DISPLACED PERSONS Territorial states create population displacements, if only by drawing boundaries. The longing that links displaced peoples and the places to which they seek to return is a potent force in history. The first two essays concern themselves with situations of return and re-emplacement, the first in Germany, the second in Rwanda.

MAKING SENSE Three essays show how attending closely to the ways in which sense is produced can help us make better sense of things.

POWER FLOWER Imperial science and its collaborations, its landscapes, and its audiences is the theme of many interesting studies of late, including several pieces in this journal, such as Robert Shanafelt, “How Charles Darwin Got Emotional Expression out of South Africa (and the People who Helped Him)” (2003: 783–814), and Saul Dubow, “Earth History, Natural History, and Prehistory at the Cape, 1860–1875” (2004: 107–33). The first essay examines the practice and narrativizing of flower-collecting under imperial conditions.

CULTURE POWER Being in the habit of taking the temperature of anthropology from time to time (Sherry B. Ortner, “Theory in Anthropology since the Sixties,” CSSH 1984: 174–90; “Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal,” 1995: 173–93; Webb Keane, “Self-Interpretation, Agency and the Objects of Anthropology: Reflections on a Genealogy,” 2003: 222–48), we take a keen interest in the health of the culture concept. News of its demise may be exaggerated, judging by the first article, which draws our attention to its worldwide spread and tries to account for it.

The scene that unfolded in the plaza of Cajamarca on Saturday, 16 November 1532, is one of the most loaded in the Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire. That day the Inca Atahualpa, head of an empire of several million extending from present day Ecuador to Chile, surrounded by his powerful army, was captured by 168 men. The attack took place after the exchange of a book and words in the middle of the plaza, between the Inca and fray Vicente de Valverde, head clergyman of the conquest party lead by Francisco Pizarro. The scene has been the object of much debate, both in the sixteenth century, when it rapidly became part of Europeans' colonial imagination, and in the present. This essay's goal is to offer an alternative interpretation of Cajamarca, which addresses a simple, under-explored question: Why did the meeting occur in the way it did? Why was Atahualpa there, exposing himself to some dangerous looters, why did the Spanish not attack directly if the ambush was ready? To anticipate my conclusion, I argue that Cajamarca happened as it did because it was the necessary final act of a long chain of improvised moves, which responded to culturally specific political dilemmas. Its dynamic reflected a radical uncertainty common to contact processes, but left aside by most scholarship. Recovering this, I suggest, speaks not only to the case in point, but to the mechanics of power and coloniality across space and time.

Immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, one of the most pervasive media images consisted of East Germans on a frenetic, collective shopping spree. For many western Germans, as well as for much of the world, the “triumph” of capitalism and democracy seemed to be reflected and confirmed in the “consuming frenzy” (Konsumrausch) of the “Ossis” (East Germans). Although these images of consumption following the collapse of socialism were new, they were structured by and contributed to a dominant narrative of “democratization” and national legitimacy in which access to consumer goods and consumer choice are defined as fundamental rights and democratic expressions of individualism. Indeed, many observers have since suggested that the transitions of 1989 were not about demands for political or human rights, but for consumer rights (e.g., Bauman 1992; Borneman 1992; Drakulic 1991). They were also, I would add, about consumer rites—about the making of citizen-consumers.

In his own mission to versify the planet, or at least an exemplary portion of it, Captain Francis Kingdon-Ward (1885–1958) returned repeatedly, even obsessively, to certain places on the alpine plateaus of Northwest Yunnan and Southeast Tibet, where the vegetation, refracted through the Aleph of what I shall argue was a deliberate, laborious, and disciplined optical practice, became liquid, a sea:

In the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, “culture” achieved the status of a truly global concept. We find discourses of “culture” emerging to prominence in the German-speaking world during the second half of the eighteenth century (with the closely associated linguistic arenas of the Netherlands and Scandinavia rapidly following suit); in the English-speaking world starting in the first half of the nineteenth century; in Eastern Europe, East Asia, and South Asia starting in the second half of the nineteenth century; and just about everywhere else in the course of the twentieth century. “Culture” began to circulate far beyond the European sites of its modern genesis, sometimes through the direct transfer of lexical items from Western European languages (e.g., Russian kulءtura; the use of kalcar in various South Asian languages); and more often through the construction of new translative equivalencies with preexisting words or concepts most often signifying purification, refinement, or improvement (e.g., Japanese bun-ka; Chinese wen-hua; Bangla and Hindi sanskriti; Urdu tamaddun).

Over the 1990s, Western images of Africa became dominated by a social landscape of mobile people fleeing disaster. In the aftermath of the horrendous 1994 genocide in Rwanda, refugees and IDPs (“internally displaced people,” the term used for uprooted individuals within a state) were especially visible in Central Africa, but West Africa also was the locus of a series of complicated refugee movements (from Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea, Côte d'Ivoire, and elsewhere), and northeast Africa (Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia) generated many more. Such flight from fear, however, was not new to Africa. Many people had fled colonial extractions or had been forcibly moved for purposes of colonial labor; many more were caught up in precolonial relocations. Of course many were forcibly moved as well in the massive displacement of slaves from and within Africa, and voluntary movement was also common, for land, trade, or religious duty. Consequently, while in the West, Africa is often thought of as a continent in stasis, with the rural poor tied to their land, in fact, the historical record indicates that Africa has always been a continent of enormous mobility.

In his geographical treatise of 1537, the Portuguese chronicler D. João de Castra explained that it would be possible to correlate all newly discovered lands with astronomical markers to produce an accurate map of the world. The result would be, he wrote, a “true and perfect geography.” The movement toward this vision, from the cartographic revolution of thirteenth-century Portolan charts to the use of surveying to map colonial territories in the nineteenth century, is a compelling narrative of the rationalization of space, and of the reinforcement of this trend by the pursuit of European imperial interests.

This article pursues two basic agendas. My primary purpose is to explore the contours of repatriation language as spoken by Native Americans directly participating in repatriation processes. To this end, I argue that a first step entails a critical assessment of the terms and assumptions by which repatriation discourse is framed by observers, participant observers included. Therefore, the first section of this article works toward a critical theory of repatriation discourse, with particular reference to religious language and narratives of identity. I make a case for approaching repatriation discourse as a rhetorical field. Questions I ask include: Who speaks? Under what constraints? With what possibilities? Addressing these questions, among others, I advocate an analytical approach to repatriation that is both specific and frank in exploring the ways group boundaries are shaped and reshaped through narrative.

In the Tibetan Buddhist monastery town of Labrang, located in southwest Gansu Province, China, the past is a heavy, and very often hidden, burden for residents and visitors alike (figure 1). This is not readily apparent amidst the bustling ‘nowness’ of commercial activities in this tourist site and model town for the profitable coexistence of Tibetan Buddhist monasticism and Chinese state-sponsored development goals. But as I discovered over the course of my fieldwork there in the mid-1990s, and again in the summer of 2002, for a population living with unsanctioned memories of the traumatic ruptures of the Chinese Communist-led revolution beginning in 1949, the ‘unsaid’ of history spoke loudly in implication—in implied dialogue with multimedia official histories, in the gaps in written and oral chronologies of events, in the revived performance of the lay and monastic ritual calendars, and in the dodges and silences of my Tibetan interlocutors during our many conversations about their pasts: “I don't know anything! I'm too young, you know!” (Tibetan [Tib.] ngas shes ni ma red, nga lo chung gi mo). Ama Drolma, a village matriarch in her late fifties, repeated this adamantly to me after I and my Tibetan woman assistant had asked her for a taped interview about local “history” (Tib. lo rgyus). She would hear none of our explanations about my interest in people's personal histories and insisted that I seek out old men, they would know about “early, early, early times” (Tib. sngan na sngan na sngan na).

The term “ethnic cleansing” vaulted to international prominence in 1992, shortly after Francis Fukuyama proclaimed the end of history. Popularized during the narrow window of optimism between the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of Ussama Bin Ladin, the phrase was used to describe events in the recalcitrant states that had not gotten the message that liberal democracy was the way of the future. The product of a particular time and place—Yugoslavia in the contemporary era—ethnic cleansing was generalized into an analytic category, stretched across the globe and the twentieth century, and, on occasion, transformed into a transhistorical characteristic of humanity. In this sense, the category of ethnic cleansing is too large: scholars and journalists have vitiated the term's explanatory power by grouping together sundry events.

The world exposition stemmed from the specific context of nineteenth-century Europe, but by the end of that century, its practice had already spread to the colonies as the imperial powers organized a number of colonial expositions. The colonial exposition was meant to represent colonialism as fundamental to the progress of both the metropole and the colony. The ideas of “progress” and “modernity” were represented in such a way that colonial subjects would acknowledge the benevolent contribution of imperial rule to the development of the colony. This historical practice attracted not only nations that had already achieved imperial status, but also nations such as Japan that were aspiring to become an imperial power.

The vigorous revival of institutionalist theories and methods among economists, political scientists, and other social scientists has prompted a broad reconsideration of how political and economic preferences are transformed into social outcomes. In much of the professional literature, this change has stimulated a shift away from behavioral and empirical methods to those that rely on interpretation of the historical evolution of policies in an organizational framework. Focusing on topics as disparate as the implementation of Keynesian economic policies in the 1930s, United States civil service reform at the turn of the twentieth century, or the evolution of property and other rights in early modern England, institutionalist studies by sociologists, political scientists, and economists have, increasingly, addressed problems by using historical narratives.

Inventions have their greatest impact when they go beyond their possible practical applications and act upon the imagination. When Martin Behaim invented the first globe in 1490, a functionally useless object consisting mostly of terra incognita, he was widely ridiculed; but somehow the ideas that his globe represented stuck, and within a few decades the basic validity of his construction was confirmed by the voyages of Columbus, Cabot, Vasco de Gama, Magellan, and others. Today, with efforts to situate the rapid growth of information and communication technologies (ICTs), especially the Internet, in the context of globalization, there is a similar division between those who dismiss it as being of no importance and those who see in it a looming (for good or ill) global revolution. But, as with Behaim's globe, the imaginary possibilities of these innovations are important in determining how and to what extent human existence is to be transformed by them.

As anyone who has tried knows, the central problem in thinking about race in Brazil is how to. The almost quantum-theory-like indeterminacy of the ways Brazilians of different skin colors interact has exercised imaginations for decades, from fin-de-siècle scientific racists, to the eugenists of the 1920s, to interwar modernists who promoted the idea of racial democracy, to the Brazilian and later North American revisionists of the 1950s and beyond. The complexities of Brazilian race have not always been in the forefront of these debates. For much of the period up to the 1970s, scholars focused on debunking Brazil's vaunted myth of racial democracy—the national ideology claiming Brazil to be free of racial prejudice (Costa 1985). The effort was roundly successful. From this literature, we learned not only how wide a gap there has been between the ideal of racial democracy and the reality of racial and color prejudice in Brazil, but also the role elites have played in manipulating the myth to defuse racial and other social tensions (Hanchard 1994). Recently, some scholars have suggested that it is high time to look beyond the debunking agenda and take up once again the complexities of the Brazilian situation. Anthropologists have led the way, seeking to reveal “the range of contemporary understandings” of racial democracy and to explain something of its persistence as a tangible “dream” in the face of ongoing discrimination and prejudice in everyday Brazilian life (Sheriff 2001:8).

Andrew Walder's “neo-traditional” image of Chinese socialism has profoundly shaped understanding of China before market reform. It has also influenced the broader debate on the nature of ‘actually existing socialisms.’ Walder argues that the Communist state dominated the industrial workforce through the institutionalization of organized dependence and clientelism in the workplace. State-appointed management tightly controlled access to goods, services, and positions and used these resources to reward cooperative workers and activists. Their actions created webs of clientelist relations but also a chasm on the shop floor, as ordinary workers resented the activists for acting against workers' general interest. But since ordinary workers could rarely obtain what they wanted beyond the factory, they, too, curried favors from factory officials. Walder observes that the growth of clientelist relations and personal ties within the industrial enterprise dampened workers' capacity for collective resistance and their pursuit of their personal welfare further depoliticized the working class. As a result, workers exhibited “a stable pattern of tacit acceptance and active cooperation” toward Communist political rule.

The practice of conversion—changing from one religion to another—is certainly not a modern invention, but it takes on a new and sometimes threatening significance in a modern context characterized by censuses, elections with universal suffrage, and majority rule. In the modern world separate religions have come to be defined, like ethnic groups or nations (Barth 1969), by the boundaries between them. One can only be a refugee if one flees across an international boundary; likewise, conventionally, religious change is only labeled “conversion” if it occurs across a boundary. Thus, as boundaries have become sharper between ‘religions,' so the issue of conversion has grown in political significance.