The last several decades have seen both a renewed anthropological interest in the possibility of cross-cultural comparison and the rapid rise of the anthropology of Christianity. These two trends should be mutually supportive. One of the promises of the anthropology of Christianity from the outset has been that it will allow people to compare how processes of Christianization have unfolded in different parts of the world and to consider how the resulting Christian configurations are similar to and different from one another. But to this point, relatively little detailed comparative empirical work on Christianity has appeared. Our aim here is to contribute to remedying this situation. Drawing on recent theoretical work on comparison, we set comparative work on Christianity on a new footing. Empirically, we examine how processes of Evangelical Christianization have transformed notions of the self in one Amazonian society (Wari') and two unrelated societies in Melanesia (Bosavi and Urapmin). We define the self for comparative purposes as composed of ideas of the mind or inner self, the body, and relations between people. In our three cases, Christianization has radically transformed these ideas, emphasizing the inner self and downplaying the importance of the body and of social relations. While our empirical conclusions are not wholly unexpected, the extent to which the details of our three cases speak comparatively to one another, and the extent to which the broad processes of Christian transformation they involve are similar, are surprising and lay a promising foundation for future comparative work in the anthropology of Christianity.

Since democratization, Indonesia has played host to a curious form of ethnic conflict: militant vigilante groups attacking a small, socially marginal religious sect called Ahmadiyah. While most scholars attribute the violence to intolerance by radicals on the periphery of society, this article proposes a different reading based on an intertwined reconfiguration of Indonesian nationalism and religion. I suggest that Indonesia contains a common but overlooked example of “godly nationalism,” an imagined community bound by a shared theism and mobilized through the state in cooperation with religious organizations. This model for nationalism is modern, plural, and predicated on the exclusion of religious heterodoxy. Newly collected archival and ethnographic material reveal how the state's and Muslim civil society's long-standing exclusion of Ahmadiyah and other heterodox groups has helped produce the “we-feeling” that helps constitute contemporary Indonesian nationalism. I conclude by intervening in a recent debate about religious freedom to suggest that conflicts over blasphemy reflect Muslim civil society's effort to delineate an incipient model of nationalism and tolerance while avoiding the templates of liberal secularism or theocracy.

Over the last fifteen years, hundreds of Muslim citizens claiming Armenian descent have submitted petitions to Turkey's secular legal authorities asking for changes to both their name and religion in the public record. In this article, I discuss the name-change cases of Armenian return converts to further the debates on Turkish secularism and to critique the body of scholarship that welcomes the governing Justice and Development Party's legal reforms as a measure of growing religious tolerance. In the article's first part I analyze the historical foundations of the regulation of religion and name changes in Turkey by fully and explicitly engaging with law as a site where minority difference is constructed, authorized, and challenged. The article's second half offers an alternative reading of how tolerance functions as an aspect of the Justice and Development Party's reforms. Based on my investigation of specific legal forms of argument that converted Armenians and their lawyers put forward in today's secular courts, and how legal officers of the state respond to them, I demonstrate that legal reform has shifted the definition of religion as a marker of minority difference in legal space. I argue that the historical context of name change and religious conversion forces the limits of existing understandings of freedom of religion in Turkey, and that this renders visible historical injustices that cannot be resolved simply through the notion of “religious tolerance” in the courts.

Buddhism contributed to the culture and politics of thirteenth-century Eurasian intellectual exchange, depositing literary, artistic, and architectural traces subsequently eclipsed by layers of Islamic and Eurocentric history. Within extensive cross-continental networks of diplomatic and commercial activity, Ilkhanid Buddhism and the Buddhist revival of which it was a part drew serious attention among contemporary travelers, scholars, and statesmen including Ibn Taymiyah, Roger Bacon, and Rashid al-Din. This article argues that awareness of a Buddhist scholarly and political elite in the Muslim heartland, with its center at Tabriz, generated a historically significant Eurasian Buddhist discourse during a critical passage in the turn to modernity.

Despite a growing literature revealing the presence of millenarian movements in both Theravada and Mahayana Buddhist societies, scholars have been remarkably reluctant to consider the role of messianic beliefs in Buddhist societies. Khruubaa Srivichai (1878–1938) is the most famous monk of northern Thailand and is widely revered as a tonbun, or saint. Although tonbun has been depoliticized in the modern context, the term also refers to a savior who is an incarnation of the coming Maitreya Buddha. In 1920 Srivichai was sent under arrest to the capital city of Bangkok to face eight charges. This essay focuses on the charge that he claimed to possess the god Indra's sword. Although this charge has been widely ignored, it was in fact a charge of treason. In this essay, I argue that the treason charge should be understood within the context of Buddhist millenarianism. I note the saint/savior tropes in Srivichai's mytho-biography, describe the prevalence of millenarianism in the region, and detail the political economy of the decade of the 1910s prior to Srivichai's detention. I present evidence to show that the decade was characterized by famine, dislocation, disease, and other disasters of both natural and social causes. Such hardships would have been consistent with apocalyptic omens in the Buddhist repertoire portending the advent of Maitreya. Understanding Srivichai in this millenarian context helps to explain both the hopes of the populace and the fears of the state during that tumultuous decade.

This article is a study of the Inner Mongolian land reform undertaken by the Qing government in the last decade of its rule. Instead of portraying land reform as a state process of taming and transforming nomads, I examine the metamorphosis of the multi-ethnic governing relationships enabled by the reform. The frontier governance system on which I focus consisted of coalitions and conflicts among four key players: Mongol banners, neighboring Han Chinese provinces, the Court of Dependencies, and frontier military governors. By elucidating the changing relationships that bound these players together, I pinpoint the most significant agendas of land reform, how the Mongols' position vis-à-vis state agencies changed throughout the reform process, and to what extent these changes resulted in state centralization. My study illuminates a variety of topics, including nomad sedentarization, frontier politics, and modern state expansion.

Why do some states resort to more exclusive top-down management of natural resources, while others tend to be more inclusive and solicit participation from civil society? By rejecting the simple characterization of the state within the narrow spectrum of “weak” and “strong,” this article investigates resource-mediated relations in the peripheral social groups that the state has sought to transform as part of the process of modernization. Focusing on Siam and Japan, I highlight alternative explanations based on ethnicity and labor, bureaucratic mindset, and agro-ecological conditions. I argue that the more embedded nature of the labor force in resources sectors made it necessary for the Japanese government to engage with marginal people, whereas the enclave nature of such sectors in Siam allowed elites to establish a distinctively exclusive system. While the Japanese state quickly learned to accommodate people at the fringes through its recognition and acceptance of existing customs in the management of resources, and even facilitated the creation of local organizations such as forest unions, the Siamese were consistently more exclusionary and even oppressed indigenous groups living at the state's territorial periphery. Resource interventions targeted at the fringes of land and society in Japan and Siam produced lasting effects on state-society relations that have extended far beyond their original intention of securing resource procurement. Understanding the historical roots of such relations offers a fresh perspective from which to explain why state inaction prevails in the present debate on state devolution in Thailand.

This article explores how accusations of cannibalism in post-conflict Mozambique, which were leveled in the context of individually driven and protracted struggles, albeit with cultural spinoffs, have contributed to ongoing and contested forms of social transformation in the country. The accusations were accentuated by the mobilizing effects of memories of violence and interventions of the mass media, which in turn highlighted the enduring struggle over the politics of local recognition and authority and its dynamic and broader links to state-building and legitimacy in Mozambique. This analysis traces the origins of cannibal accusations in culture and politics and, through a discussion of the biographies of concrete social actors and their open and discreet struggles, has wider repercussions for the study of the role of indigenous beliefs about, and fears of, cannibals and witches on state-building in post-conflict countries.