CULTURE POWER Being in the habit of taking the temperature of anthropology from time to time (Sherry B. Ortner, “Theory in Anthropology since the Sixties,” CSSH 1984: 174–90; “Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal,” 1995: 173–93; Webb Keane, “Self-Interpretation, Agency and the Objects of Anthropology: Reflections on a Genealogy,” 2003: 222–48), we take a keen interest in the health of the culture concept. News of its demise may be exaggerated, judging by the first article, which draws our attention to its worldwide spread and tries to account for it.

In the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, “culture” achieved the status of a truly global concept. We find discourses of “culture” emerging to prominence in the German-speaking world during the second half of the eighteenth century (with the closely associated linguistic arenas of the Netherlands and Scandinavia rapidly following suit); in the English-speaking world starting in the first half of the nineteenth century; in Eastern Europe, East Asia, and South Asia starting in the second half of the nineteenth century; and just about everywhere else in the course of the twentieth century. “Culture” began to circulate far beyond the European sites of its modern genesis, sometimes through the direct transfer of lexical items from Western European languages (e.g., Russian kulءtura; the use of kalcar in various South Asian languages); and more often through the construction of new translative equivalencies with preexisting words or concepts most often signifying purification, refinement, or improvement (e.g., Japanese bun-ka; Chinese wen-hua; Bangla and Hindi sanskriti; Urdu tamaddun).

In his geographical treatise of 1537, the Portuguese chronicler D. João de Castra explained that it would be possible to correlate all newly discovered lands with astronomical markers to produce an accurate map of the world. The result would be, he wrote, a “true and perfect geography.” The movement toward this vision, from the cartographic revolution of thirteenth-century Portolan charts to the use of surveying to map colonial territories in the nineteenth century, is a compelling narrative of the rationalization of space, and of the reinforcement of this trend by the pursuit of European imperial interests.

The term “ethnic cleansing” vaulted to international prominence in 1992, shortly after Francis Fukuyama proclaimed the end of history. Popularized during the narrow window of optimism between the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of Ussama Bin Ladin, the phrase was used to describe events in the recalcitrant states that had not gotten the message that liberal democracy was the way of the future. The product of a particular time and place—Yugoslavia in the contemporary era—ethnic cleansing was generalized into an analytic category, stretched across the globe and the twentieth century, and, on occasion, transformed into a transhistorical characteristic of humanity. In this sense, the category of ethnic cleansing is too large: scholars and journalists have vitiated the term's explanatory power by grouping together sundry events.

The practice of conversion—changing from one religion to another—is certainly not a modern invention, but it takes on a new and sometimes threatening significance in a modern context characterized by censuses, elections with universal suffrage, and majority rule. In the modern world separate religions have come to be defined, like ethnic groups or nations (Barth 1969), by the boundaries between them. One can only be a refugee if one flees across an international boundary; likewise, conventionally, religious change is only labeled “conversion” if it occurs across a boundary. Thus, as boundaries have become sharper between ‘religions,' so the issue of conversion has grown in political significance.

In 1932 a young man called Shoniwa Masedza was working for a cobbler near Salisbury, the capital of Southern Rhodesia. Masedza had come from his home in Makoni, near the border with Portuguese East Africa, in the late 1920s. He had held a number of odd jobs in and around the capital: driving wagons, working as a “garden boy,” apprenticing with a carpenter. Just after starting with the shoemaker, some time around May 1932, Shoniwa fell ill, suffering from “severe pains in the head.” He lost his speech for four months and was “unable to walk about.” During his sickness he studied the Bible “continuously.” He dreamt that he had died, and in the dream he heard a voice saying he was now Johane Masowe—Africa's “John the Baptist.” Upon recovering, Johane went to a nearby hill called Marimba. He stayed there for forty days, praying to God “day and night” without sleep. He survived on wild honey. Johane was told by a voice (which he believed to be the Voice of God) that he had been “sent from Heaven to carry out religious work among the natives.” He was told also that Africans must burn their witchcraft medicines, and must not commit adultery or rape. After these experiences, Johane no longer suffered from pains in the head.

Translation has often been characterized as a ‘central act' of European colonialism and imperialism. For example, it has been argued that translation had been utilized to make available legal-cultural information for the administration and rule of the non-West, but perhaps more importantly, translation has been identified as important for the resources it provided in the construction of representations of the colonized as Europe's ‘civilizational other.' In the context of British imperialism in South Asia, Bernard Cohn has persuasively demonstrated the first point, namely, that the codification of South Asian languages in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries served to convert ‘indigenous' forms of textualized knowledge into ‘instruments of colonial rule.' Translational technology, in the form of language grammars and dictionaries, Cohn argues, enabled information gathering and the effective communication of commands, as well as the (at least partial) displacement of European dependence upon interlocutors of perceived dubious reliability. Most recent discussions of translation in this context, however, have focused rather more upon the act of translation as a strategic means for representing ‘otherness' to primarily domestic British reading audiences. In this case, the act of linguistic translation is more clearly being enumerated as a practice of cultural translation. English translations of the ‘ancient' Sanskrit texts of India, for example, have been analyzed for the rhetorical work that the text performs in certain contexts. On the one hand, European-produced translations of these texts might serve to reinforce the dominance of a European aesthetic sensibility through a process of ‘naturalization,' in which the culturally-specific is ‘sanitized,' subordinated to a European norm, thereby inherently limiting the ‘artistic achievement' of the colonized. The orientalist William Jones' erasure of the motif of sweat as an indication of sexual interest and arousal in his translation of Kālidāsa's fourth- or fifth-century Sanskrit play Śakuntala is a case in point. On the other hand, literary translations from Sanskrit might also foreground the ‘otherness' of Indian texts and cultural norms through a strategy of ‘foreignization'; that is, by registering for the European reader differences in language and cultural content. For example, European translations from Sanskrit might include anthropological notations which explain the cultural relevance of the text, or might instead adopt an overly literal rendering of prose, thereby foregrounding differences in syntax, vocabulary, symbol, or motif. Both such rhetorical devices, it can be argued, leave the reader tripping over the text, giving him pause to consider the very strangeness of its appearance and contents.

Tehran, 1934. Introducing his newest book, Mental Diseases, Dr. Muhammad-עAli Tutiyā hits a raw nerve. Iran's capital is abuzz with news about עAli Asghar Borujerdi. Earlier on that year, the man soon dubbed Asghar Qātel (the murderer) confessed to having had sexual intercourse and subsequently killed thirty-three adolescent boys. Born in 1893 in the Western Iranian town of Borujerd, at the age of eight he left with his mother and siblings for Karbalā, Iraq. Six years later, he moved on to Baghdad, and began to sexually abuse adolescents. Eventually, he began to murder them, according to his initial testimony in order to trick the police that were observing him. In 1933, after having taken twenty-five lives, he only escaped Baghdad and arrest by the skin of his teeth. Arriving in Tehran, he worked as porter and vegetable-seller, and took up residence in Bāgh-e Ferdous, a neighborhood in Tehran's poor popular south. He carried on with his deeds, killing eight boys, most of them homeless vagrants. The first bodies, heads severed, were found on 31 December 1933. Borujerdi was arrested once and released for lack of evidence, but in early March of 1934, the police detained him again, and this time he confessed. He was tried, convicted, and, after an unsuccessful appeal, was hung in front of an immense crowd in Tehran's Sepah Square on 26 June.

In September 1964 עAli Taleb, an employee in the Agricultural Directorate in Gaza, petitioned the civil service administration for what he claimed was a long overdue promotion. On the face of it, there is nothing particularly surprising about such a petition—עAli was certainly not the first employee to feel he deserved more recognition for his work. What makes his petition peculiar were the circumstances which generated it. The Gaza Strip, the territory in whose civil service עAli was employed, came into existence in 1948 as a result of the war over the establishment of Israel. Before 1948, Gaza was a district of Palestine, governed like the rest of the country as a mandate granted to the British government by the League of Nations. When the 1948 war ended in defeat for the Arab forces, the Egyptian army occupied the Gaza area, which it administered for the next twenty years. עAli was hired in 1937 by the Mandate government—and under its rules of promotion—but it was the Egyptian Administration (henceforth “Administration”) which he expected to fulfill the obligations of this system. “I was nominated to be promoted to Grade 3 under the previous Mandate government,” עAli explained, noting that, “before my turn arrived the Mandate ended and the Arab Administration came to the Strip.”

Economic anthropology has two ‘sacred' field sites—one in Melanesia, the other in Central America—and the empirical data gathered from these sites has set the theoretical agenda for the sub-discipline. Malinowski conducted seminal fieldwork in both of these areas and the respective subjects of his investigations tells us much about the socio-economic concerns of people in Melanesia and Central America. His classic ethnography on the Kula exchange system of the Milne Bay area of Papua New Guinea, Argonauts of the Western Pacific, established Melanesia as the classic home of gift exchange. The postwar ethnographies have only served to confirm the passion Melanesians have for creating intricate forms of gift exchange: Andrew Strathern's The Rope of Moka, introduced us to the ties that bind the ‘big men' in the Highlands; Michael Young's Fighting with Food: Leadership, Values and Social Control in a Massim Society, challenged us to rethink the social role of food, and so on. These ethnographies, and many others like them, have provided the ethnographic base on which general theories of the gift have risen, Marilyn Strathern's The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia, being the best-known recent synthesis. The product of Malinowski's Central American fieldwork, Malinowski in Mexico: The Economics of a Mexican Market System (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982), which he wrote with J. de la Fuente, has not had the impact of Argonauts, for a number of reasons, including the fact that an English translation of the 1957 Spanish edition took some twenty-five years to appear, and that his research, carried out in 1940, was not pioneering in the same ethnographic and theoretical way that Argonauts was. His Mexican work was part of a long tradition of American scholarship on the peasant-artisan commodity producers of this area. Commodity production and exchange is to the people of Central America what gift exchange is to Melanesians. However, the exchange of commodities in Central America is a not ceremonial ritual, but rather everyday reality that the people must undertake in order to survive. It has been this way for centuries, which is why Central American ethnographers have devoted so much time to describing and analyzing petty commodity reproduction. This is not to say that market exchange is unimportant for the people of Melanesia, but what sets Melanesia apart is that gift exchange has flourished under the impact of capitalism, and it is this question that commentators have tried to describe and explain. What then are the peculiar social conditions found in Central America that account for the specificities of the economy found there? What conceptual frameworks have economic anthropologists developed to come to terms with these facts?

Central to Douglas Northrop's archivally based study of the Soviet attempt to unveil Uzbek women is the argument that the Soviet Union was a colonial empire, one where Bolsheviks tried to transform daily cultural practices and gender relations against the wishes of most Uzbeks, who responded as colonial subjects by using weapons of the weak. Northrop's use of previously unavailable Communist Party documents allows an exploration of the Party's arguments for and against unveiling, and describes the Party's surprise at the vehemence and violence of anti-unveiling resistance in Uzbekistan. Starting with the 1927 Communist Party initiation of the Hujum—or campaign against veiling in Soviet Uzbekistan—this work's exclusive focus on the unveiling campaign allows Northrop to reveal that resistance to unveiling and other laws concerning “liberation” continued into the 1950s, and to examine the ways that intrusion into family life and cultural practices served the Party as a tool for defining loyalty during the Stalinist period. Northrop far exceeds Gregory Massell's The Surrogate Proletariat: Moslem Women and Revolutionary Strategies in Soviet Central Asia, 1919–1929 (1974) in exploring Party arguments over policies toward Central Asia.

In the Time of Trees and Sorrows is an engaging and elegant exploration of the history of the former kingdom of Sawar, an area of twenty-seven villages in Rajasthan. The authors focus on the period from the 1930s to the 1950s, an era of dramatic changes in Sawar's (and India's) political and ecological landscape. Drawing on interviews with subjects of the former kingdom, mostly non-literate farmers, herders, and laborers, the authors provide a textured account of the pre-independence period (pre-1947) marked by what they term the “double oppression under colonial and regional rulers,” and a landscape rich with trees and wildlife, albeit resources to which the king's subjects were mostly denied access (p. 1). This period is contrasted with the post-independence period, during which India's princely kingdoms were absorbed in the Indian Republic, and the subjects of Sawar experienced “the sudden and radical transformation to democracy and modernity” (1). This latter period also witnessed, as the authors draw attention to from the outset, the complete devastation of Sawar's landscape which “transformed from one of rich biodiversity of trees and growth to one where hillsides have been stripped of indigenous growth and are now dominated by a single alien species” (3). In bringing political and ecological history into the same frame, Gold and Gujar explore a compelling paradox of the area's postcolonial history: as the residents of Sawar gained political rights, their environment was transformed and, in many ways, devastated.