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.

Recent interpretations of oral histories in Africa have been based increasingly on the premise that each teller creates a unique oral text. Oral sources, according to this new formulation, should not be “flattened by transcription,” with individual voices operating interchangeably. Rather, these sources should be heard with all of the personal, subjective, ambiguous, and contradictory inflections with which they circulate in practice. This emphasis on multiplicity, variability, and subjectivity represents a notable departure from earlier approaches to oral history that privileged “tradition” as a distinctive cultural form and, following a meticulous methodology pioneered by Jan Vansina, sought to sift their stable and verifiable elements from the flux of performances. Perspective and performance, once considered antithetical to the pursuits of professional historians working with oral sources, now occupy a privileged position in the analytical framework.

Recent years have seen the emergence of a lively debate over the nature of “colonial knowledge”—those forms and bodies of knowledge that enabled European colonizers to achieve domination over their colonized subjects around the globe. Lying at the heart of the debate are two opposing evaluations of the role played by colonized subjects in the production of colonial knowledge. One position holds that the role of the colonized was negligible—at most, permitting some of them to serve as passive informants, providing raw information to the active European colonizers who produced the new knowledge by imposing imported modes of knowing upon the raw data of local society. In contrast, the other holds that indigenous intellectuals in reality contributed actively to the process, and that colonial knowledge was thus produced through a complex form of collaboration between colonizers and colonized, and an attendant process of epistemic confrontation and adjustment between European and indigenous knowledge systems. Although this debate has focused primarily on one colonial context—that of British India—it has important ramifications for the broader history of colonialism, and is complemented by contributions relating to other areas of European colonialism (Cooper and Stoler 1997:11–18).

Have women in third-world societies been made second-class citizens by colonialism, incorporation into the capitalist world economy, and class formation? Or are women relegated to less prestigious and less economically rewarding roles by patriarchal ideologies and practices the origins of which lie in indigenous cultures? Much of the anthropological scholarship on women can be divided between those who emphasize the relative importance of capitalism (for example, Leacock 1981; Nash and Fernandez-Kelly 1983; Boserup 1970) and those who emphasize culture (for example, Ortner and Whitehead 1981; Schlegel 1990; Rosaldo 1974) as determinants of gender roles and relations.

This essay is about concepts of time and the past among the Maya Indians of Yucatan in southeastern Mexico. It explores how these concepts fit into the Maya's general view of the way the world works and how they relate to certain dynamics of Maya history—as we define history—during their pre-Hispanic and colonial past. One inspiration has been the often baffling written records the Maya have left, from which we try to quarry historical facts without always enquiring what the records meant to the people who produced them. The other is the reminder, provided by recent historical work from anthropologists, that people do not record their past so much as construct it, with an eye to the present, and at the same time use that past in molding the present.

I have taken my title from the Onomastikon or Word-Book of an Alexandrian Greek of the second century of our era named Julius Pollux. At the end of a longish section (3.73–83) listing, and sometimes exemplifying, the Greek words which meant “slave” or “enslave”, in certain contexts at least, Pollux noted that there were also men like the helots in Sparta or the penestae in Thessaly who stood “between the free men and the slaves”. It is no use pretending that this work is very penetrating or systematic, at least in the abridged form in which it has come down to us, but the foundation was laid in a much earlier work by a very learned scholar, Aristophanes of Byzantium, who flourished in the first half of the third century B.C. The interest in the brief passage I have cited is that it suggests in so pointed a way that social status could be viewed as a continuum or spectrum; that there were statuses which could only be defined, even if very crudely, as “between slavery and freedom”. Customarily Greek and Roman writers were not concerned with such nuances. To be sure, the Romans had a special word for a freedman, libertus, as distinguished from liber, a free man. When it came to political status, furthermore, distinctions of all kinds were made, necessarily so. But for social status (which I trust I may be permitted, at this stage, to distinguish from political status), and often for purposes of private law, they were satisfied with the simple antinomy, slave or free, even though they could hardly have been unaware of certain gradations.

Fishing is commoniy thought of as a man's business. Yet fishing has a special interest for understanding the position of women, both past and present. There is a double reason for this: for the masculine image of the industry conceals the reality of an occupation which, by removing men to sea, makes them peculiarly dependent on the work of women ashore. And this dependence gives women not only more responsibility, but also the possibility of more power, both in the home and in the community. My concern here is therefore with the sexual division both of labour and of power. Of the two issues, the second is considerably more complicated. For while the character of women's work in fishing communities has again and again taken parallel forms in different societies, this is much less true of its consequences for the social position of women.

Reflecting on European colonialism in 1950—at a time when discussions about what we now know as the European Union emerged in western Europe—Aimé Césaire wrote, “… Europe is morally, spiritually indefensible.”2 This idea is fairly commonplace in much of the post-colonial world and it has some purchase within certain academic and intellectual circles elsewhere. And yet, in the process of denouncing the widely noted3 presence of racism in Hungary, thirty-six leading Hungarian intellectuals have, in a recent public document, felt compelled to thank France, and through France, a generic, trans-historical notion of “Europe,” for what they saw as the latter's profound, longue-durée goodness.

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.

The highlands of mainland Southeast Asia have famously been the locus of “Zomia,” polities resistant to control by lowland nation-states, but this relative resilience has been due to their marginality. However, as even remote borderlands connect to the market economies of what has been labeled the “Greater Mekong Subregion,” these semi-independent polities are trying to transform themselves from isolated drug enclaves into regional paragons of economic modernity labeled “Special Economic Zones.” The main actors in this transformation are ethnic Chinese migrant capitalists who embrace the economic rhetoric of mainland China's “growth model” to create respectability and to evoke images of a cosmopolitan future as they build casinos in the rainforest. The zones’ claim to be the vanguard of modernity rests on two mutually contradictory sets of symbols: a mimicry of Chinese state paraphernalia designed to conjure up the efficacy of a strong developmental state, and the discourse of freedom from state control. This article examines the transformation of zones of political and criminal resistance into zones of economic development from a historical perspective of changing practices of sovereignty and shifting understandings of development.

In October of 1899, General George W. Davis of the United States military government in Puerto Rico issued General Order No. 160. By that time, General Davis and his forces had been occupying Puerto Rico for over a year. The war with Spain which had initially brought them to the island was finally over, and they now claimed complete control over the territory. General Order No. 160 thereby called for the establishment of municipal governments in Puerto Rico. It established municipal elections with a restricted suffrage, and empowered the newly-elected officials to carry out various duties, from policing to taxation to basic administration. Of course, the Puerto Ricans already had municipal governments, established by the Spaniards during their three hundred year reign over the island. But General Order No. 160 was supposed to mark something entirely new in that it manned the municipal governments exclusively with elected Puerto Ricans. The idea was that the Puerto Ricans, “for the first time in their history,” should be given an opportunity to manage their own affairs and acquire practical education in modern liberal governance. As General Davis stated, the new municipal governments were to serve as “a sort of kindergarten” in which Puerto Ricans could learn the ways of “popular government,” Anglo-American style.Headquarters Department of Porto Rico (1899a); United States Congress (1904: 222).

People who are not members of the Han Chinese majority and who are officially classified as members of the Yi minzu (“ethnic group”) inhabit many villages within fifty kilometers of the industrial city of Panzhihua (formerly Dukou) at the southernmost point of Sichuan province. These people differ widely from each other in language and other cultural traits and in the nature of their relationship to their non-Yi neighbors. Of three Yi communities studied in the winter of 1988, one is isolated from and culturally distinct from the Han society of its neighbors, and its separate ethnic identity is taken by Yi and Han as a given. given. In another community, Yi and Han live totally intermixed and are culturally identical, and again the separate ethnic identity of the Yi and Han is accepted by all concerned. In the third community, the people classified as Yi are also culturally identical with the Han, though they live separately. Although they are classified as Yi, they do not admit that they belong to the Yi minzu; they insist instead that they are a separate group altogether—the shuitian zu or “rice-field people.” This paper attempts to explain why the nature of ethnic identity is so different in the three Yi communities.

In February 1989, General Alfredo Stroessner, Paraguay's longtime dictator, was deposed in a coup led by one of his top generals. During the first days after the coup, hundreds of rural Paraguayans swept onto unused lands claimed by the state, the Stroessner family and its cronies, and foreign investors, to set up ramshackle huts and clear plots to grow manioc and corn. They were soon followed by thousands more. By mid-1990, observers and representatives of the occupants estimated that roughly 19,000 families had claimed lands totaling over 360,000 hectares.These figures are derived from information provided by several organizations involved with the occupants and from data collected by the Centro de Documentación y Estudios and published in its monthly Informativo Campesino. For more information, see note 4. Most of the occupations occurred in the eastern and northern border departments, a frontier zone that had been rapidly developed for commercial agriculture during the preceding decades. But small farmers and rural workers throughout the nation mobilized to demand direct participation in their new government, more favorable agricultural policies, and restitution for past abuses. For Paraguay, then a nation of only 4.1 million persons, 2.06 million of them rural, this mobilization represented a considerable proportion of the population. Although land occupations were not new to Paraguay, his wave of rural activism was exceptional. Coinciding with Paraguay's first hesitant steps toward democracy, the occupations expressed the hopes of the rural poor for a more democratic rural society and for their own voice in the new political system.

I am extremely fortunate to have discussed issues of hegemony, consciousness, and class transformations with Nan E. Woodruff, who brought Southern and European perspectives to my own Peru-centered understandings. Julie Saville, a scholar of emancipation and reconstruction in the United States, made me aware of the fine points of cultural resistance and taught me not to underestimate its strengths. Jane Collier also taught me much about chiefdoms and their internal tensions. And thanks to the anonymous reviewer for interesting and helpful suggestions. This article was presented in various incarnations at several professional gatherings. I am grateful to have benefited from the insights and criticisms of co-panel members and audience. “Contradictions in Inca Ideologies" was presented at the Sixteenth Annual Meeting of the Canadian Ethnology Society (Montreal, 1984); ‘Politics of Reproduction and Inca Expansion’ was pre- sented at the Annual Meeting of the American Ethnological Society (Wrightsville Beach, 1986); and ‘Politics of Reproduction and the Inca Construction of History’ was presented at the Symposium on Andean and Lowland South American Cosmologies, organized by the University of Chicago (Chicago, 1986). Generous grants from the Doherty Foundation, Wenner Gren Foundation, and Organization of American States allowed me to conduct research on the Incas in Peru from June 1975 to December 1978. I will always be grateful to them for affording me that special opportunity.

The nineteenth century, a time when world history seemed to accelerate, was the epoch of the Risorgimento and the Unification of Germany. It was also an epoch which saw the last efforts of dynastic ancien régime empires (Habsburg, Romanov, Ottoman) to shore up their political systems with methods often borrowed from their adversaries, the nationalist liberals. Eric Hobsbawm's inspiring recent study has pointed out that, in the world after the French Revolution, it was no longer enough for monarchies to claim divine right; additional ideological reinforcement was required: “The need to provide a new, or at least a supplementary, ‘national’ foundation for this institution was felt in states as secure from revolution as George III's Britain and Nicholas I's Russia.”

Ahmed Sa'id was Secretary of his neighborhood NGO and a member of a joint government-NGO committee. He was also a successful owner/operator, or master (‘usta), of a workshop (warsha). He owned a body shop that checked the balance of cars with computerized equipment. He had paid 120,000 LE (about US$ 35,000) for that equipment—produced in Italy to his specifications—with money he had saved as a migrant worker in Germany, Turkey, and Italy. Sa'id's equipment gleamed in the center of his workshop. To the left stood his desk, which attested to the business function of a workshop master, and his special status as Secretary of the NGO. Under the glass of his desk lay a display of the business cards of some of his most valued customers—mainly army officers.

If women's biology is their economic destiny, nowhere is this destiny more inexorable than in anthropological representations of the sexual division of foraging labor. Physically weak, immobilized by nursing children, engrossed in the provisioning of reliable plant foods, redolent with odors that drive away the game, and subject finally to the axiom that specialization everywhere increases productivity, the foraging woman who gathers but does not hunt seems multiply inevitable, the product at once of logistical necessity and evolutionary selection.

Clothing is a bundle of cultural symbols that has been dealt withsomewhat eclectically and indiscriminately in the anthropological wash.Some writers have speculated on the origins of clothing, stressing suchqualities in human nature as modesty and vanity; others, more materiallyoriented, have emphasized utility; others again have listed separategarments, the materials of which they were made, and the techniquesemployed; and some have paid attention to broader historical and sociological dimensions. In a pioneering study, Kroeber used documentary evidence to correlate fluctuations in women's fashions (using indices of skirt length, width of waist, and depth of decolletage) with major social and political upheavals (Kroeber, 1919, 1940), but perhaps because of the nature of his data, as well as his particular orientation, he made no reference to the persons involved, and overlooked internal cultural variations and conflicts of style. These issues received more attention from scholars trained in the Malinowski tradition of fieldwork, and they described clothing worn by different persons in different situations; those who worked in areas where people of different cultures were brought in contact in the colonial situation indicated the meaning of changes in style of clothing over time. General textbooks draw attention to the correlation between clothing and social status and to such facts as the cost of clothing, its technology and its aesthetics.

“Lies, damned lies,” the possibly apocryphal comment of a British political leader on statistics about the unemployment consequences of his economic policy in the 1920s, sums up the impotent, frustrated acceptance of the ubiquitous presence of this tool of modern administration. We have slipped into living with statistics as we have with television or computers, even into accepting the assertions of value-free neutrality of its more brash exponents. The study of statistics is integral to the development of the modern state and modern society. Hence the relative paucity of studies of how statistics became what they are today is somewhat surprising, not least because its history offers insights into so many aspects of modern life, from the self-perception of society to the internal history of the exact and medical sciences, from the relationship between state and citizen to the social implications of the production of knowledge.