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.

This paper is a revisiting of the question of contemporary Islamism in Egypt. Its purpose is to rethink the main arguments and explanatory frameworks relating to Islamist activism in general and the militant and violent type in particular. It presents some new propositions about the phenomenon and provides elements for a deeper understanding. This revisiting is undertaken in light of certain developments over the last decade or so, which may be summarised as follows: 1) the heightening of Islamist violence, marked by confrontations with the government in and around Cairo and in the provinces of Upper EgyptThe 1990s have seen an intensification of violent clashes between the Islamists and the government, claiming over one thousand lives. The Islamist attacks have been aimed particularly at the tourism sector and the police. More than a hundred police officers and soldiers have been killed. For more details, see the annual reports of al-Taqrir al-Istratiji al-Arabi (The Arab Strategic Report). See also Nabil Abd al-Fatah and Diya' Rashwan, Taqrir al-Hala al-Diniya fi Misr 1995 (Report on the State of Religion in Egypt 1995) (Cairo: Centre for Political and Strategic Studies, 1997).; 2) the emergence of clear socio-spatial dimensions to Islamist activism. For the purposes of this article, my analysis pertains to these developments in the greater Cairo area.The rise of al-Jama‘a al-Islamiya in the Upper Egypt governorates of Qena, Asyut, Suhaj, Minya and Aswan must be examined in relation to the social fabric and spatial organisation of their cities and towns. The complexity of social organisation based on tribe and family and the hierarchies characterising social, economic, and political positions in the various provinces have yet to be studied in a comprehensive manner, and are beyond the scope of this paper. See Nazih Ayubi, Political Islam (London: Routledge, 1991), and Mamun Fandy, “Egypt's Islamic Group: Regional Revenge,” Middle East Journal 48, 4 (1994): 607–25.

The Boy Scout and Girl Guide movements arose in the first decades of the twentieth century, an era of social and political unrest, and they were initially the center of intense controversy in Britain.Much has been written on the Baden-Powells and the Scout organization, but little has been done on either the Guides or on gender in either movement. Also, most works deal specifically with the first two decades of the movements, rather than with the interwar period. The major official histories of the Scouts and Guides include Henry Collis, Fred Hurll and Rex Hazlewood, B-P's Scouts: An Official History of the Boy Scouts Association (London: Collins, 1961); Rose Kerr, The Story of the Girl Guides (London: Girl Guides Association, 1954); and Alix Liddell, The Girl Guides, 1910–1970 (London: Frederick Muller, 1970). Robert Baden-Powell has been the subject of several biographies and the Chief Guide, Olave Baden-Powell, has written an autobiography that is quite useful. The best biography is the recent one by Tim Jeal, The Boy-Man: The Life of Lord Baden-Powell (New York: William Morrow, 1990). The analytical works on the movements are limited to work on the Scouts by Martin Dedman, “Baden-Powell, Militarism, and the ‘Invisible Contributors' to the Boy Scout Scheme, 1904–1920,” Twentieth Century British History 4:3 (1993), 201–23; John Gillis, Youth and History (New York: Academic Press, 1974); Robert H. MacDonald, Sons of the Empire: The Frontier and the Boy Scout Movement, 1890–1918 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993); Michael Rosenthal, The Character Factory (New York: Pantheon Press, 1986); John Springhall, Youth, Empire and Society (London: Croom Helm Ltd., 1977); Allen Warren, “Sir Robert Baden-Powell, the Scout Movement and Citizen Training in Britain, 1900–1920,” English Historical Review 101 (1986), 376–98; and Paul Wilkinson, “English Youth Movements, 1908–1930,” Journal of Contemporary History 4:2 (April 1969), 3–23. Allen Warren has written several insightful articles, including, “Mothers for the Empire,” in Making Imperial Mentalities, ed. J. A. Mangan (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), 96–109; “Citizens of the Empire,” in Imperialism and Popular Culture, ed. John Mackenzie (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), 232–56; and “Popular Manliness: Baden-Powell, Scouting and the Development of Manly Character,” in Manliness and Morality: Middle-class Masculinity in Britain and America, 1800–1940, eds. J. A. Mangan and James Walvin (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987), 176–98. Good studies of working-class boys are: Michael J. Childs, Labour's Apprentices: Working-class Lads in Late Victorian and Edwardian England (London: Hambledon Press, 1992) and Harry Hendrick, Images of Youth: Age, Class and the Male Youth Problem, 1880–1920 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990). For the post-World War I period, see: David Fowler, The First Teenagers: The Lifestyle of Young Wage-Earners in Interwar Britain (London: Woburn Press, 1995). Two classic studies of middle-class girls are: Carol Dyhouse, Girls Growing Up in Late Victorian and Edwardian England (London: Routledge, 1981) and Deborah Gorham, The Victorian Girl and the Feminine Ideal (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1982). For works specifically dealing with American Scouting, see Jeffrey P. Hantover, “The Boy Scouts and the Validation of Masculinity,” Journal of Social Issues 34:1 (1978) and David I. Macleod, Building Character in the American Boy: The Boy Scouts, YMCA, and Their Forerunners, 1870–1920 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983). By the 1920s, however, they had become an established part of what came to be seen as the British “way of life.” The movements also began a sustained international expansion, winning acclaim from educators, government officials, social organizations, and even the League of Nations. Yet this extension of the Scout and Guide program into other countries produced problems both abroad and at home, as contradictions appeared in the ideologies and activities of the two groups. Practically speaking, they both faced difficulties in accommodating different races, religions, languages, and nations in the new global brother/sisterhood.

News from afar sometimes seems to bear an uncanny resemblance to one's own remembered past. This is not because of the banal redundancy of events, but because of memory's inclination to refurbish itself in contemporary designs and novel images. In 1994 I was in northern Sumatra collecting stories from Karo veterans of the Indonesian war of national independence. Every night the television news offered more horrifying pictures of ethnic violence from around the world. In central Africa, roadways were filled with thousands of starving, desperate people traveling toward unknown destinations. This made a big impression on my Karo informants. “That's exactly how it was here,” they told me over and over. “I saw it on TV last night. I told the kids, ‘We were just like that during the evacuation.' Nothing to eat. No clothes. We were living like animals.”

In the general election of 1886 Dadhabai Naoroji (1825–1917), one-time Bombay mathematics professor and longtime Parsi merchant-entrepreneur, ran on the Liberal ticket for the constituency of Holborn and lost, with a total of 1,950 votes against 3,651 cast in favor of the Tory candidate, Colonel Duncan.R. P. Masani, Dadhabai Naoroji: The Grand Old Man of India (London: George Allen Unwin, 1939), 247. Naoroji's candidacy received little publicity outside Holborn itself and indeed, but for Naoroji's second bid for a parliamentary seat in 1892 the Holborn debacle might have gone unnoticed in the annals of parliamentary history, as did the attempts of two compatriots: David Octerlony Dyce Sombre, who was elected for Sudbury in 1841; and Lal Mohan Ghose, who ran as a Liberal candidate for Deptford just a few years before Naoroji.Rozina Visram, Ayahs, Lascars and Princes: Indians in Britain, 1700–1947 (London, Pluto, 1986), 78; see also S. R. Mehrotra, The Emergence of the Indian National Congress (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1971), 405 and ff. Dyce Sombre (1808–1851) was a person of mixed Indian and European ancestry who, despite the fact this his election was “controverted” the next year, did sit and vote on several bills. I am indebted to Michael Fisher for this information. See his entry on Dyce Sombre in The New Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, forthcoming). Even so, Naoroji's accomplishment—i.e., election to the House of Commons as the spokesman for a colonial territory that many contemporaries, even those who were sympathetic to the cause of India, scarcely recognized as a legitimate nation, let alone a viable electoral constituency—remains one of the last untold narratives in the high political history of the Victorian period.Though he ran for a London constituency and was its official representative, Naoroji was also, and consistently, viewed as “the representative for India” to the House of Commons. This omission persists despite the availability of information on Naoroji's career in Britain through the work of Rozina Visram and others, not to mention the attention given to it in the contemporary Victorian press. More remarkable still, Naoroji's bid for parliamentary representation as an Indian for “India” remains obscure despite recent attempts to understand how thoroughly empire helped to constitute “domestic” politics and society across the long nineteenth century.See for example Jonathan Schneer's London 1900: The Imperial Metropolis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), which devotes an entire chapter to Naoroji but only briefly mentions the “Blackman” incident.

It was the official line of Suharto's regime that Indonesia is a nation which has no indigenous people, or that all Indonesians are equally indigenous.Sarwono Kusumaatmadja (1993), Minister of State for the Environment, addressing an NGO forum. The internationally recognized category “indigenous and tribal peoples” (as defined in International Labour Organization convention 169) has no direct equivalent in Indonesia's legal system, nor are there reservations or officially recognized tribal territories. Under Suharto the national motto “unity in diversity” and the displays of Jakarta's theme park, Taman Mini, presented the acceptable limits of Indonesia's cultural difference, while development efforts were directed at improving the lot of “vulnerable population groups,” including those deemed remote or especially backwards. The desire for development was expressed by rural citizens through the approved channels of bottom-up planning processes and supplications to visiting officials. National activists and international donors who argued for the rights of indigenous people were dismissed as romantics imposing their primitivist fantasies upon poor folk who wanted, or should have wanted, to progress like “ordinary” Indonesians. Nevertheless, a discourse on indigenous people took hold in activist circles in the final years of Suharto's rule, and its currency in the Indonesian countryside is still increasing. With the new political possibilities opened up in the post-Suharto era, now seems an appropriate time to reflect on how Indonesia's indigenous or tribal slot is being envisioned, who might occupy it, and with what effects.This paper was first submitted to CSSH in November 1997. It was revised and resubmitted in November 1998, after the fall of Suharto, during a period when hopes for progressive change and skepticism about reformasi were present in equal measure. The situation in November 1999, as I make final revisions before the journal goes to press, has changed again in ways that I cannot fully explore. Most notably, the indigenous peoples' platform was highlighted by a national congress held in Jakarta in March 1999, and the founding of an indigenous peoples' organization, AMAN (Aliansi Masyarakat Adat Nusantara). See the special issue of Down to Earth, October 1999. Improved prospects for some kinds of legal recognition under the new government make reflection on the issues I raise in this article even more important.

A series of diplomatic exchanges has recently unfolded between the Hungarian government and the Commission of the European Union. The stakes are historic for the Hungarian side. Hungary formally applied for full membership in the European Union on March 31, 1994, the first country to announce such intentions among the successor states of the former Soviet bloc. Two years later, the Commission sent a lengthy questionnaire about the “state of the applicant” to all—by then, ten—central and east European applicant states. The Hungarian side filed its comprehensive response three months after the receipt of the questionnaire. The Commission waited until all responses were in and acknowledged the Hungarian answer in a document, issued another year later, whose purpose was to determine whether to recommend that the EU Council should start negotiations with the individual candidate countries about full membership.

The past thirty years in Latin America have produced tremendous transformations of the state's role in society, both in the scope of its activities and the extent of its presence. Sometimes this has led to the state's unprecedented expansion into the far reaches of economic and social life, other times to its retreat from direct institutional presence in favor of indirect market-mediated linkages to society. The impact of these transformations on associational life and the quality of political participation has to some extent been obscured in recent scholarly work on democratic transition and consolidation, important as these issues are.There is an extensive literature that examines the ways in which the institutional organization of democracy shapes the stability and character of post-transition politics. See, for example, Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and Post-Communist Europe. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Juan Linz, “The Perils of Presidentialism.” Journal of Democracy 1 (1990), and contributions to Scott Mainwaring and Timothy Scully, eds., Building Democratic Institutions: Party Systems in Latin America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); and Jorge Domínguez and Abraham Lowenthal, eds. Constructing Democratic Governance: Latin America and the Caribbean in the 1990s (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). This paper explores how the transformations in the deeper “structural linkages” between state and society have affected political organization and mobilization in rural Brazil and Chile. In so doing, we contend that institutions not normally seen as central to democratic politics are in fact crucial to understanding political participation and mobilization.

The late colonial period was generally an era of anxiety for royal officials in Spanish America and its neighboring areas. To the turmoil caused by massive rebellions, especially in the early 1780s, was added the volatile political atmosphere resulting from the French Revolution. Several “seditious” incidents occurred subsequently throughout the colonial landscape. Both the popular rebellions prior to and the plots following the French Revolution were compounded by an increasing “public” awareness and discussion of politics and modern ideas.

There is little doubt that, after a century's exposure, Chinese have absorbed and understand quite clearly the greater meanings of the realm of sport—the connections between competitive athletic endeavor, imperialist bluster, and economic standing in the world community. This article is an exploration of the late Qing Dynasty origins of this modern global culture of physical culture and sport.

Sectarianism is an orphan of history.This paper was originally presented to the Davis Seminar at Princeton University's Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies, in November 1998. I am grateful to the participants in the seminar as well as my colleagues at Rice University, whose criticisms helped make this essay more coherent. That, at least, seems to be the consensus of the scholarship on Middle Eastern religious violence. Unlike recent studies of communalism in India and Spain,For the case of India, see Gyan Pandey, The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992); and Sandria B. Freitag, Collective Action and Community (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). For Spain, see David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). which have explored the cultural and discursive aspects of sectarian violence, analyses of Middle Eastern religious mobilizations have long been, and remain, preoccupied with the alleged failure of the Middle East to modernize—with its failure, in other words, to replicate a secular Western path of development.

A great deal of research over the past decade or so has been concerned with understanding the processes of objectification of “custom” or “traditional culture” in Melanesia and other parts of the South Pacific, reifications which have accompanied, or are accompanying, the emergence of new ethnic and national identities (see, for instance, Jolly and Thomas 1992b; Keesing and Tonkinson 1982; Linnekin and Poyer 1990a; Norton 1993). As Foster (1992:284) among others has noted, colonialism has been viewed in much of this research as the key factor giving rise to these hypostatisations of culture, especially hypostatisations involving objectifications of entire “traditional” ways of life as cultural wholes.

One of the great virtues of Charles Tilly's Durable Inequality is that it might be wrong. So often attempts at constructing grand theories in sociology turn out, on close inspection, to consist largely of tautologies and vacuous propositions—conceptual frameworks that are so flexible and indeterminate that no empirical observations of the world would ever count as surprising. This is not the case for the central arguments in Tilly's book. Consider, for example, a claim that the author makes early in the book about the relatively limited significance of beliefs in the explanation of durable inequality:

Currently, one of the most important issues in resource management is: under what conditions will people conserve the resources on which their livelihood depends? In all too many cases, overexploitation is the rule. All around the world fish stocks, forests, grasslands, air, soils, wildlife, and water quality have been seriously degraded by human beings. Environmental disaster is not inevitable, however, for in many cases those who are dependent on resources, and their governments, have acted to generate effective rules to manage those resources at sustainable levels (Anderson and Simmons 1993; Berkes 1989; McCay and Acheson 1987; Ostrom 1990; Pinkerton 1989; Ruddle and Akimichi 1984).

Durable Inequality is a very ambitious work of social theory by one of our foremost sociologists. In many ways, it builds upon the grand master theorists of the nineteenth century through a language of the present. It is like the more structuralist versions of Marx. For Marx, however, class relations and class inequality have different dynamics and different characteristics, depending on historically variable modes of production. For Tilly, inequality refers to relations between paired and unequal categories that have differential access to value- producing resources. And for Tilly, again in contrast to Marx, categorical inequality is perpetuated—is durable—in large measure because of various specified organizational properties and dynamics. There are no contradictions for Tilly, no dynamics of change that are internal to his model or vary by the specific historical conditions that one is attempting to analyze. This is, indeed, surprising for a scholar so identified with historical sociology. In Tilly's formulation, the characteristics and dynamics through which categorical inequality creates durable inequality appears transhistorical. It is not inequality under capitalism that seems to be Tilly's focus, but, rather, a universal theory of inequality across time.

Durable Inequality is an important and insightful book. In this work, Charles Tilly links organizational needs to the production and reproduction of social inequality. For some time now, organizational theorists have demonstrated that formal organizations are central actors in modern society, and that the significant environment of formal organizations are other formal organizations. Durable Inequality demonstrates how social inequality is directly tied to solving organizational problems. His four master mechanisms—exploitation, opportunity hoarding, emulation, and adaptation—tell us a great deal about how inequality is produced and maintained. The argument about categorical pairing and how such pairing is used by organizations to generate inequality is plausible and seductive.

Social life consists of making mistakes, then correcting them. The big questions do not concern who makes the fewest mistakes and why, but whether the mistakes are fruitful, how fast people recognize them, and how well they correct them. The same principles apply to writing books, even if the interaction and error-correction take longer to operate than in everyday conversation. This symposium's vigorous, vital critiques of Durable Inequality establish that my book is no exception to the rule. Clearly in writing the book I made mistakes of at least four kinds: