Scholarship on the political economy of natural resources in the Global South has often relied on the concept of the “resource curse” to explain the negative features of extractive economies and their alleged tendency to promote rent capture at the expense of national sovereignty and development. Such theories link the behavior of social actors to an excess of “unearned income,” with little reference to the concrete forms of political and cultural mediation that reproduce this structure of growth. This article explores the role of the devil symbol in populist discourse in Venezuela and how this spectral figure comes to mediate subaltern consciousness. Tracing the origins of this image to colonialism and efforts to grasp the dynamics of the modern petrostate, the analysis shows how use of this symbol to mediate the forecast transition from a rentier to a productive economy has given workers in a state enterprise a potent set of signs to articulate opposition to unjust labor conditions. Venezuelan leaders have deployed figures drawn from local folklore to divide society into two competing power blocs. Yet, while these discourses are effective at forging coalitions and justifying specific reallocations of oil wealth, they do not obviate the tensions of this transition, and a counternarrative using these same figures has arisen in response. The article concludes with an analysis of parallels between global theories of the resource curse and local Venezuelan iterations of this discourse as well as a discussion of the role of translation in theories of culture and modernity.

How can we remain attentive to the scale of the environmental damage caused in traditional Maroon territories by the effects of the Plantationocene and the material vestiges of colonial and racial violence left by capitalism? Dwelling on conversations held with Maroon Cottica Ndyuka women living in Moengo, a small town established on the Cottica River in Eastern Suriname to support a bauxite industrial plant in the early twentieth century, this text seeks to illuminate what Maria Puig de la Bellacasa (2021) calls “elemental affinities,” relationships in which humans and more-than-humans interact in composing body and earth through refractive and diffractive effects. The paper observes how the women mixed and modeled clay, turning it into sculpted balls known as pemba or pemba doti, frequently used as a therapeutical and spiritual substance, and as food. In so doing, the text deals with processes such as creating, composing, undoing, decomposing, and perishing once the earth—as soil—takes part in and renders possible the existence of diverse creatures. This is a contribution toward an ethnography of (de)compositions of the earth that sets out from the affinities between earth and bodies, attentive to certain metamorphic possibilities, the multiplicities of relations in which soils act.

What qualifies as a political event is a core question for social and historical research. This article argues that the use of temporal structures in narratives of political and social developments contributes significantly to the making and unmaking of events. We show how arguments that draw upon history play a particularly important role in transforming the everyday unfolding of politics into discernable events with a clear time bracket. Through this lens, we investigate the 2016 Brexit referendum as an event that has triggered extensive debates about both Europe’s experiences of the past and political expectations for its future. Conflicting assessments of history are crucial for understanding how and when Brexit became an event of European significance and why it then ceased to be so. This case also enables us to distinguish more clearly between the agent-centered focus on the event itself, and the analytical ex-post assessment as a critical juncture. Methodologically, the article demonstrates the value of a multi-perspective approach for qualitative analyses with a focus on Brexit narratives articulated across several EU countries and the United Kingdom.

How can historians of “small spaces” and cities focus on local events and issues and at the same time carry on conversations with peers in a disciplinary mode marked by the spatial expansiveness of global history, on one hand, and a focus on objects and individuals of microhistory on the other? At stake here are key questions connected with the intellectual value of place-based knowledge and detailed single-site historical case studies. I argue that as long as we are caught between the positivist idea that causal regularity and time-place independence of explanatory mechanisms are the hallmark of theory, and the postmodernist resistance to generalizations, histories of cities and other small spaces will suffer from “defanged empiricism.” This problem is particularly debilitating for non-global histories of small spaces and cities of the global South, which often “do not travel well.” Is there a way out? I argue that a critical engagement with the stratified ontologies of critical realism— in particular, a version that I call “soft critical realism”—and Charles Tilly’s “deep order” can enable historians of small spaces and cities to re-situate their research at the heart and center of social theory, and simultaneously strike a better balance between attention to local details, the narrative form, and engagement with larger processes, concepts, and theories. Finally, I concretize the discussion by offering the example of how my own research on late colonial and early postcolonial Calcutta has benefitted from this approach.

When scholars have compared “African traditional religion” and “Western science,” they have often treated the terms of this comparison as racialized unitary entities, which are either radically different or somewhat similar (even as Western categories of rationality or nature remain the basis for these comparisons). This essay unsettles these assumptions by focusing on practices that are called “science” in the fields of both petroleum geology and Afro-Caribbean religion. Based on long-term ethnographic research in Trinidad, arguably the world’s oldest site of commercial oil extraction, I show how internal differences between those involved in “petroleum science” and “African religion” reveal a spectrum of meanings for the word “science” centered on relations to risk. At one end of this spectrum, science conveyed ideals of stable tradition that de-risked claims to knowledge for energy sector specialists intent on securing foreign investment or for “Yorubacentric” lineages of African religion centering initiation-based authority. At this spectrum’s other end, “science” foregrounded the risks of accessing hard-to-perceive forces in petroleum exploration or “spiritual work.” By focusing on heterogeneous practices rather than cultural essences or ideals of rationality, I show how the ethical implications of “science” depend on differing experiences of the risks of working with subterranean powers. While petroleum surveys at my field site in Trinidad required embodied risks by laborers, geologists backgrounded these contexts of power, representing the risks of their work as a problem of scientific accuracy. Afro-Trinidadian spiritual workers, in contrast, foregrounded the embodied risks of science as the ground of ethical practice.

Real knowledge emerges from “impossible” worldviews. Or, put differently, it is possible to accept knowledge that is produced by people whose ontological presuppositions–their baseline assumptions about the nature of reality–one entirely rejects. How can this fact be accommodated, not by advancing a wishful post-dualism, dangerous post-secularism, or implausible ontological relativism, but by working within the tradition of secular political philosophy so that indigenous knowledge, too, can be a basis for public policy and collective action in secular societies? Via a reframing Amazonian multinaturalist perspectivism–which has so inspired post-dualist civilizational critiques–as a social theory of health and illness that informs contemporary Western epidemiology’s struggles to theorize the distribution of health and illness in mass society, this article advances a general approach to recognizing knowledge that has been developed on the other side of boundaries of ontological difference. It argues that the accuracy or efficacy of any particular indigenous knowledge-practice implies the generative potential as theory of the ontological presuppositions that facilitated the knowledge-practice’s evolution. Combining the ontological turn’s interest in the innovativeness of indigenous concepts with a proposal for superseding its incommensurable worlds and abandonment of the aspiration to more-than-local knowledge, the article shows that indigenous ideas and their underlying ontologies are more than generic alternatives to inspire Western civilizational renewal, and opens a path to their legitimization as actionable knowledge in the terms of secular public reason.

This article examines four typologies of secularism in China from the sixteenth century onward, through an analysis of the triadic relationship between the secular, religious, and superstitious. These notions have been considered to be derived from the particular intellectual and political history of the West, but this fails to grasp the complexity of non-Western belief systems. This article proposes to instead examine how Chinese policymakers and intellectuals actively fabricated religion and produced secularization. It goes beyond a simple rebuttal of Eurocentrism, and arguments regarding the mutual incomparability of Western and Chinese experiences of secularization. It distinguishes four typologies of secularism that emerged successively in China: (1) the reduction of Christianity from the sixteenth century to the 1900s; (2) the Confucian secular and (3) atheist secular that were conceptualized, respectively, by royalist reformers and anti-Manchu revolutionaries during the final two decades of the Qing Dynasty; and (4) the interventionist secularism pursued by the Republican and the Communist regimes to strictly supervise and regulate religious beliefs and practices. The paper argues that, if secularization is indeed Christian in nature, secularism and religion were not imposed in China under Western cultural and political hegemony. Instead, the Christian secular model was produced in China mainly via pre-existing cultural norms and the state’s ad hoc political needs, making the Christian secularism itself a multipolar phenomenon.

In this article I analyze stories about the negotiation of European racialization ideologies in the Society Islands (Tahiti and its Islands) in the late eighteenth century. My focus is the disjunctures between European understandings of their encounters at Tahiti, and what Pacific scholars have come to understand of Polynesian understandings of themselves and various foreigners in that early period. In doing so, I draw out the ways sexuality and gender mediated, enabled, and were also constituted through such racialization processes in their cultural and historical specificity. A key point of departure for this analysis is that the embodiment of race is a negotiated social process. The comparative historical case study I offer up here follows current scholarly moves in seeking out the insights to be gained by tracking racialization as a contingent process, as open rather than closed, as variegated rather than singular, and as imperfectly and only tenuously wrought through ideologies that may be profoundly unanticipated from the vantage point of modernist logics of essentialism and foundationalism. The resulting analysis aims to create space for critically revisiting the ways in which racial normativities and racialized embodiment operate, and how they work, and fail to work, to promote naturalized racist hierarchies of privilege and subordination.

From Iran and Mozambique to France’s Gilets jaunes, consumer energy protests are ubiquitous today. Little historical scholarship has so far explored such “fuel riots,” the problematic moniker bestowed by contemporary policy scholars. This article argues for disaggregating the homogenous crowd of so-called rioters, instead analyzing why particular socioeconomic groups persistently take to the streets. To do this, it sketches an energy-centered approach to class with both structural and subjective axes. This analytic is applied to a comparative history of two of the best-documented energy protests of the last half-century. During the 1970s, independent truckers blocked American highways to protest the high price of motor fuel. A decade later, half a million North Indian farmers mobilized to demand cheaper and more reliable electricity. Half a world apart, the two movements shared key characteristics. They were the expression of specific class fractions whose material interests were conditioned by heavy dependence on state-mediated energy supplies. Awkwardly located between big capital and wage labor, both truckers and farmers owned stakes in the carbon-intensive means of production that left them exposed to volatility in energy quality and pricing. Both mobilized in reaction to perceived breaches of state-centered moral economies of energy which threatened this dependence, leveraging their power to interrupt supplies within the circulatory systems of fossil fuel society. Even as both movements failed in their own terms, their political resistance helped to lock in place consumer subsidies for cheap carbon-intensive energy. Such energy protests deserve a central role in our environmental histories of fossil fuel society.

Shortly after the start of colonial rule in Northern Nigeria, a series of scandals over flogging brought international attention. A network of newspapers reported on flogging cases, particularly those involving women and educated, often Christian, Africans from outside the north. International attention focused on these cases as humanitarian outrages. The Nigerian administration and the Colonial Office deflected the scandals through a shifting series of strategies: justifying flogging as appropriate and humane, attempting to ensure floggings were only administered by Africans, carefully regulating the practices of flogging, and investigating cases of flogging to exculpate the officials responsible. These scandals led to a reform of the criminal justice system in 1933, but had long-lasting effects. They entrenched the trope of whipped bodies as a particularly “African” outrage. They helped to institutionalize the notion that particular judicial and governmental techniques were culturally specific. They politicized key markers of personal identity.

This article explores the widespread phenomenon of anti-colonial movements that relied on magical rituals for protection against European weapons. It examines both the beliefs of the magical practitioners themselves, and those of colonizing observers whose fascination with stories of “primitive magic” contributed to their contrasting self-representations as superior beings in possession of technological wonders. North America’s Ghost Dance movement, China’s Boxer Rebellion, and East Africa’s Maji Maji uprising took place on three different continents but occurred almost simultaneously. The cases come from a narrow period of time, roughly 1890 to 1910, during a peak of colonial violence all over the world.

Revivals of public interest in the Neolithic Near East have generally coincided with the emergence of powerful imagery, such as the discovery of Çatalhöyük’s striking wall paintings in the 1960s. Now, sixty years later, the sculptures of Göbekli Tepe are ensuring the period’s widespread appeal. The capacity of these well-preserved buildings to carry such imagery until today has made them, in turn, an image of the supposed achievements of Neolithic sedentism. But the popularity of these images depends on their decontextualization. This modernist notion that permanent architecture represents the conquest of spatial forms over time is in contradiction with the early Neolithic experience of settled life, which had more to do with the unstable duration of places than with an emancipation from motion. This essay explores the Neolithic preference for earth architecture over more stable construction materials such as stone, its influence on visual culture, and how it contributed to building new living relations to the inhabited landscape. Instead of the sense of fixity and completeness that we, moderns, desperately seek in plans, reconstructions, and monumentality, it is the very transience, repetitiveness, and cumulativeness of earth that determined the transformations of the archaeological record. In other words, rhythms are key to understanding Neolithic sedentism in ways that differ wildly from the static images we have substituted for it.

This paper investigates how the members of the Kigye Yu lineage imagined and invented their ancestral roots during the Chosŏn dynasty (1392–1910) and how such a pursuit of ancestral origins led to subsequent developments in genealogical records. As early as the fifteenth century, Chosŏn elites began to show interests in genealogy that included identifying remote ancestors from ancient times for various political, social, and cultural reasons. From the seventeenth century, the transformation of kinship organization in line with the Confucian ideal of patriliny and elites’ competition for power and prestige intensified genealogical consciousness. Elites became heavily invested in searching for ancestral origins in the form of their lineages’ founders and their tombs. While claiming to rely on documentary and physical evidence, elites often deviated from their professed empiricism and adopted evidence from dubious sources such as oral testimonies and geomancy to rationalize invented ancestral roots. Such pliable approaches, often observed in other early modern cultures such as late imperial China and Europe, opened a floodgate of lineages glorifying their ancestry by pushing their origins back even to mythical founders of ancient Korean and Chinese kingdoms, and adorning their lineages with invented heroes. At the same time, loopholes and blank spots in genealogies enabled quasi- and nonelites to become a member of prominent lineages by grafting their names onto their family trees.

Is Sinhala caste simply a weak regional variant of Hindu caste or is it something else entirely? This essay argues that Sinhala caste as found in the territory of the former Kandyan Kingdom has had a distinctive ontology and retains its unique character. The essay begins with an overview of textual, genetic, and archaeological evidence for the origins of caste on the subcontinent. It then turns to the island and the fourth century CE bifurcation of Sinhala society into “high” and “low”; this duality’s persistence into the second millennium CE; its elaboration in the Kandyan Kingdom’s bureaucratic political economy; and the dissonance between this Sinhala “cartwheel” model of collective inequality and the Brahmanical “ladder” of colonial powers and the Sinhala elite. The essay concludes by examining how the ongoing discordance between these two models of Sinhala caste plays out in people’s lives through a case study of a non-elite caste community.

In Central Asia, the Soviet state had destroyed most Islamic institutions by the late 1930s, which gradually alienated millions of Soviet Muslims from the basics of Islamic theology and key Islamic practices of virtue cultivation, including the five daily prayers (namaz), Islamic ethics of dressing (like covering certain parts of the body), and certain lifestyle prescriptions (such as the avoidance of alcohol, gambling, and premarital sex). As a result, mainstream Islam in Central Asia came to revolve around the main Islamic life-cycle rites (i.e., male circumcision, the marriage ceremony, and funeral prayer) and occasional practices of uttering blessings, reciting short Qur’anic verses for the souls of the deceased, and visiting shrines, among others. Although more than thirty years have passed since the fall of the USSR, this non-observant form of Islam remains widespread in the region. Inquiring into the conceptual and affective aspects of Soviet forced secularization in Central Asia, I make two interrelated interventions into secularism studies and the anthropology of Islam. First, I theorize Soviet secularism through attending to the modern state’s aspiration to transcend and transform the particularities of lived traditions, which reveals significant overlaps between communist and liberal modes of statecraft and subject formation. Second, reflecting on a non-observant form of Islam in contemporary Kyrgyzstan, I ask: what remains of a tradition of virtue ethics when its modes of abstract reasoning and virtue cultivation have all but vanished?

This article traces the fraught history of the file system’s adoption by the Japanese Public Prosecutor’s Office (PPO) from the late 1940s to the early 1950s, when the U.S. General Headquarters (GHQ), the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, decentralized the PPO’s power and transformed it into a “democratic” judicial agency. This is also a postwar history of the introduction of Taylorism-derived scientific management to white collar office work and Weberian visions of bureaucratic rationality into government offices, as part of the democratization of public administration steered by various sections within GHQ. Among the key changes was a guarantee of the right to receive a “speedy trial.” The essay argues that, while that guarantee was meant to secure human-rights protections for the accused, the file system introduced to the PPO translated the constitutional imperative of the rights of the accused into the pursuit of efficient scientific management, in which democracy was an operationalized socio-technical achievement. This logistical channel led to the co-emergence of democracy and modern rational bureaucracy, with each evincing mutual cause and effect. American reforms invested technicality with the promise of “democracy,” but as this essay shows, senior Japanese officials envisioned it as a means to rebuild a centralized information network.

In recent decades, secularism has emerged as one of the most studied concepts in sociocultural anthropology, and Egypt a primary site of its analysis. This article considers trends in Egypt’s modern and contemporary history in order to complicate the great explanatory power some anthropological works have granted to secularism. Above all else, it interrogates the manner in which the state’s regulation of religion (which is the defining feature of Asadian conceptions of secularism) has unfolded in recent Egyptian history. First, I survey the different ways scholars have portrayed secularism in Egypt, focusing in particular on the insights and limitations of Asadian theories. A second section employs ethnographic data to uncover how ordinary Egyptians in the provincial capital of Beni Suef have experienced state power, religion, and secularism in their everyday lives. Contextualizing these ethnographic perspectives alongside several prominent instances of state violence between 2011 and 2013, I elucidate how, rather than typifying a secular state, Egyptian politics, above all else, have been driven by an opportunistic realpolitik. My final section brings historical and ethnographic perspectives into sustained conversation to argue that the state regulation anthropologists sometimes frame as secularism is better conceptualized as a form of state centralization. I conclude, in turn, that political developments in modern Egypt have most often been shaped by flexible national and imperial interests.