Before Najla passes me the gourd brimming with yerba mate, she makes sure to wipe the end of the metal drinking straw with the fragrant leaves of a local herb—for the flavor and to clean it she explains in her Venezuela-accented Spanish. We sit under the welcome shade of a veranda, each taking our turn to drain the gourd and then returning it to Najla to fill once more with warm water from the teakettle. After splashing a pitcher of cold water on the concrete to cool it, her husband offers us a rare privilege: the liberty to ask any question we wish about the Druze religion. The Druze, an offshoot from eleventh-century Shi'a Islam, are endogamous and usually reveal the tenets of their faith only to those born within their community. Though we are speaking a mixture of English and Spanish, we are all guests at the Lebanese mountaintop home of Najla's deceased grandfather, an important Druze warlord during the civil war of the 1970s and 1980s. Najla and her husband are vacationing from their home in the Persian Gulf and staying with her unmarried female cousins, our hosts.

In every neighborhood of Dakar, Senegal, large houses in various stages of construction stand as witnesses to and evidence of transnational movements of labor and capital. These ambitious building projects, funded by Senegalese migrants living and working abroad, have utterly transformed the city landscape, and their pervasiveness leads many Dakarois to assume that everyone must be migrating. Intended as eventual family homes, investment properties, or a combination of the two, the innovative layouts and architectural flourishes of these not-yet houses echo lives lived elsewhere while drawing on local aesthetics and approaches to spatial design. Though some houses seem to near completion within just a year or two, most structures linger for several years or even a decade, slowly eroding as families and hired contractors wait for money transfers from abroad. Some constructions boast newly laid bricks or fresh paint, while others are obscured by overgrown vegetation and debris.

On 16 September 1856, gentleman illusionist Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin embarked from Marseille on the steamship Alexandre bound for the embattled French colony of Algeria. Thirty-six hours later, a detachment of French soldiers met him in the port of Algiers. Recently retired as an entertainer to pursue research in optics and the emerging field of applied electricity, Robert-Houdin was about to return to the stage in a series of magic performances that a French general purportedly called the most important campaign in the pacification of indigenous Algeria (Chavigny 1970: 134).

In southern Ghana, where I have been conducting research on the genesis of popular Christianity for almost twenty years, Christian imagery is everywhere. The Ghanaian state re-adopted a democratic constitution in 1992, and this was followed by a liberalization and commercialization of mass media, which in turn facilitated the spread of Pentecostalism in the public sphere (see De Witte 2008; Gifford 2004; Meyer 2004a). Within this process, Christian pictures have become ubiquitous. Pentecostal-charismatic churches assert their public presence and power via television, radio, posters, and stickers, and there has also emerged a new public culture rife with Christian imagery. This visual and aural expansion of Christianity and its particular aesthetic severely challenges what is being called African Traditional religion, and clashes with initiatives developed by the state and intellectuals to secure a national heritage.

The image appeared on the cover of a Sunday bulletin, produced and distributed by one of Guatemala City's most conservative neo-Pentecostal mega-churches. The picture presented the face of a young teenage girl, her eyes closed, lips wet, and skin kissed by a soft, transcendent light; the young woman's head was even tilted to the side in what Jacques Lacan would call jouissance (1998). Across her pink lips read Psalm 4:6: “In peace, I lay myself down.” This image, stitched together by the church's media relations department, makes a sly reference to Gian Lorenzo Bernini's sculpture, St. Teresa in Ecstasy (1652). The statue in Rome presents one of Teresa of Ávila's (1515–1582) mystical experiences of God, which the sixteenth-century Spanish saint narrates with unblinkingly erotic imagery. In her autobiography, St. Teresa writes how “the great love of God” often left her “utterly consumed,” “penetrated to [her] entrails,” and made her “utter several moans” for both the “intense pain” and its “sweetness” (Peers 1927: 197). With St. Teresa in mind, my own reaction to the church bulletin parroted Jacques Lacan's response to Bernini's statue. “She's coming,” Lacan commented, “There's no doubt about it” (1998: 76).

After more than three hundred years of colonial rule, Filipinos began a revolution against the Spanish empire in August of 1896. By June of 1898, revolutionary forces had managed to overwhelm the Spaniards who were already reeling from the destruction of their navy in the initial days of their war with the United States and had been fatally weakened by the decade-long revolution in Cuba. In the Philippines, a Revolutionary government was formed under the dictatorship of Emilio Aguinaldo. It declared independence, convened a convention to write a constitution and briefly succeeded in forming a Republic led by the wealthiest men of the archipelago by January of 1899. But by February, Filipinos were engulfed in a new war against an emergent U.S. empire that was to last through much of the first decade of the twentieth century, leading to U.S. colonization of the Philippines until 1941.

In the fifteen years following World War II more was done to combat tuberculosis than at any other time in world history. On every continent, hundreds of millions received the BCG (Bacillus Calmette Guérin) vaccine and millions more benefited from newly discovered antibiotics. TB research and attempts to control the disease knit together disparate populations and places as a network of experts and a matrix of ideas spread out across the globe linking the world through a common vaccine, a battery of antibiotics, and a knowledge network. Medicine became internationalized as organizations like the WHO and UNICEF began to see diseases as global problems and not solely the concern of individual countries.