MEMORY WORK Never has the work of memory had more advocates and provoked more controversy, whether it is the new business of recovered memories of childhood abuse and national apologies for the past sins or the old business of commemorating the nation's past. Two essays explore this rapidly expanding terrain.

Memory is a major theme in contemporary life, a key to personal, social, and cultural identity. Philosophers have long regarded continuity of memory as an essential quality of personhood. But personal and collective identity are intimately linked. Classical works such as Maurice Halbwachs's The Collective Memory, and Sir Frederick Bartlett's Remembering highlight the social nature of what we usually take to be individual memory, an insight reinforced by research on the historical consciousness of non-literate peoples.Sir Frederick Bartlett, Remembering (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1932); Maurice Halbwachs, The Collective Memory, Francis and Vida Ditter, trans. (New York: Harper Collins, 1980). For excellent descriptive and theoretical overviews of the problems that Halbwachs opened up, see Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989) and James Fentress and Chris Wickham, Social Memory (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1992). Here I will explore, in comparative perspective, the social processes through which personal memory becomes collectivized and collective memory is instantiated through autobiographical recollection.

I spent the 1996 Columbus Day holiday weekend in Bayonne in southwest France lecturing on the ethnographic fieldwork research I had conducted among a community of artisanal chocolatiers six years earlier.See Terrio 1998:18–31. 1996 was proclaimed the Year of Chocolate in Bayonne by municipal leaders and local chocolatiers. This event was an ambitious commemoration involving a series of public lectures organized to celebrate the southwest as the historic cradle of French chocolate production. At the gala dinner following my lecture, there was little talk of chocolate but a lively discussion ensued on the Clovis affair.An earlier version of this essay was presented in a session organized by Jill Dubisch at the 1997 American Anthropological Association Annual Meetings in Washington, DC. For their detailed readings of the text and insightful comments I wish to thank the editors; the excellent readers who reviewed the essay for this journal; David Kertzer, who served as the AAA session discussant; Sylvie Durmelat; and Patti Sunderland.L'affaire concerned the polemic surrounding the national ceremony organized two weeks earlier to commemorate the fifteen hundredth anniversary of the Catholic conversion and baptism of the Frankish king Clovis in 496. That polemic centered on an apparently incongruous cast of characters including the fifth-century Frankish king Clovis, the current President Jacques Chirac, Pope Jean Paul II, the Catholic Church and the French Republic.Journalist Adam Gopnik devoted his regular Paris Journal feature in the New Yorker magazine to an insightful and humorous analysis of the Clovis affair (7 October 1996).

In much of rural China, memories of past violence are crucial to people's sense of their own relation to distant centers of state power. In particular, memories of death from hunger during the Great Leap famine (1958–61)1 In the famine that followed the Great Leap Forward, twenty to thirty million people died of hunger-related causes. The famine is usually attributed to overprocurement, bad harvests, disastrous agricultural policies, chaotic transportation, and natural calamities (Kane 1988). In Yunnan the famine was not as severe as in many regions, but the poor, remote counties in the north still suffered badly. In 1960, according to official figures, the crude death rate rose to forty-two per thousand in the northern counties of Yongren, Dayao and Yaoan, while the rate for the province as a whole was twenty-six per thousand (Yunnan Sheng tongji ju renkou ban 1990). Within these counties, high-mountain, cash crop areas such as Zhizuo, where every household relied on sales of hempen cloth to buy food (see Mueggler 1998b), suffered worst. and suicide during the Cultural Revolution (1966–76) continue to haunt people's imagination of state and nation in ways that those of us who did not live through these devastations are only beginning to discover (cf. Watson 1994). Many of the diverse, non-Han, Tibeto-Burman speaking communities scattered through the mountains of Southwest China share traditions of poetic speech, explicitly intended to deal with bodily afflictions attributed to spectral memories of the violently dead. In a Lolop'o (officially Yi) minority community, where I did fieldwork from 1991–1993,Thirteen months of field research were conducted in Zhizuo between October 1991 and June 1993. Sponsoring units were the Yunnan Academy of Social Sciences in Kunming and the Yi Culture Research Institute in Chuxiong. poetic speech is used to drive the ghosts of those who died of hunger, suicide, or other violence out of the bodies of their descendants and into the surrounding landscape. The ghosts are driven along a specific route through surrounding mountain villages. Their path eventually takes them down the nearby Jinsha river to the Changjiang (Yangtze). They make these rivers their steeds, riding them across the empire's breadth to the richly-imagined cities of Chongqing, Wuhan, Nanjing, Shanghai, and Beijing. En route, they are to feast on piles of meat and barrels of drink, buy beautiful clothing in the markets, and hobnob with officials.

The grandmothers, as they are called—elderly women imprisoned for refusing to testify against their children regarding their resistance involvement—sit on the stone steps leading to the upper floors of the prison and learn from other prisoners how to read, write, and count. They are among the estimated 70 percent of illiterate Greek women at mid-century, and the plan is to reach full literacy within the prison. “I'm learning so I can write about the history of my village during the Albanian war, the resistance, the German occupation, and the civil war. How and why our children were forced to take up arms again and head for the mountains . . . I know this history well because I helped both in Albania and in the resistance,” says Maria Zoga. She has lost two sons, one killed by the Nazis and the other by “Greek fascists.” “My son Stamatis wanted me to learn to read and write. And I will learn, I will learn. I've just started to read,” says Violeta Tsamoutalidou. Stamatis, a communist and member of the resistance, was tortured at the police station and killed during an alleged escape attempt in 1948. “Teach me to read and to count,” says Grannie Regina. “Now that I've lost my husband and I'm by myself, who will count the grains?” The grandmothers scattered about the prison “learning letters” and taking life on their own terms is a prominent theme in the accounts of political prisoners.See Papadouka (1981:36–39). The Averoff Women's Singing Group, formed during the 1940s, sang and continued to perform the song, “The Grandmothers Learn Letters” into the 1980s. Its lyrics depict this peculiar pedagogy: “The grannies are bent over, with their eyeglasses/They are learning their ABC's and yet their hair is white as snow./The grandmothers hold their pencils and paper and write slowly/Their first letters will be sent to their grandchildren, who will receive them with joy./And if in their old age, many problems weigh on their hearts/Closed up just like the young inside the prison, they are learning to read and write./Spreading their gentle caresses among us, they remember the old days/Our every storm, they weathered first, and they put glasses on us.”

Accounts of late-twentieth-century capitalist restructuring have emphasized the decline of “permanent” work contracts and the growth of more “flexible” ways of employing labor. Most of these accounts have argued that, under conditions of global competition, firms seek to reduce the cost of wages and benefits by hiring more temporary workers. Such accounts assume permanent labor contracts to be a norm that is violated only when economic systems come under pressure. This essay adopts a different perspective, suggesting that, in fact, permanent labor contracts have been normative only in certain historical situations (such as the twentieth century United States). In a global and trans-historical context, these contracts have been introduced under specific conditions to solve particular kinds of problems. Thus, this study attempts to shift the question from “why is permanent work declining?” to “where and why do permanent work contracts emerge?”

The neoliberal reforms sweeping the globe are generating strikingly analogous transformations in diverse politico-economic and ideological landscapes, especially through the spread of democratic-liberal political regimes and an emphasis on the “virtues of the invisible hand”—rather than the state—in the investment of a huge mass of mobile capital (Fishlow 1990:64; Amin 1995; Gill 1993). We are witnessing an increasingly dominant and profitable global capitalist economy with a “highly coercive capacity to ensnare enormous numbers of peoples within its grasp” (Blim 1992:5; Gereffi and Korzeniewicz 1994; Sachs 1995; Mittelman 1996; Dirlik 1994; Diskin and Koechlin 1994; Hojman 1994).

The colonial legal order was by its very nature a plural legal order. Multiple legal authorities were created out of the imposition of colonial law and the persistence, protection, and invention of indigenous legal practices. Less obvious but critically important, too, was the plural nature of European legal systems themselves—a complexity that carried over into, and was sometimes exacerbated by, conditions of colonial rule. Broadly speaking, we can trace a historical shift over three centuries of European overseas expansion from a relatively fluid legal pluralism in which semi-autonomous legal authorities operated alongside state law, to a hierarchical model of legal pluralism in which state law subsumed in one way or another all jurisdictions, including “traditional” forums given special status by the state.

Modern categories of citizenship and discourses of nationalism are inconceivable without the existence of two inventions: the microscope as a laboratory instrument and the statistical concept of normality. The former, first devised by Dutch opticians around 1600, was the sine qua non of the bacteriological revolution spearheaded by Robert Koch and Louis Pasteur beginning in the 1870s.Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1997), chs. 9, 14. On bacteriology in the United States, see George Rosen, A History of Public Health (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1993 [1958]), chs. 7, 8 and John Duffy, The Sanitarians: A History of American Public Health (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1990), ch. 13. The latter had been christened several decades earlier by Adolphe Quetelet when he prestidigated the mean or “average man” by plotting the chest circumferences of over 5,000 Scottish regiment soldiers and calculating basic frequencies. Soon, the idea of normal distribution became a cornerstone of the emergent fields of sociology, anthropology, demography, as well as the insurance industry.The social, philosophical, and mathematical epistemologies which generated the concept of normality have been deftly analyzed by Ian Hacking. See his The Taming of Chance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Also see Theodore M. Porter, The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820–1900 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986). In different but interconnected ways, each invention opened up an extensive and untraversed terrain of corporeal and organic knowledge which it alone was capable of deciphering. Guided by the logic of germ theory, scientists used the microscope to translate invisible pathogens into classifiable bacilli and facilitated the manufacture of large-scale cures such as anti-toxins and vaccines. If the microscope and its appurtenances of slides and cultures exposed a hidden bacterial world which had previously existed only in the abstract, statistical methods and normal curves inductively abstracted from the concrete “to a postulated reality,”Hacking, The Taming of Chance, 109. originating prototypes and endowing them with enough distributive power to stand for the whole.

In State and Status, Samuel Clark surveys the rise of the state and its relationship to aristocratic power in two zones in western Europe, the British Isles and France and its eastern periphery. The core of Clark's argument examines the ways in which ruling aristocracies were restructured by state formation, particularly the emergence of political centers. As monarchs became more important arbiters of the manifold flows of resources, the exercise of power, status awards, and cultural grammars, older and more dispersed forms of feudal lordship were unevenly transformed. Lordship eventually declined, but meanwhile the actions of centralizing monarchs could shore it up or retool it as aristocracies were rearticulated into emergent states. This was a two-way street, for the decline and restructuring of lordship also sped state formation (pp. 153–4). There were other factors at issue, and the book discusses some of them—for example, commercialization as tied up with statemaking—but the emergence of political centers has been neglected, Clark thinks, and deserves more emphasis.

In this book, Sumathi Ramaswamy explores how the Tamil language became the focus of intense commitments in twentieth-century South India. Following recent calls among South Asian scholars to find alternatives to narratives derived from western experience, she rejects language nationalism as an appropriate conceptual tool for her study, both because the term implies a universal European standard by which language feeling is to be measured and because it is incapable of encompassing the full range of ideas and sentiments that became attached to Tamil. Instead she employs a concept grounded in the discourse of the politicians and writers she has studied: that of tamilpparru or devotion to Tamil.

Berezin's study in historical sociology takes as its starting point an Italian present marked by a resurgence of fascism and by renewed contests for the symbolic space of the piazza. Confident that a new understanding of the “old” fascism can have contemporary social and political relevance, Berezin examines interwar efforts to construct “fascist identities” by fusing public and private selves. In a book that engages political philosophy and the anthropology of ritual, Berezin focuses our attention on public spectacle, “the favored expressive vehicle of the fascist identity project” (p. 5).

Fieldwork was once a mysterious business: Students were told that it involved “participant observation”: a mode of being apparently located somewhere north of “going native” but south of simply collecting survey data. Advice was informal and practical (keep duplicate notes, bring plenty of ziplock bags). However, the recent loss of confidence in the anthropological project and a concomitant concern with reflexivity has meant that fieldwork has also become increasingly “problematized” and self-conscious.

In Post-nationalist Ireland, Richard Kearney provides a cross-disciplinary study which critically reassesses some of the central components of traditional Irish cultural nationalism and republicanism. He also proposes a new framework for a more complex vision of Irishness.