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.

The most important advance in the understanding of ethnic and national identity has surely been the realization of its deeply relational nature. A nation or ethnic group is not a self-defined monad of some kind, but exists in and through its interactions with others (Duara 1996; Eriksen 1993:9–12, 111; Schwartz 1975:107–8).

The international campaign to control human fertility has inspired a vast inter-disciplinary literature, but only in recent years has it become a subject for historical study and debate. New archives have opened, especially among the largest donors during its early, heroic phase. And scientists and activists are increasingly willing to be reflexive about their lives' work. Most importantly, with rates of fertility declining in every region of the world, it is now possible to begin to see the end of the story. As the period of unprecedented growth in world population draws to a close, international efforts directed at limiting that growth—as opposed to safeguarding reproductive rights and health—will inexorably pass from the domain of policy to history.This distinction suggests the nature and limits of the term “population control,” which is itself fast becoming a historical artifact. As will be discussed anon, while it now denotes a shrinking subset of the “family planning” agenda, population control can be seen as encompassing the once wide-ranging efforts to shape the quality as well as the quantity of population. On this point see also Dennis Hodgson and Susan Cotts Watkins, “Feminists and Neo-Malthusians: Past and Present Alliances,” Population and Development Review 23 (1997):471. The latest U.N. projections are presented in “World Population Prospects: The 2000 Revision,” http://www.un.org/esa/population/wpp2000.html.

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).

A generation ago, alert historians jolted the field of witchcraft studies by calling attention to the fact that it was women in particular who burned on the pyres of the European witch trials. Amazingly enough, earlier historians had overlooked, or at least underplayed that particular skew in the record. Now the idea of witch-hunts as a “women's holocaust” is old hat, and in fact, has made one of those rare successful crossovers into popular culture. Historical approaches never stay still, however, and recent publications have reoriented the discussion yet again. A spate of new interpretations, particularly by Stuart Clark and Robin Briggs, push gender off the center of the screen, arguing that other factors were equally or more important in shaping accusations. Other works muddy the waters by noting the many places, particularly in the Baltic and Scandinavia, but also pockets within Western Europe, where men, not women, comprised a large fraction or even the majority of the accused.Evidence of male witches in Estonia, Finland, and Iceland is found in Maia Madar, “Estonia I: Werewolves and Poisoners,” in Early Modern European Witchcraft: Centres and Peripheries, Bengt Ankarloo and Gustav Henningsen, eds. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 257–72; Juhan Kahak, “Estonia II: The Crusade against Idolatry,” in ibid., 273–84; Antero Heikkinen and Timo Kervinen, “Finland: The Male Domination,” in ibid., 319–38; Kirsten Hastrup, “Iceland: Sorcerers and Paganism,” in ibid., 383–401; Marko Nenonen, ‘”Envious are all the People, Witches Watch at Every Gate”: Finnish Witches and Witch Trials in the 17th Century,' Scandinavian Journal of History 18 (1993):77–91. In Western Europe, regions that produced larger trials generally included higher percentages of males among the accused. See E. William Monter, Witchcraft in France and Switzerland: The Borderlands during the Reformation (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1976); H. C. Erik Midelfort, Witch-Hunting in Southwestern Germany, 1562–1684: The Social and Intellectual Foundations (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1972). In the heart of Europe, France also offers some exceptionally high representation of males in particular jurisdictions, although not uniformly throughout the country. Alfred Soman finds that over half of the 1,300 defendants who appealed witchcraft convictions before the Parlement of Paris were male. Alfred Soman, “Les Procès de sorcellerie au Parlement de Paris (1565–1640),” Annales 32 (1977):790–814; and “La Sorcellerie vue du Parlement de Paris au début du XVII<+>e siècle,” Actes du 104<+>e congrès national des sociétés savantes, Bordeaux, 1979, Section d'histoire moderne et contemporaine (Paris, 1981); and Sorcellerie et justice criminelle (16e–18e siècles) (London, 1992), 798–99. William Monter finds an extraordinary pocket of male witches in Normandy. “Here, in the Pays de Caux, lay the epicenter of male witchcraft in Western Europe.” W. Monter, “Toads and Eucharists: The Male Witches of Normandy, 1564–1660,” French Historical Studies 20 (1997):563–95, quote on 581. Other discussions of the involvement of men in witchcraft trials include Eva Labouvie, “Männer im Hexenprozess. Zur Sozialanthropologie eines ‘männlichen' Verstädnisses vom Magie und Hexerei,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 16 (1990):56–78; Robert W. Thurston, Witch, Wicce, Mother Goose: The Rise and Fall of the Witch Hunts in Europe and North America (London: Longman, 2001), 126–27.On Russia's male witches, see Russell Zguta, “Witchcraft Trials in Seventeenth-Century Russia,” American Historical Review 82 (1977):1187–207; Valerie Kivelson, “Through the Prism of Witchcraft: Gender and Social Change in Seventeenth-Century Muscovy,” in Russia's Women: Accommodation, Resistance, Transformation, Barbara Evans Clements, Barbara Alpern Engel, and Christine D. Worobec, eds. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991); A. S. Lavrov, Koldovstvo i religiia v Rossii, 1700–1740 gg. (Moscow: Drevlekhranilishche, 2000); E. B. Smilianskaia, Koldun i ved'ma v kontekste russkoi kul'tury XVIII veka (Moscow: ROO “Sodeistvie sotrudnichestvu Instituta imeni Dzh. Kennana,” 2000); “Sudebno-sledstvennye dokumenty kak istochnik po istorii obshchestvennogo soznaniia (iz opyta izucheniia “dukhovnykh del” pervoi poloviny XVIII v.),” in Issledovaniia po istorii knizhnoi i traditsionnoi narodnoi kul'tury Severa (Sytyvkar, 1997), 168–75; and her forthcoming book, Volshebniki, bogokhul'niki, eretiki. Narodnaia religioznost' i dukhovnye prestupleniia v Rossii XVIII veka (Moscow: Indrik, 2002). W. F. Ryan also acknowledges some gender imbalance among those accused in Russia, in, “The Witchcraft Hysteria in Early Modern Europe: Was Russia an Exception?” Slavonic and East European Review 76 (1998):49–84. Still, little systematic work has appeared that seriously attempts to sort out why in some areas people believed that, “particularly through the agency of woman are infernal enchantments brought to pass,” and elsewhere men became the more common targets of accusation.The quote is taken from an early Russian text, but the presence of this textual tradition did not prevent later Muscovites from accusing primarily male witches. The Russian Primary Chronicle: Laurentian Text, Samuel Hazzard Cross and Olgerd P. Sherbowitz-Wetzor, trans and ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: The Medieval Academy of America, 1973), entry for the year 1071, p. 153.

The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals Darwin makes brief reference to a “curious document” obtained from a South African man whom he described as the brother of a prominent chief (1965 [1872]:22). This document was received, not during the brief stop made by the Beagle at the Cape in 1836, but thirty-two years later as a written response to a questionnaire about emotion that Darwin had sent by post to various institutions and associates around the globe. He suggests that he found this response most interesting because it was the only one to come directly from a “native,” and was even more amazing in having come from the hand of one able to write down his own responses. It was from a man who referred to himself as “Christian Gaika, brother of Chief Sandilli.”

An important part of the by now enormous literature on nationalism has focused on its conditions of possibility, on what we may call the processes of pre-formation that underlay the explosive rise of those “imagined communities” in the modern era. How indeed has modernity (however defined) impacted on the mechanisms by which identities—including national ones—are formed, felt and enacted? This question has frequently been addressed in recent decades, especially as studies of nationalism have broadened their ambit to take in the non-Western world. This expansion has certainly generated major works—most famously, of course, the first edition (1983) of Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities which made the stimulating suggestion that print capitalism was a central pre-formative institution for incipient nations.

In the summer of 1996, when French policemen stormed Paris' Eglise Saint-Bernard, evicting dozens of African immigrants and activists who had taken refuge in the church, people in both France and West Africa surged with anger. Many of those immigrants had lived in France for years, often with an ambiguous legal and bureaucratic status (hence their moniker sans-papiers, those without papers), and they had occupied the church in order to demand the regularization of their status.The sans-papiers' story is complex; see Balibar et al. (1999), Dubois (2000), Fassin et al. (1997), Goussault (1999), Rosello (1998), and Siméant (1998). Each of the leading spokespersons has written a memoir (Cissé 1999; Diop 1997; Sané 1996). My analysis most closely resembles that of Dubois. However, while his interest lies in the implications of the “culturalist” stance within the sans-papiers movement and in the colonial origins of universalism, I am pursuing the deployment of a particular argument materially grounded in the colonial period. Mine is also the only study of which I am aware that analyzes how the dispute was understood in the immigrants' countries of origin. West African, French, and international protests of the high-handed and violent government action called on both universal and particular arguments to support the rights of the sans-papiers. Editorialists lambasted the French government for disregarding the “Rights of Man” and for forgetting the sacrifices of West African soldiers—the tirailleurs Sénégalais—in the defense of France.The point had already been made by Konaté: “Everything has its price, including having been the country of the Enlightenment and a colonial power” (1994).

The struggle to control nature takes many forms. In the State of Maine, one current struggle for control has been focused on declining stocks of Atlantic salmon. The varied participants in the debates and struggles over Atlantic salmon include federal and state governments and many of their bureaucracies, large international timber corporations, small local businesses, salmon farmers, dam owners, blueberry growers, commercial fishers, recreational fishers, scientists, and a raft of environmental organizations. In different ways, these participants all have a stake in the fate of Atlantic salmon, but they do not have the same power to effect ecological change or to define the debate in terms most favorable to their wishes.The primary sources on the debate include, “Review of the Status of Anadromous Atlantic Salmon (Salmo salar) under the U.S. Endangered Species Act,” 60 Federal Register 50530 (July 1999); “Proposed Endangered Status for a Distinct Population Segment of Anadromous Atlantic Salmon (Salmo salar) in the Gulf of Maine,” 64 Federal Register 62627 (17 Nov. 1999); “Comments of the Maine Salmon Rescue Coalition in Opposition to the Proposal to List Atlantic Salmon as Endangered Under the Endangered Species Act” (12 Apr. 2000); and “Comments of the State of Maine in Opposition to Proposed Endangered Status for a Distinct Population Segment (DPS) of Atlantic Salmon in the Gulf of Maine, 64 Federal Register 62627 (November 17, 1999),” (14 Apr. 2000). The published and unpublished documents concerning the endangered species listing have been collected by the Services, and are available for inspection at the National Marine Fisheries Service, Gloucester, Massachusetts, and at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Hadley, Massachusetts.

In Morocco, as in every other developing country, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and Western governments have pushed for liberalization of the financial sector, efficiency and transparency in state management and corporate governance, independent functioning and monitoring of the judicial system, reduction in poverty and illiteracy rates, and greater labor market flexibility—namely less of a ‘work tax' on employers. Uniform and universal in their nature, these policies of market reform in principle fortify the boundaries of a monolithic global economic structure.

African studies, at least in its northern versions, has historically been about mediating Africa to the rest of the world. Those of us who teach in the United States are still stalked by battles from the 1960s about whether or not the study of Africa is intellectually viable; many of us claim that the real struggle is against stereotypes and correcting racist myths about Africa. Indeed, the syllabus for my undergraduate African history survey has in its introduction a few lines about how the stereotypes about nineteenth-century Africa—tribal warfare, superstition, poverty and disease—have hindered our ability to understand Africa's past and present. In their research, scholars have grappled—in varying degrees of course—with the question of how to represent Africa, and how to translate experience there to the rest of the world. Over the last forty years, this has meant some impressive apologies for repressive regimes and some imaginative accounts of social and economic conditions. If only one looked closely enough, many argued, one could see civil society/creative outpourings/new social arrangements emerging amidst growing poverty and disappointment. Such statements are anything but cynical, however: they are as much a part of the struggle against the older stereotypes as my upper division survey course claims to be. We are wary of showing an Africa that others might think awash with odd beliefs, or the site of meaningless violence, or as having politics that are more corrupt than consensual. Besides, what we study in Africa has been the subject of much criticism within the field, and many scholars also struggle against claims that we are exoticizing Africa, or, as in a famous critique of a Rhodes-Livingstone Institute anthropologist (see Ferguson, 28–29), that we study what is irrelevant to African lives—like leisure—instead of the colonial oppression under which Africans toiled. Many scholars have taken this critique quite seriously, and have approached the study of African songs, gossip, and sexuality with some defensiveness; others have focused on colonialism and its myriad evils to the point that independent Africa (i.e., the last thirty to forty years) is rarely an object of study in and of itself, but instead is the direct result of colonialism (i.e., the colonial legacy). The result has been at best linear, and at worst paternalistic. How Africans understand their own contemporary dilemmas has rarely been an object of enquiry.

If in the 1970s modernization theorists predicted the demise of paid domestic work, developments during the last two decades have proven them wrong. Both in the North and in the South the number of those engaged in paid domestic work has grown rapidly. In some cases, like China and India, intra-state migration is predominant. Elsewhere, in the United States, Canada, and Western-Europe, as well as in growth areas such as the Gulf States, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, and Malaysia, the presence of large numbers of migrant domestic workers from abroad has been particularly striking. In fact, in a number of cases the growth of domestic labor as a field of employment has led to the feminization of outmigration. By the late 1990s, there were between 1.3 and 1.5 million Asian women working in the Middle East. Whereas in the 1970s women formed about 15 percent of the migrant labor force, in the mid-1990s almost 60 percent of the Filipino migrant labor force was female, and women constituted approximately 80 percent of the Sri Lankan and the Indonesian migrant labor force (Gamburd 2000:35).

Working ethnographers know that cultural contradictions often hide in plain sight. We may represent such contradictions in our monographs as deep, dark secrets it has taken an expert to unveil, but such nods to the demands of academic theatre tend to violate the sense in which they are very much visible on the surface of daily life. Argyrou's argument focuses on one such contradiction in the culture of anthropology itself: quite obviously, anthropologists both make a living out of claiming that cultures and people shaped by cultures are different from one another while at the same time attacking those who propound racist and ethnocentric arguments by asserting that at bottom people and cultures are in the most important respects all the same. The burden of Argyrou's short, impressively well-argued monograph is to show that this contradiction is present in all versions of anthropology (Victorian, modern, post-modern) and that it dooms the discipline to a kind of incoherence, at least in theoretical and political terms, if not ethnographic ones.

The parts of a machine are elastic, indeed, flexible. But does this mean that there really isn't any mechanism at all, since the parts of the machine function as if made of butter? (And now think of a mechanism, say clock-works, made of materials which are far more flexible still than ours, so that the movements would be strangely irregular—would a mechanism like that have to be useless, or couldn't it actually be used?) —Wittgenstein, Last WritingsLudwig Wittgenstein. 1990. Last Writings of the Philosophy of Psychology. Vol. I. Preliminary Studies for Part II of Philosophical Investigation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), I, §878:112–13.

As demonstrated by the above lyrics, the Shakers (known officially as the “United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing”) were not favorably disposed toward the bonds of marriage, family, and kinship. Started as a Quaker splinter group under the charismatic leadership of Ann Lee in Manchester, they emigrated to the United States, gathered further adherents there, and became a communal sect in 1787. Within the next sixty years, they grew to more than 4,000 members in sixteen villages in New England and the Midwest.Stein 1992:87–89. True to their view of God as androgynous, and their founder as the female equivalent of Jesus Christ, women had a comparatively strong position in the sect, and there were equal numbers of male and female office holders on all hierarchy levels.The question of how much gender equality existed among the Shakers is subject to some debate. The division of labor as well as many gender stereotypes remained conventional (Brewer 1992), and after the death of the initial leaders Ann Lee and Lucy Wright, male members dominated the leadership (Stein 1992:132–33, Brewer 1986:51) until they became a small minority in the later years (Stein 1992:339). Brewer concludes that true gender equality was not achieved, nor even aimed at (1992). Compared to their female contemporaries, however, “Shakeresses” were able to keep their private lives free from male interference to a considerable degree (Humez 1991). Besides, male Shaker complaints about “pettycoat government” do not only suggest a patriarchal striving for power, as Humez argues (1991), but also the imperfect realization of these tendencies. Female Shakers also made important contributions to the early women's rights movement (Stein 1992:258–68, 310–12). Genders, however, were strictly separated, and celibacy was obligatory in the “gospel relations” between members.Brewer 1986; Stein 1992.

The distinction between state and civil society is deeply rooted in both sociology and political theory (Barkey and Parikh 1991:525; Bobbio 1999:115; Habermas 1989:19). Even thinkers who argue that civil society and the state ‘interact' often retain the basic conceptual opposition between the terms. Barkey and Parikh go so far as to characterize recent work on the state as “the state-society literature” (1991:524). Within sociology, however, there is less theoretical discussion of what connects state and society—political society—or the way that interests in civil society are constituted as claims on the state. But as the Sardinian Marxist Antonio Gramsci pointed out in his Prison Notebooks, and the German sociologist Max Weber is his essay on class, status and parties, political society is reducible neither to interests in civil society, nor to the state (Gramsci 1971:138–40; Weber 1946:194; see also Poulantzas 1976: 95; Przeworski 1985:67; Stepan-Norris and Zeitlin 1991:1153; Wright 1978: 103, 222).

“What makes a certain people a ‘diaspora?’” and “Where is the homeland?” are principal questions Axel asks in The Nation's Tortured Body. Axel chronicles the formation of Sikh communities and the fight for Khalistan, an autonomous Sikh nation, and questions whether sharp distinctions can be made between diasporas and homelands. In fact, he argues, the limitations of some contemporary scholarship theorizing diasporas has been the tendency to treat the homeland as a point of origin. Such work is flawed, he asserts, because the paradigm in which it operates requires one to reduce the diaspora to that which is inauthentic, a replica. Challenging this logic, Axel inverts the paradigm and asserts that it is through the diaspora that the homeland is constituted. In this regard, he restores a sense of motion to theorizing the circulation of ideas, information, and, yes, bodies between diasporas and homelands. Yet, despite his criticism, Axel firmly insists that there are limitations to questioning the categories diaspora and homeland. In this way, Axel attempts to distance his work from scholars who have argued that homelands and diasporas are “imaginary”—work that he argues has resulted in an odd spatiotemporal duality, wherein the homeland is understood to be a lost relic of a past time, and the diaspora a present configuration—while also disputing the utility of constructing such firm distinctions.

The subtitle of this book refers to Bangalore, “India's High-Tech City.” Today, Bangalore is indeed best known as a kind of Silicon Valley in India. The author, however, has been ill-advised to put this in the title, since her book hardly touches on that central feature of contemporary Bangalore. Instead it offers a conventional historical account of the Karaga ritual and its performers, the Vahnikula Kshatriyas, a traditional caste of gardeners. The Karaga ritual is an annual performance, featuring an earthen pot carried by a priest. Priest and pot together are seen as a manifestation of the female power (shakti) of Draupadi, one of the main characters of the Mahabharata. The performance belongs to the Karnataka ‘jatre' genre and shares features with other Goddess cults in the region. A special and interesting element is the association of the Karaga performance with a Sufi Saint Cult in Bangalore. The procession of the Karaga can only continue past the Sufi shrine after paying respect to the Saint. Unfortunately, the author does not attempt to analyze this in connection with the growing communal tensions between Muslims and Hindus, even in the South of India. The Vahnikula Kshatriyas are seen as part of a larger community, called Tigala. As a result of the political gains of the backward class movement in Karnataka they claim the status of backward tribe. The author describes in detail the formation of a caste association of the Tigala, a political alliance of several communities.

This volume of essays on the history of ethnographic collecting in Melanesia should open up debates about the agency of indigenous people in the process of collecting for European museums during the height of empire. It should also add more fire to the often spirited discussions about the repatriation of objects from these institutions. Although in his introduction O'Hanlon approaches the question of repatriation gingerly, the essays in this volume have provided him with the material to critique some of the assumptions behind contemporary arguments in its favor. As O'Hanlon stresses, and Nicholas Thomas revisits in his brief epilog, so much of the scholarship produced on colonialism during the last four decades has been focused on qualifying the ways in which colonial relations were relations of dominance. This focus has become almost tautological, so that scholars and others interested in ethnographic artifacts collected during the colonial era have tended to identify them a priori with dispossession. This, O'Hanlon argues, has left little room for considering the agency of non-Europeans in the world-wide networks of exchange that touched Melanesia (or other places) during the age of empire. It has also radically curtailed our appreciation of the kinds of ethnographic work that can be pursued in museums. This volume is meant to correct that imbalance by throwing into question the “unidimensional popular stereotype of dispossession and cultural obliteration” (3) associated with collecting. It encourages us to rethink some aspects of colonial encounters, the history of metropolitan museums, the history of anthropology and, by implication, the politics of repatriation.

Prior to anti-globalization demonstrations in places like Seattle and Prague, the Ejercito Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (Zapatista Army for National Liberation, EZLN), better known as the Zapatistas, became a leader in the struggle against neoliberal economic policies and a model for peaceful change in the twenty-first-century. June Nash's erudite book Mayan Visions: The Quest for Autonomy in an Age of Globalization provides a local ethnographic analysis of the “fissuring and fusing” of the Zapatistas in the context of national and international influences. For example, female Zapatistas, who comprise 40 percent of the EZLN, are not only fighting for national and international autonomy but also for female representation and power in their local patriarchal indigenous communities. These women do not see indigenous rights and women's rights as mutually exclusive; they strive to change the world more radically than most of their male counterparts and in so doing they display how revolutionary movements can simultaneously be agents of change and subjects of reform. Nash adeptly argues that “indigenous peoples will become the chief protagonists of change in the coming millennium” (26) partly because they articulate a plausible alternative to neoliberalism (based on the right of self-determination, moral authority as a means to power, collective strategies for survival, and multiethnic and nonhierarchical worldviews). In fact, the Zapatistas are already changing the face of civil society in Mexico, and their savvy communication skills (led by Subcomandante Marcos) buttresses and protects their organization by attracting those outside the country to their goals and techniques.