Editorial Foreword

MAKING SENSE Three essays show how attending closely to the ways in which sense is produced can help us make better sense of things.

Gonzalo Lamana, revisiting the fateful meeting of Pizarro and Atahualpa at Cajamarca, at which the Spaniards killed the Inka and founded the Spanish ascendancy in Peru, considers that differences among sources are “indices of distinct ways of making and producing sense of events,” differences “that coexisted when the events occurred” and linger in representations produced afterwards. His method of reading this much-recited and much-analyzed event holds the promise of avoiding “the double bind plaguing representations of non-Westerners,” exoticizing them through emphasis on cultural difference, or the flattening of cultural difference on either side by the imposition of a Western rationality on both. The author attempts to capture the improvisation and unscriptedness of the encounter, and shows ways in which the narratives written after the event can be read in such a way as to lead us back to the unscripted moment when each side is struggling, under conditions of great excitation and sense of crisis, to make sense of the other.

Charlene Makley finds a “vigorous alternative historiography” in a Tibetan Buddhist monastery town under Chinese rule. In this alternative history, stories of karmic retribution righted the wrongs of a state experienced as alien and repressive. The “ongoing interpretative battle” had begun when agents of the Chinese state arrested monks and other leaders during the Anti-Feudalism campaign of 1958, inciting locals to “speak bitterness” to their former feudal oppressors in “struggle sessions” of public humiliation; it continued in the formation of alternative histories.

The ongoing interpretative battle of which Don Rowney writes, by contrast, takes place among scholars of the Russian Revolution. The revolutionary regime needed to separate itself from the old regime by a practice of message control that attributed creative energy to the revolution and magnified its difference from the pre-revolutionary state. In this way the very real continuities of institutions have been obscured, and require an institutionalist perspective to be restored to view. The author aims to amend what he sees as the theoretical and empirical shortcomings of Theda Skocpol's interpretation, the prevailing paradigm of the institutionalist approach.

REVOLUTION AND THE PROFESSIONALS Lenin, finding the Bolsheviks had “no other bricks” with which to build socialism, co-opted bourgeois intellectuals and put them to work. The next essay examines distant and powerful consequences of this policy in China.

Eddy U seeks to explain why it is that under Communism, while industrial workers' capacity for collective resistance was dampened and a general acceptance of Communist rule prevailed, the professions, specifically secondary education faculty, were riven by internal conflict and were hotbeds of resentment against the regime. Using recently declassified documents and interviews with Shanghai secondary school teachers, the author shows, for example, that large numbers of teachers stepped in to direct student actions during the Cultural Revolution. The high degree of conflict and disaffection from the state among teachers, so different from the industrial workplace, had to do with the Leninist practices in the remodeling of the professions: continuation of bourgeois intellectuals, even those who were, from the perspective of the Revolution, wrongdoers, but under political supervision by workers representatives; continuation of high pay for bourgeois intellectuals, but the institution of low pay for newly-recruited professionals.

RELIGION IN THE MODERN The next essays examine religion in varying contexts of the modern: the republican, secular state of Turkey, and British colonial rule in Egypt and India.

Brian Silverstein believes that much the most interesting “critical histories of the present” in Turkey are being formulated by Islamist writers who are little-known outside, even in other Muslim countries, but are highly resonant within Turkey, writing columns in dailies and weeklies as well as articles and books in scholarly venues. He introduces us to the thought of two of them, İsmail Kara and Dücane Cündioğlu, engaged in the reinterpretation of the relation of Islam to modernity in a country where the conjuncture of the two began under the rule of the Ottomans and continues under the very different conditions of the republic.

Vickie Langohr tells us that while colonialism displaced precolonial religious education with Western-style education teaching secular subjects, it also provided new opportunities for local religious movements to achieve their goals. She examines two cases: that of the Arya Samaj in India, which promoted Hindi language at the expense of its “Muslim” cousin Urdu, and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, which expanded into rural areas as an unlooked-for effect of teacher transfers.

THE CRITIQUE OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL REASON The following article continues a CSSH tradition of periodically reading the entrails of anthropology. (See Sherry Ortner, “Theory in Anthropologies since the Sixties” (CSSH 1984: 126–66) and “Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal” (1995: 173–93), and also Webb Keane, “Self-Interpretation, Agency, and the Objects of Anthropology: Reflections on a Genealogy” (2003: 222–48).

Michael Scott adopts Marshall Sahlins' view that anthropologists have been the inheritors of a secularized and bourgeoisified Biblical cosmology in which a Hobbsean chaotic atomism gives way to an order of social solidarity, but argues that today the prevailing cosmology is nearly the inverse of that, namely one in which chaos is constantly being shaped into social order through processes of selection and combination, or hybridity. The author proposes to coordinate the cosmology of anthropologists with the chaos models of subjects in lived situations, examining two ethnographic cases, one from the Solomon Islands, involving conflicting matrilineal identities, the other from Africa, involving ethnic violence in Burundi and Rwanda.

CSSHDISCUSSION

Monica DeHart reviews four recent works on gender in Latin America, seeking to show their contribution to feminist studies as a whole.