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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

Church construction was one of the most challenging, and most political, tasks undertaken by medieval cities. Comparing examples from across Europe reveals profound differences, however, in both the architecture of politics and the politics of architecture; that is, how building projects were administered and how their administration shaped their socio-political significance. Although ranging across the continent, this article is centered on construction in two representative cities: Vienna and London. While the former had a small number of churches, all under the direct control of the mayor and council, the latter had over a hundred, each overseen by locally appointed officers. In Vienna, church construction was, thus, an important field of activity for the city government, which oversaw the work and celebrated its own leadership of the project; in London, it lay outside civic control and offered local opportunities for domination by wealthy families. This difference can be found across the continent, separating the large, old cities of England, northern France, Spain, and the Low Countries, which could have numerous churches, from smaller towns and cities both in these places and across the rest of central, northern, and southern Europe, which typically had a single, major parish church and only a few subordinate ones. This article considers the implications of these two contrasting models—centralized and decentralized, civic and parochial, high government and local politics—on how architectural production functioned as a field of political activity and how church building shaped local distributions and articulations of power in medieval Europe.

In this article, we investigate the reasons behind the puzzling enthusiastic reception of a book about Finland’s national development by Turkish nationalist intellectuals in the early Republic of Turkey. Published in Turkish in 1928, the developmental model laid out in Petrov’s The Country of White Lilies resonated with the Turkish intelligentsia and has remained a popular book in Turkey throughout the twentieth century, and even today. First, we compare the fictionalized developmental model presented by Petrov in his book with Finnish development under the Russian Empire, before its independence in 1917. Second, we show that this reception was largely based on a comparison of Turkey and Finland’s geopolitical positions in global imperial politics, and a constructed racial affinity between the two nations in the minds of Turkish readers. Third, we argue that this national developmental model served three ideological purposes; distancing the Turkish Republic from the Ottoman Empire, showing the developmental capacity of nations outside the linear and paternalistic developmental model proposed by Western European empires, and last, presenting a model that glosses over Ottoman-Turkish state violence and ethnic cleansing, as well as democratic processes, as irrelevant to considerations of progress and development. Finally, we discuss the implications of our study for re-evaluating the sociological literature on nation formation, largely taking its “model cases” (Krause 2021) from the Western European experience, through a more encompassing inter-imperial approach (Doyle 2014).

Sociolinguists study the valorization of specific languages as a ‘language ideology’. Contemporary nation-states frequently identify with and promote specific languages. Such linguistic nationalism is a language ideology, but not the only one. This article examines earlier millennia to uncover the dynamics by which imperial systems managed linguistic diversity and how and why they favored and disfavored particular languages and scripts. I analyze states and empires as coalitions of interest groups. I invoke the scribal masters of imperial chanceries and archives as one such group. I develop a heuristic framework (or “model”) to understand the interactions of language and power that unfolded across West and South Asia. I begin with a great empire, the Persian, that did not employ its founders’ ethnic speech but instead refined an older state language in governance. That choice entrenched an interest group that endured through a thousand years till displaced by Arab conquest after 660 CE. But a simpler ‘New Persian’ revived in the eastern Iranian lands. Turkish and Mongol conquest elites emerging from Inner Asia carried this language and its scribes into their growing domains in the Indian subcontinent. I then explain why the non-Persian Mughals in the 1550s selected Persian as their state language and rejected the constant pressure to use Urdu creole. Mughal rule left behind a tenacious Persian-writing elite that the early British empire employed. Finally, I explain the state processes behind the colonial-era decline of Persianate administration and the emergence of a new linguistic politics in colonial India.