MAKING ILLEGIBILITY The great decipherments of defunct writing systems—of the Egyptian hieroglyphics, the cuneiform script of the Sumerians and Akkadians, the Brahmi of Ashoka, Linear B, the Mayan glyphs—have vastly increased the extent of the past accessible to history. Decipherment of lost scripts is a decidedly modern impulse. The ancients showed little inclination to rescue lost scripts or save dying ones; John Leyden wrote (about 1810) of the Romans in Egypt that they did nothing to preserve Egyptian literature, leaving us “nothing but the hieroglyphics as a riddle to perplex future ages, a cipher of which they destroyed the key.” The modernist imperative to decode past scripts has been exercised to great effect since the early nineteenth century, but there has been little scholarly attention to the causes of the extinction of scripts. The opening essay is, as far as we know, the first comparative study of how scripts die.

SLAVERY AND AFTER Slavery and its after-effects continue to shape our world. The first two articles deal with the making of slavery in a world of free trade, and the remaking of labor and citizenship following emancipation.

Anthropology Observed Rejection of the idea of scientific objectivity and deep engagement with the ethics of anthropology are threads of commonality that run through much anthropological writing today, and give anthropology a distinctive place among the social sciences. The first two articles address the tension between objectivity and ethics.

CITIZENS The emergence and spread of the concept of citizenship as the body of persons making up the membership of a state and enjoying uniform political status, and the incompletenesses of its actualizations, forms an especially productive terrain for scholarship just now, as may be seen in the first two essays.

Inequality is a fundamental reality of the modern world-system as it has been of every known historical system. What is different, what is particular to historical capitalism, is that equality has been proclaimed as its objective, and indeed as its achievement—equality in the marketplace, equality before the law, the fundamental social equality of all individuals endowed with equal rights. The great political question of the modern world, the great cultural question, has been how to reconcile the theoretical embrace of equality with the continuing and increasingly acute polarization of real-life opportunities and satisfactions that has been its outcome.

Planter, statesman, and economic reformer Francisco Arango y Parreño (1765–1837) was the spokesman for Havana's emergent planter elite and was also among the major architects of Cuba's sugar boom during the first half of the nineteenth century. In 1792, in the midst of the slave insurrection in Saint Domingue, Arango, Apoderado General of the Havana ayuntamiento, addressed a series of memorials to the Spanish Crown culminating in Discurso sobre la Agricultura de la Habana y Medios de Fomentarla (Arango 1793a:114–75). These documents at once articulated the interests of the Havana planter class and formulated Arango's program for the transformation of Cuban economic life. Widely regarded as key texts of Cuban history, they provided the theoretical framework for the development of Cuba into the world's leading sugar producer from the 1820s into the twentieth century. At the same time, they express the creation of new zones of slave production as part of the political and economic restructuring of the world economy that I have elsewhere called the “second slavery” (Tomich 1988). An examination of these works thus calls attention to the continual re-formation of slavery and other forms of compulsory labor as part of the historical development of the capitalist world economy and to the ways that highly specific local actions at once shape and are shaped by global processes.

By any measure, the creation and development of writing was a cybernetic advance with far-reaching consequences. It allowed writers to communicate with readers who were distant in time and space, extended the storage capacity of human knowledge, including information that ranged from mundane accounting to sacred narrative, bridged visual and auditory worlds by linking icons with meaningful sound, and offered an enduring means of displaying and manipulating assertions about a wide variety of matters.Broader definitions of writing that embrace purely semantic devices (semasiography, Sampson 1985:29) relate to ancient systems of communication, especially “Mexican pictography” (Boone 2000:29), but depart from the linguistic underpinnings that characterize the writing systems reviewed here. Semasiographic definitions are not very helpful in understanding heavily phonic systems. Their limited applicability to writing systems of the world identifies a typological weakness; even the Mexican examples are inconclusive, since these texts bundle genuine lexical items with supporting graphic devices. An alternative view is that the mixed Mexican pictography contains writing, yet supplements it with effective pictorial clues. From this comes a narrative that is translatable, with some controlled liberties, into language. Equating this distinctive package of features with the preponderantly phonic nature of Egyptian, cuneiform, or Mayan glyphs blurs distinctions. A broad definition of writing does not elucidate these scripts, although it is useful for understanding the relation of texts and accompanying images (Baines 1989; Taube 2000). In part, the first writing attracts attention because it contributes to a teleological narrative of progress (Trigger 1998: 42). The invention of writing is thought, with good justification, to undergird and enable present-day society. In its more developed forms, it is indispensable to bureaucracy, propaganda, and administration.

If there is anything that exemplifies a certain common style in ethnographically-oriented approaches to culture and society today, and sets them apart from other kinds of social science, it is the habit, irritating to colleagues in some other disciplines, frustrating to students, deemed perverse by potential funders, and bewildering to the public, of responding to explanations with the remark, “We need to complicate the story.” The words “reductionist” and “essentializing” are brandished with scorn. One important perspective is expressed by this remark by Jean and John Comaroff, two influential anthropologists with solid roots in longterm fieldwork, the sobriety of British social anthropology, and the tough-minded realism of the Marxist tradition: ethnography “refuses to put its trust in techniques that give more scientific methods their illusory objectivity: their commitment to standardized, a priori units of analysis, for example, or their reliance on a depersonalizing gaze that separates subject from object” (1992:8). These words, offered almost in passing, take a host of important arguments as settled. One is that it is no longer in much dispute that cultural anthropology is not merely at an “immature” stage, en route to something more akin to natural science. Most significant, perhaps, is the assumption that the separation of subject from object can be understood only in negative terms, that to say that a field of knowledge “depersonalizes” is ipso facto to discredit it. Yet in their own ethnographic and historical work the Comaroffs take their empirical materials very seriously and do not wholly reject the separation of subject from object—how could they? What is at issue, rather, is what kinds of “objects” and “subjects,” and what categories of analysis and comparison, are epistemologically appropriate and ethically legitimate for the study of social actions and self-understandings.

Four important new books, two by established scholars, two by recent Ph.D.s, cast significant new light on a watershed in modern history—the transition from slave to free labor. In different ways, these works all probe how and why the transition occurred, what consequences it had for slaves and postemancipation societies more broadly, and what freedom would come to mean in the modern age. Three of the books focus on the creation of new labor regimes following emancipation in areas of capitalist investment and production far from the centers of the capitalist order. They show how ideas about work and other aspects of culture developed at the center were inscribed onto colonized and other marginal peoples, and how the resistance of such peoples prompted a reformulation of metropolitan thinking about race that justified denying former slaves and many other workers basic rights of citizenship, in the interest of teaching them civilized values. The books reviewed here all illuminate in provocative new ways discourses about work and freedom, race and citizenship, colonialism and nationalism, and gender and domesticity—among the most fundamental problems of the modern era.

This essay uses a discussion of three recent events in Yemen to dramatize the relationship between state power and the experience of citizenship in the aftermath of national unification in 1990.My analysis depends on readers understanding the differences I am registering among the terms “state,” “nation,” and “regime.” By “state” I mean a common set of institutions capable of distributing goods and services and controlling violence within a demarcated, internationally recognized territory. By “nation” I refer to a shared sense of belonging simultaneously with anonymous others to an imagined community. By “regime” I mean the political order of a particular leader or administration. For example, we tend to say “the regime of עAli עAbd Allah Salih,” but not “the state of עAli עAbd Allah Salih.” The first event is a “direct,” purportedly competitive presidential election on 23 September 1999, the first since unification and unprecedented in the histories of the former countries of North and South Yemen. The second is the celebration of the tenth anniversary of national unification on 22 May 2000, including the extraordinary preparations leading up to the event. The third is the public sensation following the arrest and prosecution of a man touted as Yemen's first bona fide “serial killer,” which occurred during the lead-up to the decennial celebration.

On 14 September 1908, at the Sixteenth International Congress of Americanists in Vienna, Alberto Vojtěch FričAlberto Vojtěch Frič used several variations of his name in his publications and correspondence, including Alberto Frič, Albert Frič, Adalbert Frič, and Vojtěch Frič. who had been sent to Brazil in 1906 to collect ethnographica for German museums, threw the otherwise orderly scientific proceedings into turmoil. During his presentation on the Bugres Indians of South America, Frič denounced the brutal treatment of the Kaingáng and Xokléng tribes at the hands of German colonists in the states of Santa Catarina and Paraná in southern Brazil. He complained to the Americanists that slavery, wide-spread murder, and bands of “human-hunters” could not only be found in the “independent states of the Congo”: “such acts and much worse” were being financed by German colonists living in the “civilized states of Brazil.” Frič revealed that German settlers were hiring paid killers to eradicate entire tribes of Indians and permitting the sale and clandestine enslavement of their children. He also protested that the Brazilian government was turning a blind eye to these atrocities, and he demanded that the congress act jointly to put an end to the violence.A. Frič, “Völkerwanderung, Ethnographie und Geschichte der Konquista in Südbrasilien,” in Verhandlungen des XVI Internationalen Amerikanisten-Kongresses (Wien, 1909), 63–67.

This paper was prompted by a personal question that has puzzled many former Soviet people, myself included, since the late 1980s: How to make sense of the sudden evaporation of the colossal and seemingly monolithic Soviet system and way of life, in which we grew up and lived? What was it about the Soviet system that made its “collapse” appear completely unimaginable and surprisingly fast not only to most Western Sovietologists but also to most Soviet people? The experience of the unexpectedness and abruptness of the collapse is reflected in diverse materials I have collected in Russia in the past ten years. This question is not about the “causes” for the collapse but about its “conditions of possibility”: what conditions made the collapse possible while keeping that possibility invisible? To begin addressing this question, we must analyze how the particular “culture” of Soviet socialism invisibly created the conditions for the collapse and at the same time rendered it unexpected. The period when these conditions emerged, the approximately thirty years preceding the beginning of perestroika (the mid-1950s to the mid-1980s), I shall call Soviet “Late Socialism.”

What do you think you would find on the desk of a censor? He—almost certainly “he”—would not need much. A jar filled with blue pencils. A coffee cup. A phone for whispering praise to the higher-ups and for ignoring the entreaties of his victims. For reading material, an ideological reference manual or a dog-eared sheaf of instructions would suffice. Surely, one would not expect to find any actual books on the censor's shelves—why read when your life is committed to eviscerating literature?

The object of this article is to explore a familiar paradox of folklore studies: the promotion of powerfully localist readings in the service of an inclusive national entity. In the logic of European nationalism, this might seem an irresolvable paradox. The object of the nation-state is to unify all potentially divergent cultural and social entities within a single framework, so that localist sentiment ceases to represent the threat of political separatism. In some nation-states, the most harmonious symbiosis of localism with nationalism appears in those regions that are stereotypically regarded as culturally and politically marginal and are consequently subjected to the double-edged opprobrium of being both “simple” and yet also corrupted by a vast range of allegedly foreign elements both culturally and “racially.” A study of these tension-laden matters must dodge among several levels in order to go beyond the limitations both of purely local ethnography and of national-level historiography. If the former too easily occludes the effects of larger events on local perceptions, the latter can, and often does, fail to account for the success of nationalist ideologies in securing loyalty unto death even—or perhaps especially?—from populations that are notoriously unwilling to accept state rule in more mundane matters of law and order.

As in the vast majority of socialist states that arose with the Soviet Union's post-World War II hegemony over Eastern Europe, People's Republic of Romania nationalized (confiscated) a large number of privately owned houses. The declared intention of the state was to eliminate housing inequality and the private rental sector in urban areas. In 1950, the state appropriated both leased and family homes that were considered to have too much domestic space. The inhabitants of confiscated houses became tenants instead of owners. Tenants were made to live with the former owners in such expropriated domestic space. With the collapse of state socialism in 1989, former owners and their descendants began seeking to regain the property rights for these confiscated houses. In a limited number of cases they succeeded, although the majority of houses had been sold by the state to the sitting tenants at very low prices.

A polarization has emerged in the field of colonial studies. On the one hand, many writers describe colonialism as a direct, inexorable product of Orientalist or precolonial racial discourse and pay little attention to “social” phenomena such as capitalism, the state, and social class. Other analysts assume that cultural discourse is the product of supposedly more foundational economic or material factors. Historians in the second group explain colonial policies in terms of imperialist economic and political interests, strategies of resistance and collaboration among the colonized, precolonial social structures in the periphery, or other “quasi-objective” phenomena. Both schools tend to ignore the role of properly psychic processes in the constitution of colonial regimes, although this has been the focus of Homi Bhabha's psychoanalytic interventions in (post)colonial theory (1994). The lack of integration of materialist, culturalist, and psychoanalytic approaches in the colonial literature echoes broader oppositions that structure the human sciences today.The essays in Steinmetz (1999) exemplify some attempts to overcome the artificial separation between culturalism and materialism in studies of the state. Landmark theoretical interventions that reintegrate the social and cultural levels include Bourdieu (1977), Bhaskar (1979), and Laclau and Mouffe (1985). The need for a reintegration of the psychic into social theory has been argued forcefully by Zizek (1989, 1991) and Elliott (2000).

The current intellectual climate is marked by a dual retreat, faltering and uneven, from the excesses of neo-liberalism and postmodernism. First, the idea that the world is, and should be made as far as possible, like a perfect market, virtualism for Carrier and Miller (1998), is losing ground, giving way to an understanding organized around the more-or-less pervasive presence and influence of market imperfections and the need for the non-market to correct them. Second, obsessive interpretative and relativist deconstruction of the world associated with the cultural turn across the social sciences is increasingly conceding to a renewal of interest in material culture—how reality is both construed and created. Over the past decade, the extraordinary rise to prominence of two concepts in particular has symbolized these developments. In the lead, serving as a filter for a highly diverse range of approaches and topics, is globalization.For brief overview, see Fine (2002a, ch. 2; 2002b). Close behind in timing, weight, and scope is social capital, the counterpart in most respects to globalization at the national or lower levels of community.See Fine (2001) for a comprehensive and critical account.

The following lesson on pepper appeared in the third edition of Elizabeth Mayo's Lessons on Objects (1832): “Lesson I. Pepper. Qualities of Pepper. It is hard, vegetable, foreign. It is a tropical production, wrinkled, spherical, rough, black, conservative, dry, dull. It is sapid, pungent, odorous, aromatic, medicinal, wholesome, useful, stimulating.Elizabeth Mayo, Lessons on Objects, as Given to Children Between the Ages of Five and Eight, in a Pestalozzian School, At Cheam,, Surrey, 3d ed. (London: R. B. Seeley and W. Burnside, 1832), 68.

The Ottoman Empire was the last great Muslim world empire to survive into the age of modernity. The Ottoman state, together with its contemporaries, Habsburg Austria and Romanov Russia, was engaged in a struggle for survival in a world where it no longer made the rules. As the nineteenth century approached its last quarter, these rules were increasingly determined by the successful and aggressive world powers, Britain, France, and after 1870, Germany. As external pressure on the ottoman Empire mounted from the second half of the century, the Ottoman center found itself obliged to squeeze manpower resources it had hitherto not tapped. Particularly nomadic populations, armed and already possessing the military skills required, now became a primary target for mobilization. This study is an attempt to come to grips with the “civilizing mission” mentality of the late Ottomans and their “project of modernity” as reflected in their provincial administration. It is the view of this writer that sometime in the nineteenth century the Ottoman elite adopted the mindset of their enemies, the arch-imperialists, and came to conceive of its periphery as a colonial setting.My definition of colonialism here closely follows the Leninist position as in “Imperialism the Highest Stage of Capitalism.” In my view, this is still one of the best and most succinct definitions of imperialism. After showing how the partition of the word accelerated in the 1880s, Lenin concludes, “It is beyond doubt therefore, that capitalism's transition to the stage of monopoly capitalism, to finance capital, isconnected with the intensification of the struggle for the partitioning of the world.” V. Lenin, Selected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers 1977), 224.

This article pursues conjectures raised in the conclusions of an earlier essay (Parkes 2001), where I suggested that Eugene Hammel's (1968) classic analysis of Serbian godparenthood might be extended to other kinds of constructed kinship attested in the historical ethnography of Europe and Asia. Hammel's notion of alternative social structures—configurations of mutually exclusive ties of patrilineal descent, affinal alliance, and godparenthood—was shown to apply to an analogous complex of descent, alliance, and fosterage or “milk kinship” in former mountain kingdoms of northern Pakistan. Milk kinship relations between descent lines established through infant fosterage constituted a similar system of unilateral ties of alliance between status groups. Indeed, fosterage in the Hindu Kush was a recognized institution of dynastic allegiance, tying all offspring of princely rulers to subordinate nobility, and thence interlinking successive status levels so as to form enchained factions of partisans, opposed as warring parties in the notorious succession disputes of these mountain kingdoms. In effect, milk kinship chains through fosterage comprised a structural analogue of asymmetric affinal alliance—whereby the transitive circulation of children replaced that of spouses interlinking descent lines of different status levels—just as did Serbian transactions of spiritual sponsorship according to Hammel.