The nature of medieval Hindu-Muslim relations is an issue of great relevance in contemporary India. Prior to the 200 years of colonial subjection to the British that ended in 1947, large portions of the Indian subcontinent were under Muslim political control. An upsurge of Hindu nationalism over the past decade has led to demands that the state rectify past wrongs on behalf of India's majority religion.' In the nationalist view, Hindu beliefs were continually suppressed and its institutions repeatedly violated during the many centuries of Muslim rule from 1200 C.E. onward. The focal point of nationalist sentiment is the most visible symbol of Hinduism, its temples. As many as 60,000 Hindu temples are said to have been torn down by Muslim rulers, and mosques built on 3,000 of those temples' foundations. The most famous of these alleged former temple sites is at Ayodhya in North India, long considered the birthplace of the Hindu god Rama. The movement to liberate this sacred spot, supposedly defiled in the sixteenth century when the Babri Masjid mosque was erected on the ruins of a Rama temple, was one of the hottest political issues of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Tensions reached a peak in December 1992, when Hindu militants succeeded in demolishing the mosque.

British rule in the former Crown Colony of Fiji was a paradoxical affair in several ways. The first Governor, Sir Arthur Gordon, had been shocked by the dispossession of the New Zealand Maori and was determined to subordinate settler interests in Fiji to those of the indigenous population. From the time of cession by a group of paramount chiefs in 1874, administrative policies and structures aimed to defend, protect, and institutionalize the traditional Fijian communal system. For example, what were thought to be traditional chiefly privileges, such as rights to produce, were legally enshrined and articulated with an indirect rule system of appointed village, district, and provincial chiefs. Land was made the inalienable property of clan groups of certain types (which Fijians were obliged to create where they did not already exist).

Adoption plays a major part in the traditional law of many Eurasian societies. It occupies a large portion of Mayne's Treatise on Hindu Law and Usage (1878). The Babylonian code of Hammu-rabi, the oldest comprehensive set of written laws, gives a prominent position to ‘Adoption and Wet-nursing’ (Driver and Miles, 1952: 383–406). And the institution receives the same kind of attention in the law of China, Greece and Ancient Rome. Theoretically it has been of central importance in the writings of Sir Henry Maine and Fustel de Coulanges, where it is linked to the perpetuation of corporations of agnates over time.

In Carlos Fuentes's recent novel, Terra Nostra, El Señor, an autistic Spanish king who bears a conspicuous resemblance to Philip II, is told of the existence of new worlds across the seas. In outrage and disbelief, he denies that such a thing was possible, for he, El Señor, had decreed that the only world which existed was to be found within the walls of his newly constructed palace. Royal monk that he was, he had ordered the world built for him and so forbade the existence of other worlds.

The sociological study of history has only recently achieved recognition in American sociology. Although historical research occupied an important place in the nineteenth-century European sociological tradition, American scholars long accepted a disciplinary division relegating the study of the past to historians, while reserving contemporary subjects for sociological investigation. The field of historical sociology first witnessed a revival in the 1950s with the publication of Reinhard Bendix's Work and Authority in Industry (1956) and Neil Smelser's Social Change in the Industrial Revolution (1959). During these years, a small chorus of voices called for a more historical approach to sociological problems and closer cooperation between the two disciplines.

This paper is about social change in underdeveloped areas. It is based on field work in the European Mediterranean between 1965 and 1967. Hansen worked in the wine and champagne district of Villafranca del Panadés, roughly 30 miles from Barcelona, in Catalonia. The Schneiders were in the wheat and pastoral latifundium zone of Western Sicily. The two regions exhibit quite different patterns of land use and tenure, social stratification and settlement. We were struck, however, by two characteristics which they shared. First, we found a plethora of noncorporate social structures (for the most part coalitions) which organized fundamental economic and political activities of a quite modern sort. In rural Catalonia, coalitions of businessmen, skilled workers and government functionaries are formed within the context of an emergent bar culture, centered in major towns like Villafranca. In Western Sicily, until quite recently, the locus of similar coalitions was the latifundium. As yet, no clearly defined urban tradition has replaced this predominantly rural one

In September 2003, dozens of Guaraní families from the town of Hipólito Yrigoyen in northwest Argentina decided to take back La Loma, the forested hill that stands at the edge of town and from where they had been expelled decades earlier by the San Martín del Tabacal sugar plantation. On the verge of a cliff from where they could see the town and behind it the sugarcane fields, men, women, and children began clearing a space near their old cemetery in order to plant and begin building homes. In their makeshift camp, people raised an Argentinean flag and erected signs that read “Our Land” and “Argentinean Land.” The participants in the takeover whom I talked to a few months later remembered that their return to La Loma generated an enormous collective enthusiasm and the hope of living “like before,” working the land, raising animals, and free from the urban poverty and overcrowding of Hipólito Yrigoyen. However, six days later, when over a hundred people had gathered in the dark around a bonfire, police officers stormed the place shouting, “Move out!” Some officers accused them of being “undocumented Bolivians”; others asked where the Argentinean flag was, offended the flag was there. Twenty men and two women were arrested, handcuffed, and forced to walk single file down the hill, in an atmosphere of screams and scuffles that included shots in the air and the beating of a young man. A person from the community recalled what the plantation spokesperson subsequently said about their claim, based on the fact that many of their ancestors were plantation workers who came from Bolivia: “What do these immigrants think they're asking for? They should go ask for land in Bolivia.”

On May 29, 1996, travelers visiting Istanbul witnessed a rather peculiar celebration. A group of burly men dressed in Ottoman military clothing, some wearing false moustaches, were dragging a decorated sailboat along the asphalt road toward the central Taksim Square. Although it was no easy task to drag the sailboat uphill under the hot sun and the curious gaze of tourists on this summer day, the laboring men nevertheless displayed a solemn attitude of resolve and austerity, as if to remind the observing public of the grave significance of the historical event they were commemorating.

Caritas has become not just an obsession but indeed emblematic of the profound crisis of the times in which we live. In such times, marked by social and political upheaval and by shortages of all kinds, prophets and quacks arise to heal everything, the coming end of the world gets a precise date, and every day a miracle or two happens. People crushed by hardship and without hope can hardly wait to believe in these things. The Caritas phenomenon is such a miracle.

Political science has become a dismal science for most of the world. In the proverbial third world, where most people live, the “physical quality of life” is often abysmal and liable to further deterioration. Steeped in “realism,” political science foretells a future of dictatorial rule for most of those who face the prospect of increasing physical misery.

The Graeco-Roman world, with which I am concerned to the exclusion of the pre-Greek Near East, was a world of cities. Even the agrarian population, always a majority, most often lived in communities of some kind, hamlets, villages, towns, not in isolated farm homesteads. It is a reasonable and defensible guess that, for the better part of a thousand years, more and more of the inhabitants of Europe, northern Africa and western Asia lived in towns, in a proportion that was not matched in the United States, for example, until the Civil War. (Admittedly only a guess is possible, since statistics are lacking for antiquity.) The ancients themselves were firm in their view that civilized life was thinkable only in and because of cities. Hence the growth of towns as the regular and relentless accompaniment of the spread of Graeco-Roman civilization; eastward after the conquests of Alexander as far as the Hindukush, to the west from Africa to Britain with the Roman conquests, until the number of towns rose into the thousands.

For more than a decade, the most decisive influence on the empirical study of the British class structure has been the three consecutive electoral victories of the Conservative Party during the 1950s. The widespread belief that these events reflected some underlying change in the stratification of British society stimulated a new examination of the political attitudes and behaviour of the working class. In sociology this led to the exploration of the ‘embourgeoisement’ thesis culminating in the ‘affluent worker’ study by Goldthorpe and his colleagues and it is, perhaps, a comment on the state of sociological research into the British class structure that this study, together with its associated papers, remains the centre around which much of the debate on social stratification in contemporary Britain continues to revolve. In political science, however, the investigation took a different track. Instead of seeking an explanation of the Conservative electoral successes in terms of the working class becoming more middle class, political scientists sought an explanation in terms of increased working-class ‘deference’. Bagehot was enthusiastically resurrected (a new edition of The English Constitution appeared in 1963), and a spate of studies attempted to assess the ‘deferential’ component of English political culture.

In the mid-nineteenth century, a gentleman in Xiaolan having the Mai surname wrote in his memoir:

Age eighteen, the forty-seventh year of Qianlong's reign [1782], there was a chrysanthemum festival. Each major surname group put on floral displays, and six platforms were set up throughout the town. There were scores of theatrical troupes whose performance brought together kinsmen and friends. The tradition of the festival started that year.

It is rare that circumstances in world history are favorable to the creation of a new kind of global political entity. Nationalism and the nation-state were novelties in the nineteenth century, as E. J. Hobsbawm (1990) convincingly demonstrates, but their connection with modernity was concealed by nationalist identifications with natural ties, permanent homelands, archaic cultures, and timeless bonds of common history. A similar global movement, which I refer to here as “indigenism,” has gained momentum over the last few decades largely out of the notice of observers, pundits, and theorists of international events. This movement, it is true, is smaller in scale, more fragile, less turbulent than the nationalist upheavals of the past two centuries, but it nevertheless has the potential to influence the way states manage their affairs, and even to reconfigure the usual alignments of nationalism and state sovereignty.

Through a comparative discussion of public rituals of national commemoration in India and Turkey, this essay examines the relationship between the formation of the public sphere, the production of national identity, and the establishment of state sovereignty. The central organizing principle is the notion of the “creation of the public” as a historically specific political and cultural project. This departs from the evolutionary understanding of the public sphere as a derivative byproduct or “unintended, rolling effect”1 of social, economic, and political “structural transformations” that took place in the course of the longue durée of European history.2 By theorizing the formation and reproduction of the Indian and Turkish public spheres as deliberate projects or strategies of nationalization and étatization,3 I draw attention to several significant aspects of political modernity that have been obscured in prevailing theories of public sphere formation and transformation.

In April and May 1996, while conducting doctoral research, I spent a month living in Meerut College, western Uttar Pradesh (UP). In September 2004 a new project brought me back to Meerut, and I was nervous about my return to the college. Would I get on with the new batch of students? What of the age gap that had opened up between my informants and I? Do I mention my previous visit? These concerns quickly evaporated when I entered the college. Many of the students I had met in 1996 were still living in the same hostel rooms. Between 1996 and 2004 I had completed my Ph.D., married, and obtained an academic job. During the same period, many of my informants, now in their mid-thirties, had, it seemed, stood still. Unable to obtain salaried employment, one of these students asked me: “What can we do but study and wait?”

The reasons for the recent and simultaneous appearance, or rise in influence, in much of the world of “fundamentalist” or doctrinally and socially conservative religiopolitical mass movements have been analyzed for individual groups but rarely in a way that compares all the main religions and the regions in which they are strong. Most comparative volumes on fundamentalism are collections, with most authors discussing one area. Exceptions are Mark Juergensmeyer, The New Cold War? Religious Nationalism Confronts the Secular State (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993) and Bruce B. Lawrence, Defenders of God: The Fundamentalist Revolt against the Modern Age (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1989). Useful collections include the five volumes of the Fundamentalism Project of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, edited by Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby and published by the University of Chicago Press (Chicago, 1991–95; full reference in note 3); Richard T. Antoun and Mary Elaine Hegland, eds. Religious Resurgence: Contemporary Cases in Islam, Christianity, and Judaism (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1987); Lionel Caplan, ed., Studies in Religious Fundamentalism (Albany, SUNY Press, 1987); John Stratton Hawley, ed., Fundamentalism and Gender (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); and Contention, 4:2, 3, and 5:3 (1995, 1996), sections on comparative fundamentalism. Rarer still have been analyses of why such movements have expanded in most areas only since the 1970s, what causes exist in areas where these movements are strong and why they differ from those regions where they are weak or nonexistent, and what, aside from religion, produces different types of movements. Here we will try to see if there are common factors in time and in space that help explain these movements and will look for causes of their similarities and differences. Explanations presented here will stress differences between religious nationalism (or communalism) directed primarily against other religious communities and conservative religious politics directed primarily against internal enemies. Differences between types and levels of preexisting religious beliefs will be examined to suggest why some areas have such movements and others do not. World-wide factors that help to account for the recent rise of religious politics will also be explored.