Princeton Studies in Culture/Power/History

Arturo Escobar is the Kenan Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His most recent book is Territories of Difference. How did the industrialized nations of North America and Europe come to be seen as the appropriate models for post-World War II societies in Asia, Africa, and Latin America? How did the postwar discourse on development actually create the so-called Third World? And what will happen when development ideology collapses? To answer these questions, Arturo Escobar shows how development policies became mechanisms of control that were just as pervasive and effective as their colonial counterparts. The development apparatus generated categories powerful enough to shape the thinking even of its occasional critics while poverty and hunger became widespread. "Development" was not even partially "deconstructed" until the 1980s, when new tools for analyzing the representation of social reality were applied to specific "Third World" cases. Here Escobar deploys these new techniques in a provocative analysis of development discourse and practice in general, concluding with a discussion of alternative visions for a postdevelopment era. Escobar emphasizes the role of economists in development discourse--his case study of Colombia demonstrates that the economization of food resulted in ambitious plans, and more hunger. To depict the production of knowledge and power in other development fields, the author shows how peasants, women, and nature became objects of knowledge and targets of power under the "gaze of experts." In a substantial new introduction, Escobar reviews debates on globalization and postdevelopment since the book's original publication in 1995 and argues that the concept of postdevelopment needs to be redefined to meet today's significantly new conditions. He then calls for the development of a field of "pluriversal studies," which he illustrates with examples from recent Latin American movements. "Arturo Escobar has given us an important and exciting take on issues of Third World development and its alternatives. . . . [This book] indisputably provides some exciting and significant new ways of thinking about development. . . . Arturo Escobar has done us all a service." "[T]he cultural critique--and politics--proposed in this penetrating book are crucial in these perilous times."---Michael F. Jiménez, American Journal of Sociology "[I]mportant. . . . [A]n original and provocative analysis." "An intelligent and thorough overview of the rise of the concept of 'development' . . . . [This book] represents the best of interdisciplinary work in cultural studies and speaks to central debates across the permeable borders of anthropology, economics, history, sociology, and development studies."-Orin Starn, Duke University

Jane Fishburne Collier is Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University. She is the author of Law and Social Change in Zinacantan and Marriage and Inequality in Classless Societies. In the 1980s, Jane Collier revisited a village in Andalusia, where she and others had conducted fieldwork twenty years earlier, to investigate changes in family relationships and to explore the larger question of the development of a "modern subjectivity" among the people. Whereas the villagers she met in the sixties stressed the importance of meeting social obligations, the people she interviewed more recently emphasized the need to think for oneself: status concerns in choosing a spouse had apparently been replaced by romantic love, patriarchal authority by partnership marriages, parental demands for obedience by hopes of earning children's affection, mourners' respect for the dead by personal expressions of grief. In each of these areas, the author detected a modern concern for "producing oneself," which emerged with changes in how villagers experienced social inequality. Collier notes that when inheritance appeared to determine social status, villagers protected family reputations and properties by demonstrating concern for "what others might say." Once villagers began participating in the national job market, where individual achievement appeared to determine a worker's income, they focused on realizing their inner abilities and productive capacities. Sensitivity to one's feelings, thoughts, and aptitudes, along with "rational" assessments of the costs and benefits entailed in "choosing" how to use them, testified to a person's unceasing efforts to realize inner potentials. The author also traces shifts in the meaning of "tradition," suggesting that although "modern" people cannot "be" traditional, they must have traditions in order to produce themselves. "Collier has written a sensitive and subtle description of the development of a 'modern subjectivity' among people born in a small, rural town in southern Spain. . . . From Duty to Desire is well-written, compelling, theoretically sophisticated, didactic, clear, and yet complex. Ethnographically it is generally very fertile."

Over the past decade literary critic and editor Jerome McGann has developed a theory of textuality based in writing and production rather than in reading and interpretation. These new essays extend his investigations of the instability of the physical text. McGann shows how every text enters the world under socio-historical conditions that set the stage for a ceaseless process of textual development and mutation. Arguing that textuality is a matter of inscription and articulation, he explores texts as material and social phenomena, as particular kinds of acts. McGann links his study to contextual and institutional studies of literary works as they are generated over time by authors, editors, typographers, book designers, marketing planners, and other publishing agents. This enables him to examine issues of textual stability and instability in the arenas of textual production and reproduction. Drawing on literary examples from the past two centuries--including works by Byron, Blake, Morris, Yeats, Joyce, and especially Pound--McGann applies his theory to key problems facing anyone who studies texts and textuality.

Paul R. Brass is Professor of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Washington. He is the author of many books, most recently Riots and Pogroms, Ethnicity and Nationalism: Theory and Comparison, and The Politics of India since Independence (2nd edition), a volume of the New Cambridge History of India. As collective violence erupts in many regions throughout the world, we often hear media reports that link the outbreaks to age-old ethnic or religious hostilities, thereby freeing the state, its agents, and its political elites from responsibility. Paul Brass encourages us to look more closely at the issues of violence, ethnicity, and the state by focusing on specific instances of violence in their local contexts and questioning the prevailing interpretations of them. Through five case studies of both rural and urban public violence, including police-public confrontations and Hindu-Muslim riots, Brass shows how, out of many possible interpretations applicable to these incidents, government and the media select those that support existing relations of power in state and society. Adopting different modes--narrator, detective, and social scientist--Brass treats incidents of collective violence arising initially out of common occurrences such as a drunken brawl, the rape of a girl, and the theft of an idol, and demonstrates how some incidents remain localized while others are fit into broader frameworks of meaning, thereby becoming useful for upholders of dominant ideologies. Incessant talk about violence and its implications in these circumstances contributes to its persistence rather than its reduction. Such treatment serves in fact to mask the causes of violence, displace the victims from the center of attention, and divert society's gaze from those responsible for its endemic character. Brass explains how this process ultimately implicates everyone in the perpetuation of systems of violence. "An impressive attack on 'primordialist' explanations of contemporary violence in north India. Paul Brass, who is among the best-known political scientists working on India, writes on a controversial topic in an engaging way that will appeal to a wide spectrum of readers interested in interethnic violence."-Benedict Anderson, Cornell University

An eminent anthropologist examines the foundings of the first celibate Buddhist monasteries among the Sherpas of Nepal in the early twentieth century--a religious development that was a major departure from "folk" or "popular" Buddhism. Sherry Ortner is the first to integrate social scientific and historical modes of analysis in a study of the Sherpa monasteries and one of the very few to attempt such an account for Buddhist monasteries anywhere. Combining ethnographic and oral-historical methods, she scrutinizes the interplay of political and cultural factors in the events culminating in the foundings. Her work constitutes a major advance both in our knowledge of Sherpa Buddhism and in the integration of anthropological and historical modes of analysis. At the theoretical level, the book contributes to an emerging theory of "practice," an explanation of the relationship between human intentions and actions on the one hand, and the structures of society and culture that emerge from and feed back upon those intentions and actions on the other. It will appeal not only to the increasing number of anthropologists working on similar problems but also to historians anxious to discover what anthropology has to offer to historical analysis. In addition, it will be essential reading for those interested in Nepal, Tibet, the Sherpa, or Buddhism in general. "There is a wealth of information in [Ortner's] book ... a book which is not only an important theoretical contribution but also a delight to read." "Ortner has written a provocative, stunning, brilliant tour de force."

"One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 1997" Deborah Poole is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research in New York. Her previous publications include Unruly Order: Violence, Power, and Cultural Identity in the High Provinces of Southern Peru and Peru: Time of Fear. Through an intensive examination of photographs and engravings from European, Peruvian, and U.S. archives, Deborah Poole explores the role visual images and technologies have played in shaping modern understandings of race. Vision, Race, and Modernity traces the subtle shifts that occurred in European and South American depictions of Andean Indians from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries, and explains how these shifts led to the modern concept of "racial difference." While Andean peoples were always thought of as different by their European describers, it was not until the early nineteenth century that European artists and scientists became interested in developing a unique visual and typological language for describing their physical features. Poole suggests that this "scientific" or "biological" discourse of race cannot be understood outside a modern visual economy. Although the book specifically documents the depictions of Andean peoples, Poole's findings apply to the entire colonized world of the nineteenth century. Poole presents a wide range of images from operas, scientific expeditions, nationalist projects, and picturesque artists that both effectively elucidate her argument and contribute to an impressive history of photography. Vision, Race, and Modernity is a fascinating attempt to study the changing terrain of racial theory as part of a broader reorganization of vision in European society and culture. "Bold in its conception, brilliant in its execution, this book catches the eye and stimulates the imagination through its thoughtful examination of diverse visual representations from colonial and postcolonial Peru. It engages the mind and lingers in the memory for its original and persuasive reframing of the centrality of vision to issues of science, technology, power and race in the modern world. It will be of interest not only to Latin American specialists, to historians of art and photography, and to cultural studies audiences broadly, but to all those who seek to understand the globalization of images and ideologies in the contemporary era."-Benjamin Orlove, University of California, Davis

David G. Horn is Assistant Professor of Comparative Studies at Ohio State University. Using as his example post-World War I Italy and the government's interest in the size, growth rate, and "vitality" of its national population, David Horn suggests a genealogy for our present understanding of procreation as a site for technological intervention and political contestation. Social Bodies looks at how population and reproductive bodies came to be the objects of new sciences, technologies, and government policies during this period. It examines the linked scientific constructions of Italian society as a body threatened by the "disease" of infertility, and of women and men as social bodies-located neither in nature nor in the private sphere, but in that modern domain of knowledge and intervention carved out by statistics, sociology, social hygiene, and social work. Situated at the intersection of anthropology, cultural studies, and feminist studies of science, the book explores the interrelated factors that produced the practices of reason we call social science and social planning. David Horn draws on many sources to analyze the discourses and practices of "social experts," the resistance these encountered, and the often-unintended effects of the new objectification of bodies and populations. He shows how science, while affirming that maternity was part of woman's "nature," also worked to remove reproduction from the domain of the natural, making it an object of technological intervention. This reconstitution of bodies through the sciences and technologies of the social, Horn argues, continues to have material consequences for women and men throughout the West.

Katherine Verdery is Professor of Anthropology at the Johns Hopkins University. Among her books are Transylvanian Villagers and National Ideology under Socialism. Among the first anthropologists to work in Eastern Europe, Katherine Verdery had built up a significant base of ethnographic and historical expertise when the major political transformations in the region began to take place. In this collection of essays dealing with the aftermath of Soviet-style socialism and the different forms that may replace it, she explores the nature of socialism in order to understand more fully its consequences. By analyzing her primary data from Romania and Transylvania and synthesizing information from other sources, Verdery lends a distinctive anthropological perspective to a variety of themes common to political and economic studies on the end of socialism: themes such as "civil society," the creation of market economies, privatization, national and ethnic conflict, and changing gender relations. Under Verdery's examination, privatization and civil society appear not only as social processes, for example, but as symbols in political rhetoric. The classic pyramid scheme is not just a means of enrichment but a site for reconceptualizing the meaning of money and an unusual form of post-Marxist millenarianism. Land being redistributed as private property stretches and shrinks, as in the imaginings of the farmers struggling to tame it. Infused by this kind of ethnographic sensibility, the essays reject the assumption of a transition to capitalism in favor of investigating local processes in their own terms. "Verdery starts always with real people's thoughts and experiences, putting her inquiries on a solid footing that both statistics-heavy economic reports and arid efforts at political theorizing conspicuously lack. This solidity is a boon to those who want to understand how formerly existing socialism came to be what it was--and a warning to those who traffic in simple models of how it is being surpassed."---Joel Robbins, In These Times

Katherine Clay Bassard is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. Her articles have been published in African American Review and Callaloo. The late eighteenth century witnessed an influx of black women to the slave-trading ports of the American Northeast. The formation of an early African American community, bound together by shared experiences and spiritual values, owed much to these women's voices. The significance of their writings would be profound for all African Americans' sense of their own identity as a people. Katherine Clay Bassard's book is the first detailed account of pre-Emancipation writings from the period of 1760 to 1863, in light of a developing African American religious culture and emerging free black communities. Her study--which examines the relationship among race, culture, and community--focuses on four women: the poet Phillis Wheatley and poet and essayist Ann Plato, both Congregationalists; and the itinerant preacher Jarena Lee, and Shaker eldress Rebecca Cox Jackson, who, with Lee, had connections with African Methodism. Together, these women drew on what Bassard calls a "spirituals matrix," which transformed existing literary genres to accommodate the spiritual music and sacred rituals tied to the African diaspora. Bassard's important illumination of these writers resurrects their path-breaking work. They were cocreators, with all black women who followed, of African American intellectual life. "Spiritual Interrogations marks a change in the very direction of the multiple academic disciplines that intersect at black (women's) studies."---Joycelyn Moody, Hamilton College, Signs

Dipesh Chakrabarty is the Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor in History, South Asian Languages and Civilizations, and the College at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Rethinking Working-Class History: Bengal 1890-1940. First published in 2000, Dipesh Chakrabarty's influential Provincializing Europe addresses the mythical figure of Europe that is often taken to be the original site of modernity in many histories of capitalist transition in non-Western countries. This imaginary Europe, Dipesh Chakrabarty argues, is built into the social sciences. The very idea of historicizing carries with it some peculiarly European assumptions about disenchanted space, secular time, and sovereignty. Measured against such mythical standards, capitalist transition in the third world has often seemed either incomplete or lacking. Provincializing Europe proposes that every case of transition to capitalism is a case of translation as well--a translation of existing worlds and their thought--categories into the categories and self-understandings of capitalist modernity. Now featuring a new preface in which Chakrabarty responds to his critics, this book globalizes European thought by exploring how it may be renewed both for and from the margins. "Chakrabarty's work gives us a richer, more penetrating language to deal with modernity and the colonial encounter. . . . It is the ambiguity of Chakabarty's own position as both a critic and archivist of modernity that gives his study its poetic undertow and its intelligent irresponsibility."---Amit Chaudhuri, London Review of Books "The great value of this book lies in Chakrabarty's exceptional ability to bring to light what constantly gets glossed over and forgotten when we can only speak the standard languages of the academy. To do this requires the kind of bilingual consciousness which can bring into illuminating relation Adam Smith and Tagore. Chakrabarty makes you regret that so few are capable of doing this with a high degree of eloquence and insight."---Charles Taylor, IWM Newsletter "This masterful re-examination of rationality, universality, and difference in the postcolonial world should prove inspiring for serious historians of all lands."---Alice Ballard, Theory and Society "A slow, detailed, careful reading of the author's positively provocative style will be rich in rewards, generating, in the reader's mind, new ideas with new questions pointing to interdisciplinary, inter-cultural research, dialogue. As a reference reading text, it is rich in direct and implied questions on intricate inter-cultural interactions, gaps in communication, etc. As a discourse on basic themes of socio-political modernism and cultural diversity, it is more a starting point than a store of conclusions on debate dealing with cardinal themes pointing to research in inter-cultural and intersocietal studies. His dialectic, constructive discourse is keen on generating lasting questions and not dogmatic, ephemeral answers."---Wahé H. Balekjian, Online Journal on International Constitutional Law "[T]he analysis of the processes and mechanisms of destruction are well worth reading."---Joyce Apsel, Human Rights Review "Giovanni Federico . . . has compiled an exhaustive and impressive array of historical socioeconomic data heretofore unavailable in one source. . . . One of the book's strengths is the remarkable level of detail and the carefully assembled historical data. It is a rare sort of book and Federico tells the story of agriculture in a very interesting way. His mastery of the subject is plainly visible throughout the book. . . . This is not a text that can be used in undergraduate courses; rather, it is an analysis of economic performance and the history of agriculture that should be core reading for advanced students of agriculture and researchers. It will be a major reference for the foreseeable future and should be on the shelf of every agricultural scientist and anyone else intere

Bernard S. Cohn is Professor Emeritus of History and Anthropology at the University of Chicago. He is the author of An Anthropologist among the Historians and Other Essays and India: The Social Anthropology of a Civilization. Bernard Cohn's interest in the construction of Empire as an intellectual and cultural phenomenon has set the agenda for the academic study of modern Indian culture for over two decades. His earlier publications have shown how dramatic British innovations in India, including revenue and legal systems, led to fundamental structural changes in Indian social relations. This collection of his writings in the last fifteen years discusses areas in which the colonial impact has generally been overlooked. The essays form a multifaceted exploration of the ways in which the British discovery, collection, and codification of information about Indian society contributed to colonial cultural hegemony and political control. Cohn argues that the British Orientalists' study of Indian languages was important to the colonial project of control and command. He also asserts that an arena of colonial power that seemed most benign and most susceptible to indigenous influences--mostly law--in fact became responsible for the institutional reactivation of peculiarly British notions about how to regulate a colonial society made up of "others." He shows how the very Orientalist imagination that led to brilliant antiquarian collections, archaeological finds, and photographic forays were in fact forms of constructing an India that could be better packaged, inferiorized, and ruled. A final essay on cloth suggests how clothes have been part of the history of both colonialism and anticolonialism.

Walter D. Mignolo is the William H. Wannamaker Distinguished Professor and director of the Center for Global Studies and the Humanities at Duke University. This book is the third of a trilogy that includes The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization and The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options. He is also the author of The Idea of Latin America. Local Histories/Global Designs is an extended argument about the "coloniality" of power by one of the most innovative Latin American and Latino scholars. In a shrinking world where sharp dichotomies, such as East/West and developing/developed, blur and shift, Walter Mignolo points to the inadequacy of current practices in the social sciences and area studies. He explores the crucial notion of "colonial difference" in the study of the modern colonial world and traces the emergence of an epistemic shift, which he calls "border thinking." Further, he expands the horizons of those debates already under way in postcolonial studies of Asia and Africa by dwelling in the genealogy of thoughts of South/Central America, the Caribbean, and Latino/as in the United States. His concept of "border gnosis," or sensing and knowing by dwelling in imperial/colonial borderlands, counters the tendency of occidentalist perspectives to manage, and thus limit, understanding. In a new preface that discusses Local Histories/Global Designs as a dialogue with Hegel's Philosophy of History, Mignolo connects his argument with the unfolding of history in the first decade of the twenty-first century. "Postmodernism would remain Eurocentric without a counteracting postcoloniality--without the subaltern rationality that Mignolo sees emerging at the border of modernity/coloniality."---Barry Allen, Common Knowledge "Walter Mignolo, one of America's most eminent postcolonialists, presents a challenging new paradigm for understanding the realities of a planetary 'coloniality of power,' and the limits of area studies in the United States. Local History/Global Designs is one of the most important books in the historical humanities to have emerged since the end of the Cold War University. This is vintage Mignolo: packed with insights, breadth, and intellectual zeal."-José David Saldívar, University of California, Berkeley

"Winner of the 1998 Anthony Leeds Prize, Society for Urban Anthropology" Steven Gregory is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Africana Studies at New York University. In Black Corona, Steven Gregory examines political culture and activism in an African-American neighborhood in New York City. Using historical and ethnographic research, he challenges the view that black urban communities are "socially disorganized." Gregory demonstrates instead how working-class and middle-class African Americans construct and negotiate complex and deeply historical political identities and institutions through struggles over the built environment and neighborhood quality of life. With its emphasis on the lived experiences of African Americans, Black Corona provides a fresh and innovative contribution to the study of the dynamic interplay of race, class, and space in contemporary urban communities. It questions the accuracy of the widely used trope of the dysfunctional "black ghetto," which, the author asserts, has often been deployed to depoliticize issues of racial and economic inequality in the United States. By contrast, Gregory argues that the urban experience of African Americans is more diverse than is generally acknowledged and that it is only by attending to the history and politics of black identity and community life that we can come to appreciate this complexity. This is the first modern ethnography to focus on black working-class and middle-class life and politics. Unlike books that enumerate the ways in which black communities have been rendered powerless by urban political processes and by changing urban economies, Black Corona demonstrates the range of ways in which African Americans continue to organize and struggle for social justice and community empowerment. Although it discusses the experiences of one community, its implications resonate far more widely. Some images inside the book are unavailable due to digital copyright restrictions. "Gregory employs the discipline of anthropology to penetrate the many myths and clichés that obscure the dynamics of black life in an urban community. Corona is the perfect subject for his investigation.... Black Corona is ideal for the community organizer, neighborhood historian, or academic.... [A] well-researched and beautifully written study."---Bill Batson, New York Amsterdam News "Gregory gives an up-close look at community organization in a black middle-class community that defies stereotypes by outsiders about urban pathology and the disorganization and chaos that are supposed to exist in black neighborhoods." "[Gregory] investigates class within race, race within place, and place within politics. . . . [He] makes important points about the structuring of black identities in reaction to racial, class, and gender hierarchies."---Mary Pattillo-McCoy, American Journal of Sociology "Gregory's analysis of race, ethnic, and class contacts and cooperation is clear and well written. . . . [A] welcome addition to the sparse ethnographic literature on middle-class African America." "While asserting that race and economics are important elements in the mix that creates and perpetuates poor communities, [Gregory] believes poverty at root is a political problem regardless of race. A well-documented analysis that counters prevailing views." "An excellent case study and microanalysis of a single community. It is a well written and documented confutation of black stereotypes and their communities. . . . A classic piece of urban anthropology.""---Wilbur C. Rich, Isis "Gregory's great insight is to focus on the ways in which the dynamics of class and race inform the actual patterns of daily struggle in real communities. Black Corona represents a significant contribution to the study of contemporary black urban life."-Manning Marable, Professor of History and Director, Institute for Research in African-American Studies, Columbia University

Gyan Prakash is Associate Professor of History at Princeton University. He is the author of Bonded Histories: Genealogies of Labor Servitude in Colonial India and coeditor of Contesting Power: Resistance and Everyday Social Relations in South Asia. After Colonialism offers a fresh look at the history of colonialism and the changes in knowledge, disciplines, and identities produced by the imperial experience. Ranging across disciplines--from history to anthropology to literary studies--and across regions--from India to Palestine to Latin America to Europe--the essays in this volume reexamine colonialism and its aftermath. Leading literary scholars, historians, and anthropologists engage with recent theories and perspectives in their specific studies, showing the centrality of colonialism in the making of the modern world and offering postcolonial reflections on the effects and experience of empire. The contributions cross historical analysis of texts with textual examination of historical records and situate metropolitan cultural practices in engagements with non-metropolitan locations. Interdisciplinarity here means exploring and realigning disciplinary boundaries. Contributors to After Colonialism include Edward Said, Steven Feierman, Joan Dayan, Ruth Phillips, Anthony Pagden, Leonard Blussé, Gauri Viswanathan, Zachary Lockman, Jorge Klor de Alva, Irene Silverblatt, Emily Apter, and Homi Bhabha. "The contributors are drawn from literary and cultural studies, anthropology, and history, and their work represents the latest in subaltern studies and theorizing about postcolonialism. . . . The contributors challenge disciplinary categories, conventional notions of cultural difference, and offer alternative 'displacements.'"

Mahmood Mamdani is the Herbert Lehman Professor of Government in the Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies Department at Columbia University. His many books include Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror. In analyzing the obstacles to democratization in post- independence Africa, Mahmood Mamdani offers a bold, insightful account of colonialism's legacy--a bifurcated power that mediated racial domination through tribally organized local authorities, reproducing racial identity in citizens and ethnic identity in subjects. Many writers have understood colonial rule as either "direct" (French) or "indirect" (British), with a third variant--apartheid--as exceptional. This benign terminology, Mamdani shows, masks the fact that these were actually variants of a despotism. While direct rule denied rights to subjects on racial grounds, indirect rule incorporated them into a "customary" mode of rule, with state-appointed Native Authorities defining custom. By tapping authoritarian possibilities in culture, and by giving culture an authoritarian bent, indirect rule (decentralized despotism) set the pace for Africa; the French followed suit by changing from direct to indirect administration, while apartheid emerged relatively later. Apartheid, Mamdani shows, was actually the generic form of the colonial state in Africa. Through case studies of rural (Uganda) and urban (South Africa) resistance movements, we learn how these institutional features fragment resistance and how states tend to play off reform in one sector against repression in the other. The result is a groundbreaking reassessment of colonial rule in Africa and its enduring aftereffects. Reforming a power that institutionally enforces tension between town and country, and between ethnicities, is the key challenge for anyone interested in democratic reform in Africa. "A compelling historical reconstruction…. [A]n analysis distinguished by its utter respect for the specificity of historical experience."-Irene Grendzier,The Nation "Mahmood Mamdani's powerful new volume challenges the established wisdom of Africanists concerning the European colonial impact on Africa and Africa's postcolonial settlement…. [I]mpressive."-Robert L. Tignor,American Historical Review "This book explores a provocative and original thesis about African politics, with the vigor and rigor that readers of Professor Mamdani's earlier work will expect. Anyone who cares to understand the state in contemporary Africa-anyone who wants to understand the current situation on the continent at all-would do well to read this new book. Whether you agree or disagree, this is a book to learn from."-Kwame Anthony Appiah "Mahmood Mamdani is one of the most original thinkers writing about Africa today. His skills in comparative analysis and conceptual refinement are strikingly illustrated in this volume."-Ali A. Mazrui, Institute for Global Studies, SUNY–Binghamton "Citizen and Subjectis going to be a verynecessarybook. Mamdani's exposition, of a rare clarity, offers us a broadness of vision based upon experience and knowledge always informed by his profound perceptiveness."-Breyten Breytenbach, South African writer

"One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 1994" One of the leading members of the well-known Subaltern Studies collective of scholars, Partha Chatterjee is Professor of Political Science at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences in Calcutta. His other works include Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World (Zed/Minnesota). In this book, the prominent theorist Partha Chatterjee looks at the creative and powerful results of the nationalist imagination in Asia and Africa that are posited not on identity but on difference with the nationalism propagated by the West. Arguing that scholars have been mistaken in equating political nationalism with nationalism as such, he shows how anticolonialist nationalists produced their own domain of sovereignty within colonial society well before beginning their political battle with the imperial power. These nationalists divided their culture into material and spiritual domains, and staked an early claim to the spiritual sphere, represented by religion, caste, women and the family, and peasants. Chatterjee shows how middle-class elites first imagined the nation into being in this spiritual dimension and then readied it for political contest, all the while "normalizing" the aspirations of the various marginal groups that typify the spiritual sphere. While Chatterjee's specific examples are drawn from Indian sources, with a copious use of Bengali language materials, the book is a contribution to the general theoretical discussion on nationalism and the modern state. Examining the paradoxes involved with creating first a uniquely non-Western nation in the spiritual sphere and then a universalist nation-state in the material sphere, the author finds that the search for a postcolonial modernity is necessarily linked with past struggles against modernity. "[This] is a work of magisterial erudition, the product of a mind working at the fullest command of its critical and creative powers . . . destined to become a landmark, not just in its field but in that most important of histories which is the evolving narrative of our self-awareness." "An original and powerful analysis of the emergence of anticolonial nationalism and the postcolonial state. . . . This is not merely a book on nationalism in India with some 'comparative' implications. Instead, it presents the historical case of colonial nationalism to challenge the Eurocentricity of certain basic categories-the nations-state, modernity, and indeed history itself."-Gyan Prakash, Princeton University

Robert A. Rosenstone is Professor of History at the California Institute of Technology. In Revisioning History thirteen historians from around the world look at the historical film on its own terms, not as it compares to written history but as a unique way of recounting the past. How does film construct a historical world? What are the rules, codes, and strategies by which it brings the past to life? What does that historical construction mean to us? In grappling with these questions, each contributor looks at an example of New History cinema. Different from Hollywood costume dramas or documentary films, these films are serious efforts to come to grips with the past; they have often grown out of nations engaged in an intense quest for historical connections, such as India, Cuba, Japan, and Germany. The volume begins with an introduction by Robert Rosenstone. Part I, "Contesting History," comprises essays by Geoff Eley (on the film Distant Voices, Still Lives), Nicholas B. Dirks (The Home and the World), Thomas Kierstead and Deidre Lynch (Eijanaika), and Pierre Sorlin (Night of the Shooting Stars). Contributing to Part II, "Visioning History," are Michael S. Roth (Hiroshima Mon Amour), John Mraz (Memories of Underdevelopment), Min Soo Kang (The Moderns) and Clayton R. Koppes (Radio Bikini). Part III, "Revisioning History" contains essays by Denise J. Youngblood (Repentance), Rudy Koshar (Hitler: A Film from Germany), Rosenstone (Walker), Sumiko Higashi (Walker and Mississippi Burning), and Daniel Sipe (From the Pole to the Equator). "This excellent book of 13 articles explores how films construct an image of the past. . . . Revisioning History asks: what are the particular set of rules by which the past in represented on moving images? How does the present influence the representation of the past in films? Dealing with such topics as colonialism and Nazism, the films were made in the United States, Europe, Asia, and Latin America."

John Borneman is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Cornell University. He is the author of After the Wall: East Meets West in the New Berlin, Belonging in the Two Berlins: Kin, State, Nation, and Subversions of International Order: Studies in the Political Anthropology of Culture. As new states in the former East bloc begin to reckon with their criminal pasts in the years following a revolutionary change of regimes, a basic pattern emerges: In those states where some form of retributive justice has been publicly enacted, there has generally been much less of a recourse to collective retributive violence. In Settling Accounts, John Borneman explores the attempts by these aspiring democratic states to invoke the principles of the "rule of law" as a means of achieving retributive justice, that is, convicting wrongdoers and restoring dignity to victims of moral injuries. Democratic regimes, Borneman maintains, require a strict form of accountability that holds leaders responsible for acts of criminality. This accountability is embodied in the principles of the rule of law, and retribution is at the moral center of these principles. Drawing from his ethnographic work in the former East Germany and with select comparisons to other East-Central European states, Borneman critically examines the construction of categories of criminality. He argues against the claims that economic growth, liberal democracy, or acts of reconciliation are adequate means to legitimate the transformed East bloc states. The cycles of violence in states lacking a system of retributive justice help to support this claim. Invocation of the principles of the rule of law must be seen as a chance for a more democratic, more accountable, and less violent world. "As Borneman notes, from Argentina to South Korea, people are struggling with the proper response to past abuse. . . . [Readers} will be rewarded with a subtle, albeit hardly indisputable, notion of 'retributive justice' and its value."

E. Valentine Daniel is Professor of Anthropology at Columbia Universityr. He is the author of Fluid Signs: Being a Person the Tamil Way. How does an ethnographer write about violence? How can he make sense of violent acts, for himself and for his readers, without compromising its sheer excess and its meaning-defying core? How can he remain a scholarly observer when the country of his birth is engulfed by terror? These are some of the questions that engage Valentine Daniel in this exploration of life and death in contemporary Sri Lanka. In 1983 Daniel "walked into the ashes and mortal residue" of the violence that had occurred in his homeland. His planned project--the study of women's folk songs as ethnohistory--was immediately displaced by the responsibility that he felt had been given to him, by surviving family members and friends of victims, to recount beyond Sri Lanka what he had seen and heard there. Trained to do fieldwork by staying in one place and educated to look for coherence and meaning in human behavior, what does an anthropologist do when he is forced by circumstances to keep moving, searching for reasons he never finds? How does he write an ethnography (or an anthropography, to use the author's term) without transforming it into a pornography of violence? In avoiding fattening the anthropography into prurience, how does he avoid flattening it with theory? The ways in which Daniel grapples with these questions, and their answers, instill this groundbreaking book with a rare sense of passion, purpose, and intellect. "Without doubt one of the most important accounts of nationalist violence to be published in recent years. . . . Charred Lullabies is a major addition to the growing theoretical and ethnographic literature on contemporary political violence."-Amitav Ghosh "E. Valentine Daniel does not wallow in the negations of terror; he finds a place somewhere between sensation and detachment from which to show how the wounded return to speech-even poetry. In the process, he is drawn to reflect on the place of violence in our modern understanding of culture writ large, producing an account of unusual insight and troubling beauty."-Jean Comaroff, University of Chicago

Nicholas B. Dirks is Professor of Anthropology and History, Geoff Eley is Professor of History, and Sherry B. Ortner is Professor of Anthropology and Women's Studies, all at the University of Michigan. The intellectual radicalism of the 1960s spawned a new set of questions about the role and nature of "the political" in social life, questions that have since revolutionized nearly every field of thought, from literary criticism through anthropology to the philosophy of science. Michel Foucault in particular made us aware that whatever our functionally defined "roles" in society, we are constantly negotiating questions of authority and the control of the definitions of reality. Such insights have led theorists to challenge concepts that have long formed the very underpinnings of their disciplines. By exploring some of the most debated of these concepts--"culture," "power," and "history"--this reader offers an enriching perspective on social theory in the contemporary moment. Organized around these three concepts, Culture/ Power/History brings together both classic and new essays that address Foucault's "new economy of power relations" in a number of different, contestatory directions. Representing innovative work from various disciplines and sites of study, from taxidermy to Madonna, the book seeks to affirm the creative possibilities available in a time marked by growing uncertainty about established disciplinary forms of knowledge and by the increasing fluidity of the boundaries between them. The book is introduced by a major synthetic essay by the editors, which calls attention to the most significant issues enlivening theoretical discourse today. The editors seek not only to encourage scholars to reflect anew on the course of social theory, but also to orient newcomers to this area of inquiry. The essays are contributed by Linda Alcoff ("Cultural Feminism versus Post-Structuralism"), Sally Alexander ("Women, Class, and Sexual Differences in the 1830s and 1840s"), Tony Bennett ("The Exhibitionary Complex"), Pierre Bourdieu ("Structures, Habitus, Power"), Nicholas B. Dirks ("Ritual and Resistance"), Geoff Eley ("Nations, Publics, and Political Cultures"), Michel Foucault (Two Lectures), Henry Louis Gates, Jr. ("Authority, [White] Power and the [Black] Critic"), Stephen Greenblatt ("The Circulation of Social Energy"), Ranajit Guha ("The Prose of Counter-Insurgency"), Stuart Hall ("Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms"), Susan Harding ("The Born-Again Telescandals"), Donna Haraway ("Teddy Bear Patriarchy"), Dick Hebdige ("After the Masses"), Susan McClary ("Living to Tell: Madonna's Resurrection of the Fleshly"), Sherry B. Ortner ("Theory in Anthropology since the Sixties"), Marshall Sahlins ("Cosmologies of Capitalism"), Elizabeth G. Traube ("Secrets of Success in Postmodern Society"), Raymond Williams (selections from Marxism and Literature), and Judith Williamson ("Family, Education, Photography"). "This collection of important essays, with a thoughtful and, in places, moving . . . introduction to the current questions and conversations-and dilemmas-of social-cultural history is now the best volume we have on the topic." "[This] collection of high quality essays performs a great serive to scholarship. It helps set a direction for the next generation's research. There is no comparable reader."-Thomas W. Laquer, University of California, Berkeley

Paul Rabinow is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. Among his most recent books are Making PCR: A Story of Biotechnology and French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment, both published by the University of Chicago Press. This collection of essays explains and encourages new reflection on Paul Rabinow's pioneering project to anthropologize the West. His goal is to exoticize the Western constitution of reality, emphasize those domains most taken for granted as universal, and show how their claims to truth are linked to particular social practices, hence becoming effective social forces. He has recently begun to focus on the core of Western rationality, in particular the practices of molecular biology as they apply to our understanding of human nature. This book moves in new directions by posing questions about how scientific practice can be understood in terms of ethics as well as in terms of power. The topics include how French socialist urban planning in the 1930s engineered the transition from city planning to life planning; how the discursive and nondiscursive practices of the Human Genome Project and biotechnology have refigured life, labor, and language; and how a debate over patenting cell lines and over the dignity of life required secular courts to invoke medieval notions of the sacred. Building on an ethnographic study of the invention of the polymerase chain reaction--which enables the rapid production of specific sequences of DNA in millions of copies Rabinow, in the final essay, reflects in dialogue with biochemist Tom White on the place of science in modernity, on science as a vocation, and on the differences between the human and natural sciences. "Rabinow has produced a rich and elegantly written set of reflections for those who want to study a culture in the making, or are part of one. It is, of course, part of his argument that they include all of us."---Jon Turney, The Times Higher Education Supplement "Essays on the Anthropology of Reason will provide an important sense of the solidity of research in the new and exciting terrains that anthropology has entered. In so doing, it will remove discussion of such new work from the 'celebrity/fashion circuit' of recent trends in cultural studies. Paul Rabinow's collection both illuminates and extends a major research career that has never waned in the power of its intellect, curiosity, and depth of achievement."-George E. Marcus, Rice University "Paul Rabinow's Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco has been seen as the precursor of the wave of reflexive anthropological texts that have played a central role in recent developments of the discipline. Essays on the Anthropology of Reason could have a similar effect, one that could contribute to a movement away from an excessive preoccupation with textual reflexivity. What one finds in this volume is a sustained reflection on what it means to do fieldwork today in or on (post)modern societies. There is no doubt in my mind that it will generate a healthy debate not only within anthropology but in other fields as well."-Alberto Cambrosio, McGill University "Paul Rabinow's voice is unique. These essays explore a wide range of topics-the historical grounding of popular conceptions of the integrity of the body, the cultural logic of biological determinism and eugenics, and the applicability of Foucault's notion of biopower-with masterful command of the literature, a nuanced ear for the subtleties of cultural interpretation, and a theoretical acuity that is often thrilling."-Emily Martin, Princeton University

David Scott is a Visiting Associate Professor of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. He has held appointments at Bates College, the University of Chicago, and the University of the West Indies, Mona. He is the author of Formations of Ritual and is the editor of the journal Small Axe. How can we best forge a theoretical practice that directly addresses the struggles of once-colonized countries, many of which face the collapse of both state and society in today's era of economic reform? David Scott argues that recent cultural theories aimed at "deconstructing" Western representations of the non-West have been successful to a point, but that changing realities in these countries require a new approach. In Refashioning Futures, he proposes a strategic practice of criticism that brings the political more clearly into view in areas of the world where the very coherence of a secular-modern project can no longer be taken for granted. Through a series of linked essays on culture and politics in his native Jamaica and in Sri Lanka, the site of his long scholarly involvement, Scott examines the ways in which modernity inserted itself into and altered the lives of the colonized. The institutional procedures encoded in these modern postcolonial states and their legal systems come under scrutiny, as do our contemporary languages of the political. Scott demonstrates that modern concepts of political representation, community, rights, justice, obligation, and the common good do not apply universally and require reconsideration. His ultimate goal is to describe the modern colonial past in a way that enables us to appreciate more deeply the contours of our historical present and that enlarges the possibility of reshaping it. "This is an ambitious and exciting book by a gifted young anthropologist. David Scott takes two ex-colonial countries which he personally knows well, Sri Lanka and Jamaica, and subjects aspects of their constructed representation to probing criticism. He does much more than simply apply familiar principles of constructivist critique to new ethnographic material. Scott's purpose is to encourage the rethinking of political options for the future, and in so doing to extend the meaning of postcolonial critique."-Talal Asad, CUNY Graduate Center "In this powerfully argued and theoretically sophisticated book, David Scott interrogates the conditions of possibility for a post- 'third world' politics that is both critical and strategic. . . . A major work which marks a new departure in the field."-Stuart Hall

Sharon Stephens is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology and School of Social Work at the University of Michigan and is Senior Research Associate at the Norwegian Centre for Child Research in Trondheim, Norway. The bodies and minds of children--and the very space of children--are under assault. This is the message we receive from daily news headlines about violence, sexual abuse, exploitation, and neglect of children, and from a proliferation of books in recent years representing the domain of contemporary childhood as threatened, invaded, polluted, and "stolen" by adults. Through a series of essays that explore the global dimensions of children at risk, an international group of researchers and policymakers discuss the notion of children's rights, and in particular the claim that every child has a right to a cultural identity. Explorations of children's situations in Japan, Korea, Singapore, South Africa, England, Norway, the United States, Brazil, and Germany reveal how children's everyday lives and futures are often the stakes in contemporary battles that adults wage over definitions of cultural identity and state cultural policies. Throughout this volume, the authors address the complex and often ambiguous implications of the concept of rights. For example, it may be used to defend indigenous children from radically assimilationist or even genocidal state policies; but it may also be used to legitimate racist institutions. A substantive introduction by the editor examines global political economic frameworks for the cultural debates affecting children and traces intriguing, sometimes surprising, threads throughout the papers. In addition to the editor, the contributors are Norma Field, Marilyn Ivy, Mary John, Hae-joang Cho, Saya Shiraishi, Vivienne Wee, Pamela Reynolds, Kathleen Hall, Ruth Mandel, Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, and Njabulo Ndebele. "Through a series of essays that explore the global dimensions of children at risk, an international group of researchers and policymakers discuss the notion of children's rights, and in particular the claim that every child has a right to a cultural identity. This stimulating volume should interest social scientists across many fields, particularly anthropologists and area specialists, who will benefit from the largely ethnographically based studies it contains."

"Winner of the 2002 Williard Hurst Prize in Legal History" Sally Engle Merry is Class of 1949 Professor of Ethics in the Anthropology Department at Wellesley College. Her books include Urban Danger: Life in a Neighborhood of Strangers, Getting Justice and Getting Even: Legal Consciousness among Working-Class Americans, and The Possibility of Popular Justice: A Case Study of American Community Mediation, coedited with Neal Milner. She is currently president of the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology. How does law transform family, sexuality, and community in the fractured social world characteristic of the colonizing process? The law was a cornerstone of the so-called civilizing process of nineteenth-century colonialism. It was simultaneously a means of transformation and a marker of the seductive idea of civilization. Sally Engle Merry reveals how, in Hawai'i, indigenous Hawaiian law was displaced by a transplanted Anglo-American law as global movements of capitalism, Christianity, and imperialism swept across the islands. The new law brought novel systems of courts, prisons, and conceptions of discipline and dramatically changed the marriage patterns, work lives, and sexual conduct of the indigenous people of Hawai'i. "This is an important study which details a crucial (and often ignored) chapter in American legal history. It stands to make an important contribution to the anthropology of law, to the history of colonial legality, and to the methodology of ethnography in the archives."-Annelise Riles, Cornell University "This is a work of exceptional merit: substantively innovative and valuable, interpretively cogent and insightful, stylistically lucid and engaging. It reads very well as a significant account of the historical Hawaiian situation and as a major contribution to a multidimensional examination of colonial law and, especially, of a crucial and fairly singular American colonial enterprise."-Don Brenneis, University of California, Santa Cruz

Michael Herzfeld describes what happens when a bureaucracy charged with historic conservation clashes with a local populace hostile to the state and suspicious of tourism. Focusing on the Cretan town of Rethemnos, once a center of learning under Venetian rule and later inhabited by the Turks, he examines major questions confronting conservators and citizens as they negotiate the "ownership" of history: Who defines the past? To whom does the past belong? What is "traditional" and how is this determined? Exploring the meanings of the built environment for Rethemnos's inhabitants, Herzfeld finds that their interest in it has more to do with personal histories and the immediate social context than with the formal history that attracts the conservators. He also investigates the inhabitants' social practices from the standpoints of household and kin group, political association, neighborhood, gender ideology, and the effects of these on attitudes toward home ownership. In the face of modernity, where tradition is an object of both reverence and commercialism, Rethemnos emerges as an important ethnographic window onto the ambiguous cultural fortunes of Greece. "Herezfeld once again assures his place as one of the finest ethnographers to work in Greece. . . . This rare study of social organization in a provincial Greek city sheds much light on how public officials and citizens debate their connection to the Greek past."

Lila Abu-Lughod is Professor of Anthropology and Middle East Studies at New York University. She has written widely on women and gender in the Middle East. Her books include Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society and Writing Women's Worlds: Bedouin Stories. Contrary to popular perceptions, newly veiled women across the Middle East are just as much products and symbols of modernity as the upper- and middle-class women who courageously took off the veil almost a century ago. To make this point, these essays focus on the "woman question" in the Middle East (most particularly in Egypt and Iran), especially at the turn of the century, when gender became a highly charged nationalist issue tied up in complex ways with the West. The last two decades have witnessed an extraordinary burst of energy and richness in Middle East women's studies, and the contributors to this volume exemplify the vitality of this new thinking. They take up issues of concern to historians and social thinkers working on the postcolonial world. The essays challenge the assumptions of other major works on women and feminism in the Middle East by questioning, among other things, the familiar dichotomy in which women's domesticity is associated with tradition and modernity with their entry into the public sphere. Indeed, Remaking Women is a radical challenge to any easy equation of modernity with progress, emancipation, and the empowerment of women. The contributors are Lila Abu-Lughod, Marilyn Booth, Deniz Kandiyoti, Khaled Fahmy, Mervat Hatem, Afsaneh Najmabadi, Omnia Shakry, and Zohreh T. Sullivan.The book is introduced by the editor with a piece called "Feminist Longings and Postcolonial Conditions," which masterfully interfaces the critical studies of feminism and modernism with scholarship on South Asia and the Middle East. "Abu-Lughod's latest offering is an edited collection of literary criticism and historical analysis that assesses the status of theorizing about 'woman's emancipation' in the Middle East. . . . Largely historical, the collection serves as a wonderful introduction to the field."