This essay unravels the intertwined emergence of “Fordist” connections and conceptions of America in Iran during the 1920s. By focusing on the interplay of infrastructure and information, I use a Persian travelogue to chart the impact of motor transport that, in the wake of the First World War, connected a formerly isolated Iran to the Arab Mediterranean and thence to America. Compared to the extensive Levantine encounter with the Americas that from the 1870s generated an Arab diaspora and Arabic emigration literature from Buenos Aires to Detroit, the Iranian encounter with the United States was much later and more limited. This changed rapidly, however, with the opening of the “Nairn Way” and the importing of American automobiles, developments that tied Iran to the Levant at the very moment American strategists were coining the unitary spatial concept of a “Middle East.” In Iran, this conjunctural moment coincided with the rise of Riza Shah and the nationalist search for a third-power strategy to negate a century of Russian and British influence. Expanding the recent literature on Middle Eastern globalization, this essay uses ‘Abdullah Bahrami's 1926 travelogue Az Tihran ta Niyu Yurk (From Tehran to New York) to reconstruct what Iran's new nation-builders hoped to learn from the United States during the formative decade of U.S.-Iran relations. From behind the better-known story of petropolitics, Bahrami's travelogue captures the turning point when the United States first rose on the globalizing horizons of Iran's modernizing nationalists.

This essay explores a domain of geopolitical conflict called “covert netherworld” that has been a seminal in world politics for the past half century and likely to become more central in the century to come. During the Cold War and its aftermath, covert netherworlds formed worldwide through confluence of four essential elements: reliance of modern states on covert methods for power projection at home and abroad; the consequent emergence of a clandestine social milieu populated by secret services and criminal syndicates; a complementary illicit economic nexus that sustains non-state actors and sometimes state security; and finally, spatial dimensions that range from a narrow criminal or covert milieu to entire countries or continents. When these elements align, this netherworld can attain the sheer geopolitical power to shape the course of national and international events. To lend substance to these generic elements, the essay explores three arenas of widening geographical scope. At the local level in the southern Philippines, a regional netherworld fostered Islamic insurgency and state counterinsurgency, while national elections were sustained by an illegal lottery, shaping the character of an emerging polity. At the transnational level, France's postcolonial hold on the West African region dubbed Françafrique constrained corruption within state-mediated circuits and entrenched elites at both ends of this bilateral exchange. By contrast, U.S. covert operations in Afghanistan and Central America had divergent outcomes influenced by their degree of congruence with the narcotics traffic, demonstrating that the covert netherworld can exercise sufficient autonomy to be treated as a significant factor in world politics.

This article explores how Judeo-Arabic and its speaking population were constituted as objects of research and reformation in colonial Morocco. I argue that the colonial project of dialectology, which emphasized the differentiated linguistic terrain of indigenous society, operated at two opposing levels. On one hand, the study of Judeo-Arabic contributed to the idea of homogeneous orality attributed to native languages, which despite their diverse relationships with literate textuality were made to appear divorced from locally established systems of writing. On the other, the historical and affective relationship between Jews and their Arabic dialect was figured in terms that stressed Jewish alienation from their mother tongue and thereby cast native Jews as differentiated objects of francophone linguistic reform. I pay particular attention to the material mechanics of ethnographic methodology, orthographic entextualization, and editorial arrangement through which colonial dialectologists rendered the Jewish dialect as an essentially oral and Arabic dialect, despite the countervailing circulation of Judeo-Arabic texts written in the Hebrew script. This investigation contributes to our understanding of how dialectology operated as a colonial science through which the hierarchical social categories of colonial rule were established, sustained, and manipulated against the backdrop of linguistic practices that never fully conformed to their colonial representation.

This article investigates the socio-discursive processes that have enabled the emergence and maintenance of pilgrimage practice by examining the rising popularity of the Ḥaḍramawt valley of southern Yemen as a pilgrimage destination for Indonesian Muslims. Pilgrimage to Ḥaḍramawt mainly revolves around visiting the tombs of Bā ʿAlawī (a group of Ḥaḍramīs who claim direct descent from the Prophet Muḥammad) Sufi saints and scholars scattered around the valley. Moving away from ritual analysis, I examine the roles of various actors involved in the production and consumption of pilgrimage. I analyze pilgrimage as a poetic project that frames travel as a transformative process. As a project, pilgrimage can be described as poetic because it hinges on the construction of multiple chronotopes that are juxtaposed, compared, contrasted, and assembled into meaningful alignments. The actors discussed are involved in producing chronotopes of Ḥaḍramawt as a spiritually idealized place, which are made to resonate with mass-mediated chronotopes of idealized Islam circulating among Indonesian Muslims, and contrasted with chronotopes of the modern world. Framed by such a poetic mediation, pilgrims comprehend their actual travel to Ḥaḍramawt as a cross-chronotopic movement that they believe transforms their own selves. The article observes the various mechanisms of attraction and seduction at work in pilgrimage practice, while demonstrating the structural similarities between pilgrimage and other forms of tourism.

Since the year 2000, remembering the Holocaust and fighting anti-Semitism have come to be accepted as cornerstones of European identity. The flip side of this development has been racialization of Muslims by singling them out as the main contemporary anti-Semites. After discussing the emergence of the concept “Muslim anti-Semitism,” I scrutinize government-issued reports and anti-Semitism-prevention programs in Germany. I show how the recent wave of struggle against anti-Semitism depicts Muslims as outsiders who bring unwanted ideologies, evaluates their anti-Semitism as more dangerous than that of right-wing German nationals, and attributes to Muslims culturally transmitted psychopathologies that make Muslim nations prone to anti-Semitism. Experts locate the root of Turkish anti-Semitism in their “myth of tolerance toward Jews,” and of Arab anti-Semitism in their sense of a “false victimhood” and “desire for power and pride.” Educators focus on each nationality separately to distinguish these alleged group-specific myths and feelings. Efforts and money that go into producing nation-specific Muslim anti-Semitisms depict a new Germany that has fully liberated itself from any anti-democratic tendencies surviving from its Nazi past. It also obscures connections between anti-Semitism and anti-Muslim racism, both of which are active forces in mainstream German society.

In this article, I trace how return migrants (former labor emigrants) from Andalusia, Spain draw on their regional history of emigration as a resource for claiming the moral authority to assess immigrants from the global south. By comparing their own migratory experiences and those of new migrants, Andalusians renegotiate competing ideas about their region's membership in Europe, a question with renewed political saliency during the ongoing economic crisis. Specifically, they use comparisons to claim a more central place in Europe for Andalusia, while at the same time eschewing moral culpability for Europe's mistreatment of labor emigration. To do so, Andalusian return migrants mobilize discourses of migrant suffering at various geopolitical scales of belonging, often mapping Andalusians’ experiences of emigration and return onto the region's historical trajectory of Europeanization. The scaling up and down of discourses of migrant suffering in the context of historical narratives of migration enables Andalusians to claim moral superiority based on their non-European, migrant past while also claiming European belonging in the present. Memorializing and assessing migrant suffering thus become forms of discursive work that help construct the political and moral limits of Europeanness. Through analysis of this process, I call for a more central focus on return migration and the intersection of multiple kinds of population mobility in migration research and in the study of European unification.

This paper examines a series of research trips undertaken by French physicians in Indochina to the Dutch East Indies between 1898 and 1937 to study what they saw to be a successful model of a modern psychiatric service that had been developed there. Dutch experiments with forms of “open door” care and the use of patient labor as therapy, premised on earlier ideas of moral treatment, seemed to hold both therapeutic promise and the key to resolving pressing economic concerns faced by colonial psychiatric institutions. French physicians saw in neighboring Java fundamental ethnological and geographical similarities to Indochina, and Dutch successes in psychiatric assistance there raised the prospect of adapting practices the Dutch had developed to their own program in Indochina throughout the interwar years.

This article examines some aspects of the reception of French Spiritism and psychical research in twentieth century Iran: its promotion by Iranian modernist intellectuals before the Second World War, and its appropriation by Shi‘i Muslim ‘ulama in the 1940s and 1960s. Spiritism appealed to those intellectuals and scholars who sought to reconcile their commitments to science with their religious longings and dedication to moral reform. In comparing these encounters with spirit communication, I show that the adoption of putatively scientific claims in contexts that professional scientists usually disavow can be about much more than strategic appropriation and attempts to justify preexisting doctrines. They also allow us to understand science's power to mold the moral subjectivities of reformers through selective absorption into long-continuous traditions of virtue.

This article describes how Islamic and Frankish legal devices complemented each other and were even combined to settle disagreements in the late medieval Middle East. For this purpose, it focuses on two legal institutions that provided responses to the biases of Islamic law against non-Muslims and to the prejudices of Franks against the local law. The first are the notaries sent to the Mamluk cities by the Venetian government to draw up legal documents and to support the transactions of Venetian merchants. The second are the new royal or siyāsa courts implemented by the sultans, where justice was dispensed by government officials instead of by traditional judges, or qāḍīs. Specifically, the article discusses, in a comparative manner, what constituted proof for Christians and Muslims, whether minorities could bear testimony or not, and how notaries and judges dealt with unbelievers. A common notarial culture, together with the expansion of siyāsa jurisdiction over the affairs of foreigners, brought about a much deeper legal interplay than has previously been understood. Ultimately, it is argued that Mediterranean medieval societies had evolving attitudes toward justice and diversity, and approached their own legal traditions in ways compatible with the conflict resolution, while constantly borrowing legal concepts about difference from each other.

This article analyzes the growing interest in Jews and all things Jewish in contemporary Poland—from the spectacular popularity of festivals of Jewish culture to the opening of Judaica bookstores and Jewish cuisine restaurants; from the development of Jewish studies programs at various universities and the creation of several museums to artists’ and public intellectuals’ engagements with Poland's Jewish past and Polish-Jewish relations more broadly. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, over sixty formal interviews with Jewish and non-Jewish activists, and informal conversations with participants in various Jewish-centered initiatives, I argue that this cultural phenomenon is related to the attempt by specific political and social groups to build a pluralistic society in an ethnically and denominationally homogenous nation-state. I build on the literature on nationalism and symbolic boundaries by showing that bringing back Jewish culture and “resurrecting the Jew” is a way to soften, stretch, and reshape the symbolic boundaries of the nation that the Right wants to harden and shrink using Catholicism as its main tool.

For Catholic missionaries in the early twentieth century, the only way to achieve true conversion of Timorese ancestral ritualists was the deliberate destruction of sacred lulik houses. Although Timorese allegedly participated enthusiastically in this destruction, lulik (a term commonly translated as sacred, proscribed, holy, or taboo) remains a key part of ritual practice today. This article offers a dynamic historical analysis of what may be described as a particular form of Southeast Asian animism, examining how people's relationships with sacred powers have changed in interaction with Catholic missionaries. It links the inherent ambivalence of endogenous occult powers to religious and historical transformations, teasing out the unintended consequences of the missionaries' attempts to eradicate and demonize lulik. Comparing historical and ethnographic data from the center of East Timor, it argues that, contrary to the missionaries' intentions, the cycles of destruction, withdrawal, and return that characterized mission history ended up strengthening lulik. Inspired by anthropological studies of “taboo” and “otherness,” especially the work of Mary Douglas and Valerio Valeri, this article makes visible the transformation of the sacred in relation to outside agents: when relations with foreign powers were productive, the positive sides of lulik as a source of wealth and authority were brought out; yet when outsiders posed a threat, the dangerous and threatening aspects of lulik were accentuated. This analysis allows us to highlight the relational dimensions of sacred powers and their relation to ongoing social transformations.

Situated in the borderlands of Southeast Europe, this essay explores how enduring patterns of transregional circulation and cosmopolitan sensibility unfold in the lives of dervish brotherhoods in the post-Cold War present. Following recent debates on connected histories in post-colonial studies and historical anthropology, long-standing mobile and circulating societies, and reinvigorated interest in empire, this essay focuses ethnographically on how members of a dervish brotherhood in Bosnia-Herzegovina cultivate relations with places, collectivities, and practices that exist on different temporal, spatial and geopolitical scales. These connections are centered around three modes of articulation—sonic, graphic, and genealogical—through which the dervish disciples imagine and realize transregional relations. This essay begins and concludes with a meditation on the need for a dialogue between ethnography and transregional history in order to appreciate modes of identification and imagination that go beyond the essentializing forms of collective identity that, in the post-imperial epoch, have been dominated by political and methodological nationalism.

This essay reconstructs a scandal in the fall of 1797 involving Ottoman governors, leaders of a notorious network of irregular soldiers cum bandits, and residents of the city of Filibe (Plovdiv in Bulgaria). It erupted over whether or not state officials should pacify successful bandit enterprises by co-opting their leaders. The scandal escalated into a crisis in which the large armies of the governors of Anatolia and Rumeli (the Ottoman Balkans) verged on clashing because each wanted to lead the state's lucrative war against Rumeli bandit networks. Imperial administrators issued dispatches regarding this scandal that were based on gossip and rumor circulating within the general population as well as among bandits. I draw on understandings of gossip as a social and cultural resource from linguistic anthropology to make sense of Ottoman political culture. I analyze these dispatches to uncover how the performance of these informal scripts featured prominently in correspondence with the Imperial Council and related surveillance reports, and thereby mediated resources, power, and authority among different agents of imperial violence. I show that gossip, rumor, and related forms of seemingly informal “talk” played a fundamental role in sovereign decision making. I also transpose methodologies and approaches of “history from below,” conceived by earlier generations of cultural anthropologists and historians, onto elite letters to ask new questions about information brokerage, the negotiation of power among different agents of imperial violence and their interlocutors, and the contested nature of imperial intelligence gathering and sovereignty.

This paper looks at a Persian-language documentary form called the mahzar-nama that was widely used in India between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries to narrate, represent, and record antecedents, entitlements, and injuries with a view to securing legal rights and redressing legal wrongs. Mahzars were a known documentary form in Islamic law and used by qazis (Islamic judges) in many other parts of the world, but in India they took a number of distinctive forms. The specific form of Indian mahzar-namas that I focus on here was, broadly speaking, a legal document of testimony, narrated in the first person, in a form standardized by predominantly non-Muslim scribes, endorsed in writing by the author's fellow community members and/or professional or social contacts, and notarized by a qazi's seal. This specific legal form was part of a much broader genre of declarative texts that were also known as mahzars in India. I examine the legal mahzar-namas together with the other kinds of mahzars, and situate them in relation to Indo-Islamic jurisprudential texts and Persian-language formularies. What emerges is a distinctive Indo-Islamic legal culture in contact with the wider Islamic and Persianate worlds of jurisprudence and documentary culture, but responsive to the unique socio-political formations of early modern India. I also reflect on the meanings of law, including Islamic law, for South Asians and trace the evolution of that understanding across the historical transition to colonialism.

This article examines the political role of Confucian ritual in early Japanese history. New research on early Chinese ritual has recast it as a deliberately transformative social tool, a manufactured “as if” realm in which ideal relations are played out in full knowledge of their disjunction with the real world, in an attempt to order it. This article uses this understanding of ritual to analyze Confucianism in the practice of sacred kingship in early Japan, and by contrast in Tang China. I reexamine a number of well-known primary sources of early Japanese history in comparison with parallel Chinese sources of the Tang dynasty. Placing that comparison within the context of new developments in the historiography of China, Korea, and Japan, I argue that Confucianism's comparatively weak ritual positioning in Japan disabled its capacity to legitimate imperial rule there. The early Japanese state thus lacked one of the primary ritual tools employed in other parts of premodern East Asia to legitimate the power of new emperors and kings. I thus unpack one component in a wider process of East Asian cultural reproduction, which in the case of Japan contributed to the emergence of a state ultimately not ruled through imperial institutions or the emperor for most of its premodern history. The bifurcation of ritual and political power in sacred kingship, a seemingly geographically and temporally widespread phenomenon currently studied in various global histories, is explained in this article in terms of complex processes of cultural reproduction and transmission.

This article considers the question of collective identity formation in the Arab Gulf by looking at the distinctive ways in which the genealogies of the dominant kinship collective of the United Arab Emirates, the Banī Yās confederation, have been represented by that country's cultural and heritage-making institutions. I look comparatively at two high profile, state-sponsored, Emirati genealogical projects, one a site, and the other a text, and investigate their significance from a historical and ethnographic perspective. I find that the relatively weak religious gravity of the United Arab Emirates allows for unorthodox representations of kinship at the national level, that women do not necessarily buy into these representations yet contribute in their own ways to a kinship nationalist discourse, and that genealogy is nonetheless a particularly fraught idiom for binding together an ethnically heterogeneous society like the Emirates. Approaching the public representation of genealogies through an integrative framework, this article sheds light on important themes in modern Emirati and broader Gulf social and political life, including the complicated place of religious norms in a newly fashioned Muslim nation, the influence of gender on conceptions of kinship and nationhood, and the challenge ethnic heterogeneity poses to an Arab ethno-national project.