Oku adults have a straightforward rationalization for the existence of folktales: the frightening cautionary tales of the child-eating monster K∂ηgaaηgu serve to warn children not to go to the fields or to stray too far from the house without their parents. But this rationalization is belied by the fact that adults in this chiefdom of the Cameroon Grassfields do not tell folktales to children. Rather, folktales are most often told by children amongst each other, with no adult involvement, and they are consequently learned by younger children from older ones. This is an unusual situation in West Africa, where the norm is for adults to tell folktales to children. For all we know, adult-to-child storytelling may have been the normal practice in the Grassfields in the past, but if it ever was, this practice has now passed into desuetude, and today adults look with mild scorn on folktales (f∂ngaanen, ∂mgaanen pl.) and generally remain aloof during storytelling sessions. Storytelling in the Grassfields is therefore a child-structured form of play in Schwartzman's (1978) sense: it is an activity mediated by children without adult input. Prior to the introduction of schooling in the Grassfields, children used to be made to guard the crops against birds and monkeys, an activity that left them to their own devices in the fields for long periods of the day (Argenti 2001; see also Fortes 1938; Raum 1940). In some cases, children actually slept in small shelters that they built in the fields, and they would consequently stay away from their homes and adult supervision for days at a time. It was in this context, away from the censorious gaze of adults, that children's illicit masking activities developed (Argenti 2001). It may also be in this context that children were able to indulge in prolonged bouts of storytelling without fear of reproof by adults, in whose eyes children should be seen but not heard. Today, children no longer guard the fields, and they have therefore taken to telling their folktales at home.

In my family, stories of our Fijian ancestors' cannibalism have been irreverently recycled in tale-telling moments laced with both solemnity and the absurd. I never seriously questioned the reality of the stories, accepting instead their mythical quality and their underlying social allegory. With almost a wink and a nudge these tales of past cannibalism come to life as fables that nearly always taper off into the redemption of being civilized. As I explore in this article, for us as for many who engage cannibal stories, cannibalism refers to more than the cultural practice of anthropophagy. In the wake of William Arens' provocative critique of this meta-myth, it has become more difficult in recent years to uncritically accept and repeat claims of other peoples' cannibalism. Studies by a generation of scholars of history and culture have ensured that the study of cannibalism now is as likely to interrogate those that view and seek it, as it is to examine those reputed to practice it. Anthropologies of tourism and cultural critiques too have cemented its conceptualization as an enduring discourse of savagery.

Theories about the politics and economics of resource-rich or “rentier” states have been around for almost four decades now (Mahdavy 1970; Beblawi 1987; Chaudhry 1997; Humphreys et al. 2007). Political scientists and economists have argued that rents have a negative impact on levels of democracy (Luciani 1987; Ross 2001), on the quality of institutions (Chaudhry 1997; Isham et al. 2005), and on economic growth (Sachs and Warner 2001). Although much debate has been conducted over these macro-correlations, far less attention has been devoted to the causal mechanisms behind them. There is still no unified theory of rentier states, and the micro-foundations of rentier systems in particular have gone largely unexplored.

Recent ethnographic work on the state has exposed a crack in one of the founding myths of modern political power. Despite the state's transcendental claim to wielding absolute, exclusive authority within national territory, scholars have shown that in much of the world there are, in fact, “too many actors competing to perform as state,” sites where various power blocs “are acting as the state and producing the same powerful effects” (Aretxaga 2003: 396, 398) Achille Mbembe (2001: 74), writing of the external fiscal controls imposed upon African countries during the late 1980s, has termed this a condition of “fractionated sovereignty”—the dispersal of official state functions among various non-state actors. There is, as Mbembe suggests, “nothing particularly African” about this situation (ibid.). Around the world, the power of various “shadow” organizations like arms dealers and paramilitary groups seems increasingly to depend upon their ability to out-perform the state in many of its definitive functions, from the provision of security and welfare to the collection of taxes and administration of justice (Nugent 1999; Nordstrom 2004; Hansen 2005). These observations present a serious challenge to conventional state theory. They force us to consider whether such conditions of fragmented, competitive statecraft might be better understood not as deviant exceptions to otherwise centralized political systems but, rather, as the way that government is actually experienced in much of the world today.

Religious authority and its relation to the mundane, and especially to the domains of politics and the state, is a perennial issue of sociological and theological concern. Within the Islamic world, my focus here, this issue takes particular form, inflected through the powerful trope of the shari‘ah (Arabic, sharī‘ah), most commonly glossed in English as “Islamic law,” although God's right “way” through life potentially addresses every aspect of human life. This comprehensiveness, conjoined with the “openness” that the shari‘ah's nominally divine and hence, in the final analysis, inscrutable source entails, has consequences for the ways in which one might imagine a state that grounded its legitimacy in following that right path. Brinkley Messick's (1993) monograph The Calligraphic State has provided a now classic exploration of such a polity in North Yemen, and its transformations under modernization. His analysis of these processes turns on a central image: the shift from a “calligraphic,” that is, personalized form of “textual domination,” drawing its authority from the endlessly open and interpretable field of “shari‘ah discourse” (1993: 1–3), to the rationalized, impersonal authority of modern legal texts, fixed and monopolized by state officials and symbolized, following the master metaphor, by uniform, rigid print.

In November of 1934, Algerian Governor General Jules Carde asked the Algiers Police Prefecture to investigate a rumor circulating through the French bureaucracy that “natives” in the Arab cafés (café maures) of the city were tuning in to biweekly Arabic broadcasts transmitted by an unspecified Italian radio station that featured “commentaries unfavorable to France” and “openly attacked France's Muslim policy.” As the governor of three overseas French départements, Carde had already received notification that the airwaves over North Africa were becoming dangerous. A few months earlier, Jean Berthoin, the director of national security, or Sûreté, in France's Interior Ministry, warned regional prefects, “In a number of cities a large portion of the radio-electric industry—sales and the construction of devices—is in the hands of foreigners.” Berthoin feared that the dominance of France's radio-electric market by large, multinational firms would allow enemy agents to mask radio transmitters beneath the cover of radio sales and report clandestinely on troop maneuvers and defense preparations. He therefore instructed prefects to begin “discreet investigations” into the civil status, political affiliation, and nationality of radio merchants and their personnel. While ostensibly directed at metropolitan prefects, these Sûreté directives resonated in Algeria—a strategic periphery of “Greater France” and home to a sizeable European population of German and Italian descent and to multiple garrisons of France's indigenous-based African Army (Armée d'Afrique). By 1935, rumors about radio espionage and subversive auditory propaganda circulating through the Algerian colonial bureaucracy compelled Governor Carde to construct a colony-wide surveillance web to monitor radio sales, investigate Algerian listening habits, and assess the effects of radio propaganda on the “native mentality.”

Ever the trickster, Tagaro appears and multiplies, disappears and reappears, across landscapes past and present in Vanuatu. His ancient adventures, deeds, and follies are deeply inscribed into the northern islands—on Maewo, Ambae, and Pentecost, especially—in rocks, caves, trees, and the shape of hills. In recent decades, Tagaro has journeyed more widely, by way of the conversations and texts of ni-Vanuatu religious scholars and early ethnologists, for the most part within the context of the Melanesian Mission of the Anglican Church. Like all good travelers, he always returns from his journeys transformed, carrying all of the burdens that are implicated in the engagement with otherness that journeying entails. For the Sia Raga of Pentecost Island (Taylor 2008), such fraught Oceanic crossings have split Tagaro into a seemingly contradictory figure. For some he is a benevolent God, for others a maniacal, murderous, axe-wielding foreigner. This radical ambivalence calls to mind Marshall Sahlins' description of those stranger-kings, so prevalent in the histories of neighboring Fiji and beyond, powerful figures who arrive from beyond society and who rule through acting beyond it morally, but in doing so are eventually encompassed by the people, “to the extent that their sovereignty is always problematical and their lives are often at risk” (1981b: 111). It also suggests the Deus absconditus of European Christian historiography: a largely unknown but always potentially dangerous “hidden God” that lies beyond human understanding of the covenant. In this paper I explore the troubled histories of Tagaro for what they tell us of changing local engagements with that ostensibly “Other” stranger, Christianity's God Almighty, and of the dynamics of sacred power within the continuing legacy of colonialism's culture. In doing so it demonstrates the ongoing vitality of indigenous Gods, ancestors, and culture heroes to the people of the Pacific region and beyond, and more especially their importance to understanding and negotiating social, political, and religious relations of power.

Ethnographers, historians, and linguists have argued for many years about the nature of the relationship between missionaries and their collaborators. Critics of missionary linguistics and education have pointed out that Bible translations were tools forged for the cultural conquest of native people and that missionary impacts on local cultures nearly always destructive and frequently overwhelming (Comaroff and Comaroff 1997; Rafael 1988; Sanneh 1989). Sociolinguistic readings of scripture translation have emphasized the cultural loss inherent in the act of translation and even seemingly benign activities such as dictionary making (Errington 2001; Peterson 1999; Tomlinson 2006). To make this point, Rafael (1988: xvii) notes the semantic links between the various Spanish words for conquest (conquista), conversion (conversión), and translation (traducción). Historians, on the other hand, have generally been more skeptical about the power of mere words to exert hegemonic pressure on colonized people and have emphasized the more tangible power of guns and commerce as agents of empire (Porter 2004). Few would deny the symbolic power of the Bible as a representation of colonial domination, as in the saying attributed to Archbishop Desmond Tutu by Cox (2008: 4): “When the white man arrived, he had the Bible and we had the land; now, we have the Bible and he has the land.”