle for political unity on the peninsula lasting centuries and embarked upon a colonial enterprise that was to encircle the globe. But 1492 seduces the imagination, inclining one to read history's momentous consequences into the minds of the protagonists at the time. The historian is tempted to make the actors of 1492 larger than life, multiplying the importance of their actions by the eventual consequences, but this would hinder an understanding of 1492 from the perspective of the people who experienced it.

This essay concerns the politics of law and culture in Malaysia. It examines how processes of cultural change are shaped by state laws and policies and the ways in which local communities are incorporated into more encompassing political entities and their attendant moral orders. I am particularly interested in “rationalization,” a concept of central importance in much of Max Weber's work on comparative history and politics and the sociology of religion. Weber, who used this concept in a variety of ambiguous, multidimensional, and contextually specific ways, further confounded students by his difficult language and style. It is widely agreed, however, that he employed the term to refer both to institutional changes involving differentiation, specialization, and the development of hierarchical, bureaucratic forms of social organization; and to intellectual or attitudinal trends entailing, in negative terms, “the disenchantment of the world” (the displacement of “magical elements of thought”), and, in positive terms, processes by which “ideas gain in systematic coherence and naturalistic consistency” (Gerth and Mills 1958:51; Wrong 1970:26; Turner 1974:151– Schluchter 1979:14–15; Alexander 1989:74).

Culture, one of the keywords of our time, became common, as Raymond Williams has suggested, in Western discourse in the early nineteenth century. Subsequently, pushed by both anthropological and literary-aesthetic studies and extended to global dimensions, the concept of culture, which supposedly expresses primordial naturalness and the irrational, is often played off against its counterpart from the beginning, the calculated mechanicalness of civilization, or the rational. More recently, in the burgeoning field of cultural studies, the boundaries between the two terms have become increasingly blurred. Now civilization, too, is seen as the domain of the irrational, masking itself in socalled rational representation.

Many colonial regimes appropriate traditional symbols of power to enhance authority. In many cases this appropriation results in the hardening of more transitory political divisions among subject people into ethnic, national, or tribal ones. Colonialism often, in essence, creates different identities for subject peoples. For example, the East India Company (E.I.C.) and royal colonial government in India manipulated caste and religion to carry out a policy of divide and rule. Moreover, the E.I.C. and later the Raj attempted to create a European-style landed elite that could promote development of agriculture, maintain social control in the countryside and, perhaps most important, collect taxes owed to the government. The Raj attempted to place the structures of power that evolved within the framework of the symbols of Moghul legitimacy, going so far as to create a hybrid traditional style of architecture used in many public buildings that mixed elements from both Hindu and Muslim buildings. In South Africa, colonial legislation, as seen in the process begun by the Glen Gray Act of 1894, resulted in the proletarianization of the African population by creating tribal reservations without enough resources to support all the people often arbitrarily defined as members of a particular tribe. And, as seen in studies of mine labor, coloniallegislation also defined a distinctive legal status for workers.

Mayas from Guatemala and Chiapas, Mexico, narrate strikingly similar stories that are part of their oral tradition. These similarities reflect the fact that Mayas from both areas share a common cultural tradition dating to pre-Hispanic times and a basic pattern of beliefs central to the Mesoamerican cultural complex. At the same time, the stories contain notable differences that can be explained historically and traced both to pre-Hispanic or post-Hispanic developments as they combined with ecological conditions. In this study, we compare the present expression of a series of Earth Lord accounts and explain interesting differences that we observed between two groups of Maya Indians. Our results suggest that the differences can be traced to the diverse ways by which peasants are incorporated at various degrees into the capitalist system, mainly through trade or through wage labor or combinations of these with other forms of production.

When I was a girl, I was taught not to gossip by a school game. We would sit in a circle, and someone would whisper a phrase into the ear of the person sitting next to her. By the time the phrase was returned to the first speaker, it was totally deformed—hilarious proof that hearsay distorted facts. I had already published a book based extensively on oral interviews when I realized how insidious this game was, that it rested on two extremely authoritarian principles: Information should be transmitted passively, and no one has the right to alter or amend received statements.

In the course of the inter-war period, a particular empirical model of national social structure emerged in the official census publications of both Britain and the United States. In the postwar period the essential characteristics of this model subsequently became almost second nature for many English-speaking social and policy scientists on both sides of the Atlantic. This “professional model” of social structure took the following form when it was adopted in the United States in the 1930s:

I. Professional

II. Proprietors, Managers, Officials

III. Clerical, Salespersons

IV. Skilled Manual

V. Semi-skilled Manual

VI. Unskilled Manual

The Registrar-General of England and Wales had used the professional model since the 1911 census and has continued its use, with minor variations, to the present day.