This article explores how Judeo-Arabic and its speaking population were constituted as objects of research and reformation in colonial Morocco. I argue that the colonial project of dialectology, which emphasized the differentiated linguistic terrain of indigenous society, operated at two opposing levels. On one hand, the study of Judeo-Arabic contributed to the idea of homogeneous orality attributed to native languages, which despite their diverse relationships with literate textuality were made to appear divorced from locally established systems of writing. On the other, the historical and affective relationship between Jews and their Arabic dialect was figured in terms that stressed Jewish alienation from their mother tongue and thereby cast native Jews as differentiated objects of francophone linguistic reform. I pay particular attention to the material mechanics of ethnographic methodology, orthographic entextualization, and editorial arrangement through which colonial dialectologists rendered the Jewish dialect as an essentially oral and Arabic dialect, despite the countervailing circulation of Judeo-Arabic texts written in the Hebrew script. This investigation contributes to our understanding of how dialectology operated as a colonial science through which the hierarchical social categories of colonial rule were established, sustained, and manipulated against the backdrop of linguistic practices that never fully conformed to their colonial representation.

Since the year 2000, remembering the Holocaust and fighting anti-Semitism have come to be accepted as cornerstones of European identity. The flip side of this development has been racialization of Muslims by singling them out as the main contemporary anti-Semites. After discussing the emergence of the concept “Muslim anti-Semitism,” I scrutinize government-issued reports and anti-Semitism-prevention programs in Germany. I show how the recent wave of struggle against anti-Semitism depicts Muslims as outsiders who bring unwanted ideologies, evaluates their anti-Semitism as more dangerous than that of right-wing German nationals, and attributes to Muslims culturally transmitted psychopathologies that make Muslim nations prone to anti-Semitism. Experts locate the root of Turkish anti-Semitism in their “myth of tolerance toward Jews,” and of Arab anti-Semitism in their sense of a “false victimhood” and “desire for power and pride.” Educators focus on each nationality separately to distinguish these alleged group-specific myths and feelings. Efforts and money that go into producing nation-specific Muslim anti-Semitisms depict a new Germany that has fully liberated itself from any anti-democratic tendencies surviving from its Nazi past. It also obscures connections between anti-Semitism and anti-Muslim racism, both of which are active forces in mainstream German society.

This article analyzes the growing interest in Jews and all things Jewish in contemporary Poland—from the spectacular popularity of festivals of Jewish culture to the opening of Judaica bookstores and Jewish cuisine restaurants; from the development of Jewish studies programs at various universities and the creation of several museums to artists’ and public intellectuals’ engagements with Poland's Jewish past and Polish-Jewish relations more broadly. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, over sixty formal interviews with Jewish and non-Jewish activists, and informal conversations with participants in various Jewish-centered initiatives, I argue that this cultural phenomenon is related to the attempt by specific political and social groups to build a pluralistic society in an ethnically and denominationally homogenous nation-state. I build on the literature on nationalism and symbolic boundaries by showing that bringing back Jewish culture and “resurrecting the Jew” is a way to soften, stretch, and reshape the symbolic boundaries of the nation that the Right wants to harden and shrink using Catholicism as its main tool.

This essay reconstructs a scandal in the fall of 1797 involving Ottoman governors, leaders of a notorious network of irregular soldiers cum bandits, and residents of the city of Filibe (Plovdiv in Bulgaria). It erupted over whether or not state officials should pacify successful bandit enterprises by co-opting their leaders. The scandal escalated into a crisis in which the large armies of the governors of Anatolia and Rumeli (the Ottoman Balkans) verged on clashing because each wanted to lead the state's lucrative war against Rumeli bandit networks. Imperial administrators issued dispatches regarding this scandal that were based on gossip and rumor circulating within the general population as well as among bandits. I draw on understandings of gossip as a social and cultural resource from linguistic anthropology to make sense of Ottoman political culture. I analyze these dispatches to uncover how the performance of these informal scripts featured prominently in correspondence with the Imperial Council and related surveillance reports, and thereby mediated resources, power, and authority among different agents of imperial violence. I show that gossip, rumor, and related forms of seemingly informal “talk” played a fundamental role in sovereign decision making. I also transpose methodologies and approaches of “history from below,” conceived by earlier generations of cultural anthropologists and historians, onto elite letters to ask new questions about information brokerage, the negotiation of power among different agents of imperial violence and their interlocutors, and the contested nature of imperial intelligence gathering and sovereignty.

This essay examines the experience of corruption as an unavoidable and self-destructive dynamic of everyday life in post-crisis Argentina. Embedded in both everyday practices and popular evaluations of those practices, corruption in this context of neoliberal crisis operated as a folk category of socio-moral critique much like witchcraft does in some other settings, for it named a cannibalistic logic that imperiled the very framework of sociality. In order to grasp the reflexive pragmatics of this category, the essay attends first to the conceptual, then to the ethnographic, and finally to the historical dimensions of its practical life. Moving across these three dimensions, it argues that corruption indexed a very particular moral sensibility, marked by the sense of exhausted historical possibilities and inevitable national crisis.

The past thirty years have seen, particularly in the United States, a transformation in the public image of “Kongo,” an ill-defined entity (a tribe, a kingdom, a culture, a region?) on the Atlantic coast of Central Africa. The efforts of R. F. Thompson, professor of art history at Yale, and A. Fu-kiau, himself Kongolese, have done much to popularize a “Kongo” characterized more by its romantic appeal than by historical or ethnographic verisimilitude. Elsewhere in the Americas, the reputation of “Kongo” has suffered by comparison with “Yoruba,” another historically emergent Atlantic identity, based in West Africa. These identities, and the supposed contrast between them, are products of an increasingly complex trans-Atlantic discourse.

This essay uses the controversies surrounding the enigmatic Ismet Ali, a yogi working in Chicago and New York in the 1920s, to illuminate the complexities of how the performativity of religion and race are interrelated. I examine several moments in which Ali's “authenticity” as Indian is brought into doubt to open up larger questions regarding the global flows of colonial knowledge, racial tropes, and groups of people between India, the United States, and the Caribbean. I explore the ways in which, in the early twentieth-century United States, East Indian “authenticity” only became legible via identificatory practices that engaged with and adapted orientalized stereotypes. The practices of the yogi persona and its sartorial stylings meant to signify “East Indianness” in the United States, particularly the donning of a turban and beard, were one mode through which both South Asian and African Americans repurposed “Hindoo” stereotypes as models for self-formation. By taking on “Hindoo” identities, peoples of color could circumvent the U.S. black/white racial binary and the violence of Jim Crow. This act of racial passing was also an act of religious passing. However, the ways in which identities had to and could be performed changed with context as individuals moved across national and colonial boundaries.

For Dutch Calvinist missionaries in Central Java, two events bookended the radically transformative decade of the 1890s. The first, at the start of the decade, was the severing of relations with a charismatic Javanese leader named Sadrach, a decision that marked a redoubled commitment to suppress local Christian syncretism and to promote Calvinist orthodoxy in its stead. The second, at the decade's end, was the establishment of a modern clinic to serve as the flagship institution of a reformulated and reinvigorated missionary project. This article considers how these two seemingly disparate events are related. It suggests that much of what was troubling to missionaries about Sadrach and his indigenous Christian movement involved their understandings and uses of the body. I then consider how the mission attempted to use modern clinical experience and the anatomical perspective to address a range of ethical and epistemological problems posed by Sadrach and his followers' understandings of the body. The modern clinic would serve as a key pedagogical and disciplinary tool for the reordering of a vocabulary and syntax of bodies and souls, a grammar of religious and social expression.

The study of witchcraft seems to be globalizing in many respects. Not only are witches themselves supposedly globalizing, but the people who try to study them are also adopting a more global outlook. Moreover, witchcraft as a topic is no longer tied to specific areas of the world, but seems to crop up everywhere. For this essay I purposely chose three recent studies, out of a wide array of possible books, which come from very different parts of the world. Reading them comparatively can highlight key trends in this field, and also important differences.