Indigenous management of otherness and ‘alterity’ has increasingly become a central theme for anthropologists working in Amazonia and broader lowland South America. Much of the literature concerning this theme has focused on relations between specific Indigenous groups and otherly beings (whether human or non-human) in the present. These contemporary contexts of relations with otherness enable new readings and interpretations of comparable historically documented engagements, such as in contexts of missionisation, and clearer understandings of ongoing ethnographic interactions in the region. Relations between Indigenous people, outsiders, and non-human beings reveal conceptual differences and provide new interpretive means for understanding both continuities and discontinuities in historical and contemporary encounters across broader lowland South America.

On 23 July 1980, Vietnamese pilot Phạm Tuân became the first Asian and the first citizen of a developing nation to fly in space when he participated in the Soyuz 37 mission to the Salyut space station. This elaborately staged, hugely expensive piece of cosmic theatre underlined Eastern bloc mastery of the technologies of space flight at the same time it emphasized international cooperation, social and racial inclusiveness, and engagement with the developing world. As much as Phạm Tuân’s flight formed part of the Eastern bloc’s global diplomatic strategies, it was also central to a vision of the new Socialist Republic of Vietnam as part of a revolutionary vanguard, defeating the forces of capitalism and imperialism and progressing towards a modern, industrialized, and prosperous future under the leadership of the Communist party. This chapter explores how representations of Phạm Tuân ’s historic space flight drew from conventional Soviet representations of cosmonauts and space flight, but also reflected particular Vietnamese cultures and contexts. The result sheds light on the important, but often overlooked cultural dimension of state power in late socialist Vietnam, and highlights not just the limits but also the potential to create a coherent, shared vision of the nation.

This chapter initially begins with a narrative concerning how the author first came to Surama Village in Guyana in 2012. After discussing the author’s path to the village, as well as the author’s positionality in the field, the chapter describes the landscape of the Makushi people in Guyana. It provides an overview of the relational modes (particularly kinship and shamanism) through which Makushi people in Surama and beyond have engaged with outsiders (both Indigenous and non-Indigenous) in the past and present. The chapter then summarises historical Makushi encounters with European colonisation involving the Dutch, English, Portuguese, and Spanish during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as Anglican missionisation during the mid nineteenth century. It provides a brief history of Surama Village, which is the Makushi village that is centred throughout the book. The chapter closes by providing context and background for contemporary transformations among the Makushi people in Surama Village.

The first chapter sets out the historical context of Arabic learning across the early modern western Indian Ocean by discussing people, practices, and places that constituted this field from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries and how scholarship has engaged with this transregional formation so far. It explores Arabic and Persian narrative texts, such as collective biographies, from different regions of the western Indian Ocean to show how learned groups increasingly traversed the western Indian Ocean for scholarly pursuits during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the centres of learning and text transmission that emerged and shifted over time, as well as the incentives such as patronage, career progression, and scholarly sociability that generated these mobilities. Contemporaries reflected on the transoceanic cultural connections that brought communities of the different regions together. From the sixteenth to the seventeenth centuries those transoceanic entanglements continued to shape this world, but changing political landscapes had an impact on the conditions of a transoceanic field of Arabic learning.

Public memory denotes how groups recall the past and how those ideas take shape, evolve, and prompt differences or agreement about history’s events and actors. Examining first ladies through their tenures in office, memoirs, interviews, historic sites, and memorials often reveal how they wanted to be remembered. Biographies, dramatic films, documentaries, and historical fiction about them can determine how presidential wives’ legacies are preserved or morph in the public psyche over time. Siena College Research Institute’s scholar polls and Ranker online surveys rate first ladies among historians and the general public. This chapter applies such evidence to first ladies Abigail Adams, Dolley Madison, Mary Lincoln, Edith Wilson, Eleanor Roosevelt, Mamie Eisenhower, Jacqueline Kennedy, Betty Ford, Rosalynn Carter, Nancy Reagan, and Barbara Bush. Each exemplifies a variety of legacies—both positive and negative—and reflects how memorializations and public memories evolve.

This chapter examines the aftermath of early Anglican missionisation to Makushi groups. It begins with a story that was told to the author of a past Makushi leader described by a villager in Surama as a false prophet. The chapter then discusses various prophetic movements that arose among the Makushi and neighbouring Indigenous groups during the 1840s and afterwards which culminated in the alleluia religion. These movements used material and immaterial objects acquired and appropriated from the missionaries for new purposes. Many of these movements emphasised a central theme of transformation, which was often described in colonial sources in terms of Indigenous people becoming ‘white’ in one form or another. The movements combined resistance to colonialism with Christianity, shamanism, and sometimes also sorcery. In this context, shamanism became a means for contacting the Christian God. The chapter foregrounds a shamanic relational mode that structures interactions with outsiders among the Makushi.

US first ladies have exercised a complicated kind of activism when it comes to women’s rights. Some have acted as vocal advocates to insist that women’s equality should be a national priority. Others have used their platform more quietly to intervene on behalf of women’s rights. Still others have held and promoted views that have contradicted, undermined, or altogether avoided efforts to advance women’s rights. This chapter traces how US first ladies have addressed and influenced the prevailing women’s rights issues of their day, with a focus on two national campaigns: a federal amendment for women’s suffrage and a federal amendment for equal rights. By engaging or avoiding the debates surrounding women’s suffrage and the ERA, these women stretched the political and rhetorical boundaries of their platform and shaped public understanding about the ongoing struggle for women’s equality in the United States.