The last several decades have seen both a renewed anthropological interest in the possibility of cross-cultural comparison and the rapid rise of the anthropology of Christianity. These two trends should be mutually supportive. One of the promises of the anthropology of Christianity from the outset has been that it will allow people to compare how processes of Christianization have unfolded in different parts of the world and to consider how the resulting Christian configurations are similar to and different from one another. But to this point, relatively little detailed comparative empirical work on Christianity has appeared. Our aim here is to contribute to remedying this situation. Drawing on recent theoretical work on comparison, we set comparative work on Christianity on a new footing. Empirically, we examine how processes of Evangelical Christianization have transformed notions of the self in one Amazonian society (Wari') and two unrelated societies in Melanesia (Bosavi and Urapmin). We define the self for comparative purposes as composed of ideas of the mind or inner self, the body, and relations between people. In our three cases, Christianization has radically transformed these ideas, emphasizing the inner self and downplaying the importance of the body and of social relations. While our empirical conclusions are not wholly unexpected, the extent to which the details of our three cases speak comparatively to one another, and the extent to which the broad processes of Christian transformation they involve are similar, are surprising and lay a promising foundation for future comparative work in the anthropology of Christianity.

Between 1895 and 1945 Japan assembled one of the largest empires in modern world history. It vanished abruptly in the summer of 1945 at the end of the Second World War, and seemed to leave no trace in public consciousness. Historians, too, have portrayed postwar Japan as characterized by a virtual erasure of the imperial past. This article draws on recent scholarship to argue that things were more complicated than that. While references to the imperial past indeed dwindled after about 1960, immediate forgetting did not exhaust the reactions by individuals and interest groups. Some social milieus experienced the dissolution of the empire much more profoundly than official discourse would suggest. Since the mid-1990s, Japan's imperial past has reemerged as a major field of historical inquiry and a more general concern in public debate. In this article I situate the dialectic of remembering and forgetting within larger processes and transformations of the postwar order in East Asia, in particular the American occupation and the emergence of the Cold War.

After a period of neglect, civilization as a concept seems once more to have regained popularity among a number of historians and social scientists. Why? What is the appeal of civilization today? And might the return of civilization also herald a return to the work of Arnold Toynbee, once regarded as the towering figure of civilizational analysis? This paper considers the history of the concept of civilization, and argues for the continuing importance and relevance of Toynbee's multi-volume A Study of History within that tradition. The claim is that, whatever the weaknesses of Toynbee's general approach, the civilizational perspective he adopts allows him to cast an illuminating light on many important historical questions. Moreover his belief in the “philosophical contemporaneity” and equal value of all civilizations should make him peculiarly attractive to those many today who reject Eurocentrism and who are increasingly persuaded of the need to consider the total human experience from earliest times up to the present.

The expansion of the Ford Motor Company into Soviet Russia has been understood as part of a unidirectional spread of American economic power and cultural forms abroad following the First World War. This essay looks beyond the automobiles and manufacturing methods sent from Ford facilities in Detroit to the emerging Soviet automobile industry to examine multidirectional migrations of workers between Russia and the United States that underlay but sometimes collided with Ford's system. Workers, managers, engineers, and cultural, technical, and disciplinary knowledge moved back and forth between factories in Soviet Russia and the United States. Efforts to define, track, and shape workers in both countries as Americans, Russians, or Bolsheviks were integral to the construction of the products and methods that Ford sold. But many workers fell in between and contested these classifications and they often defied company attempts to create an efficient and homogeneous American workforce. In Russia, too, more than Soviet and American automobiles were produced: people and ideas were created that crossed and blurred boundaries between “American” and “Soviet.” There, “Fordizm” became a popular watchword among Soviet commentators and workers as a near-synonym for industrialization, mass production, and efficiency. Many saw it as a potentially valuable component of a new socialist world. These multidirectional movements, recorded in Ford Motor Company archives and related documents, suggest that rather than separate and alternative projects, Ford's burgeoning system to transform manufacturing and workers' lives in Detroit was linked to the Soviet revolutionary project to recreate life and work.

Studies of European colonialism have long documented how colonial states served as incubators of nationhood, yet the literature has limited its analytic scope largely to the encounters and ethnic mixings that took place within the territorial boundaries of colonies. This article examines a hitherto understudied phenomenon, the colonial state's trans-border engagement with its subjects who left the territorial unit of the colony and its impact on the contested development of diasporic nationhood. My empirical focus is the shifting trajectories of the classification struggles over Korean migrants in Manchuria during Japan's occupation of Korea. I identify the tumultuous and uneven development of specific legal, organizational, and bureaucratic infrastructures that helped the colonial state extend its trans-border reach and define and identify these migrants as “its own,” often against suspicion, sabotage, hostility, and resistance on the part of other states, indigenous populations, or migrants themselves. I argue that the colonial state's extensive and intensive transborder engagement provided a critical institutional scaffolding for the imagined community of the Korean nation, which came to be conceived as transcending the geographical boundary of the colony. This article contributes to the comparative studies of empire, migration, diaspora, and nationhood formation by challenging the prevalent sedentary bias of the existing literature, by elucidating the critical infrastructural underpinning of the formation of diasporic nationhood, and by extending the horizon of comparison to the political dynamics and long-term ramifications engendered by the migration of, not only metropolitan settlers, but also colonial subjects, within and beyond the ambit of the empire.

Since democratization, Indonesia has played host to a curious form of ethnic conflict: militant vigilante groups attacking a small, socially marginal religious sect called Ahmadiyah. While most scholars attribute the violence to intolerance by radicals on the periphery of society, this article proposes a different reading based on an intertwined reconfiguration of Indonesian nationalism and religion. I suggest that Indonesia contains a common but overlooked example of “godly nationalism,” an imagined community bound by a shared theism and mobilized through the state in cooperation with religious organizations. This model for nationalism is modern, plural, and predicated on the exclusion of religious heterodoxy. Newly collected archival and ethnographic material reveal how the state's and Muslim civil society's long-standing exclusion of Ahmadiyah and other heterodox groups has helped produce the “we-feeling” that helps constitute contemporary Indonesian nationalism. I conclude by intervening in a recent debate about religious freedom to suggest that conflicts over blasphemy reflect Muslim civil society's effort to delineate an incipient model of nationalism and tolerance while avoiding the templates of liberal secularism or theocracy.

This paper is a reinterpretation of the origins of the Cold War from a novel point of view: Soviet foreign economic policy. It questions two fundamental concepts that have formed the basis for our understanding of that conflict: Soviet autarky, and bipolarity. Soviet autarky has been the basis for an understanding of a “war” that, although never fought on military terms, needed two sides to be so conceptualized. Just as enemies in war can have no areas of meaningful cooperation, so did academics require of these Cold War rivals an all-encompassing enmity. To do so they came to consider the Soviet Union a camp apart, unconnected and hostile to the capitalist order. Scholars required a Soviet Union politically committed to autarky. Using archives from Moscow, however, the article argues that the Soviet Union was not autarkic by political choice and, at length, not autarkic at all. It followed a similar trajectory in international economic engagement as that of the countries in the so-called free world, and what's more, sought to do so. In other words, when one looks at the political economy of Soviet economic relations, the conceptual framework of bipolarity that sustains much of the work on the Cold War becomes difficult to maintain. Instead, I argue, an immensely powerful liberal world order acted on the Soviet Union in ways that should be familiar to scholars of global capitalism.

One of the most salient features of the medieval Mediterranean is that it was a zone of intense interaction and long-term cohabitation of members of various ethno-religious communities whose relations are usually conceived of as fundamentally adversarial. Yet Christians, Muslims, and Jews lived amongst each other in both the Christian- and Muslim-ruled Mediterranean, even during the era of the crusades. Typically, such relationships have been presented as either fundamentally hostile, or cordial, and as related to the “tolerance” that host cultures were inclined to demonstrate as a consequence of their own religious orientation. This paper takes a different, phenomenological approach by focusing on a specific manifestation of this interaction: the emergence of out-group political elites in confessionally defined societies. Through the medium of three case studies—a powerful Jew in Islamic Spain, a powerful Muslim in Norman Sicily and a powerful Coptic Christian in Fatimid Egypt—I demonstrate that the status of minority elites was related to concrete political circumstances grounded in the particular environment of the region, and that, despite cultural differences that might have distinguished them, these societies developed near-identical strategies for engaging with minority elites. The language of religious polemic, exclusion, and marginalization was present, but it tended to serve as a post factum rationalization for repression rather than its cause, and tended to be deployed decisively only in certain circumstances. This provides new insights not only into Muslim-Christian-Jewish relations, but the fundamental nature of Mediterranean history and society.

This paper introduces the concept of “nation-state science” to describe the scientific work of ethnoracial classification that made possible the ideal of the homogenous nation-state. Swedish scientists implicitly defined their nation for Continental Europeans when they explicitly created knowledge about the “Lapps” (today's Sámi/Saami). Nation was coupled to state through such ethnoracial categories, the content of which were redefined as Sweden's geopolitical power rose and fell. These shifts sparked methodological innovations to redefine the Lapp, making it a durable category whose content was plastic enough to survive paradigm shifts in political and scientific thought. Idiosyncratic Swedish concerns thus became universalized through the scientific diffusion of empirical knowledge about Lapps and generalizable anthropometric techniques to distinguish among populations. What Sweden lost during the nineteenth century in terms of geopolitical power, it gained in terms of biopower: the knowledge and control of internal populations made possible by its widely adopted anthropometric innovations. Nation-state science helps unpack the interrelationships between state-building, nation-making, and scientific labor.

Over the last fifteen years, hundreds of Muslim citizens claiming Armenian descent have submitted petitions to Turkey's secular legal authorities asking for changes to both their name and religion in the public record. In this article, I discuss the name-change cases of Armenian return converts to further the debates on Turkish secularism and to critique the body of scholarship that welcomes the governing Justice and Development Party's legal reforms as a measure of growing religious tolerance. In the article's first part I analyze the historical foundations of the regulation of religion and name changes in Turkey by fully and explicitly engaging with law as a site where minority difference is constructed, authorized, and challenged. The article's second half offers an alternative reading of how tolerance functions as an aspect of the Justice and Development Party's reforms. Based on my investigation of specific legal forms of argument that converted Armenians and their lawyers put forward in today's secular courts, and how legal officers of the state respond to them, I demonstrate that legal reform has shifted the definition of religion as a marker of minority difference in legal space. I argue that the historical context of name change and religious conversion forces the limits of existing understandings of freedom of religion in Turkey, and that this renders visible historical injustices that cannot be resolved simply through the notion of “religious tolerance” in the courts.

This paper examines the workings of kinship and marriage idioms in transnational political imaginary in the central Mediterranean to challenge current academic reliance on the notion of fraternity as the symbolic building block of both national and global political relations. Since the 1960s, the Sicilian town of Mazara del Vallo and its fishing fleet have become entwined in intensifying interactions with Tunisia and the wider Maghreb. These interactions—specifically the Tunisian-Italian “Fish War” and construction of a trans-Mediterranean natural gas pipeline between North Africa and Europe—rejuvenated the old geopolitical imagination of the Mediterranean and helped produce the central Mediterranean as a spatio-temporal field of political action. Italians and Tunisians perceived each other as related, and staged the trans-Mediterranean infrastructural project as a sort of European-African (cross-cousin) marriage. I begin by examining the tensions between two central kinship idioms—fraternity and cousinage—in current understandings of transnational relations. I then discuss the growing prevalence of a transnational political cosmology of affinity across difference over that of shared descent and sameness that characterize national alignments. I conclude by examining how Tunisians and Sicilians in Mazara today cast each other in roles deriving from segmentary schemes they share, but on the content of which they disagree. By applying concepts associated with kinship and marriage studies to recent Mediterranean history, I show how segmentation, a concept anthropologists abandoned when they crossed the Mediterranean on their way into Europe, can help us understand transnational politics.

Assimilation makes new members of a group by changing particular characteristics of non-members to reflect the fundamentals of collective belonging. Gaining the qualities for inclusion in one community typically involves losing at least some features that confer acceptance in another. However, scholars have generally not acknowledged assimilation as a process of loss. In part, this gap bespeaks a larger tendency to overlook the influence of emigration on national identity in population-exporting states (compared to the vast literature on immigration and national identity in population-receiving countries). This article analyzes discourses of assimilation concerning Japanese emigrants as a case study of how the ways in which members are understood to leave the national community delimits the bases of belonging for those who remain. Historically, Japanese ideologies of assimilation have been most contested in Brazil, where the largest Japanese diaspora in the West sought to reconcile patriotism and the expectations of the Japanese government with local nation-building agendas. After World War II, many emigrants and their descendants in Brazil refused to acknowledge Japan's surrender. This crisis inspired the first study of the Japanese diaspora ever conducted by a Japan-based social scientist. Izumi Seiichi's work in cultural anthropology helped to build Japan's new identity as a “peace state.” Subsequent generations of Japanese scholars continued to study the assimilation of the diaspora, recategorized as “Nikkei,” as a foil for “Japaneseness.” Their ethnic conception of national membership remains influential today, even as Japan transitions from a population exporter to a land of immigrants, including the Nikkei.

Ratu Kidul is a legendary spirit queen who plays a significant role in Javanese political ontologies and has come to be an icon of Indonesian public culture. In this paper, I trace the history of her mediation as image via paint, photography, television, film, and the Internet in order to ask how this queen of the unseen world came to be so visible a feature of the postcolonial landscape and to interrogate the nature and effects of this visibility. I argue that becoming accessible via the image was necessary to her continued political agency within a mass-mediated national public sphere in which visibility and circulation are preconditions of political recognition. Yet popular reception of images of Ratu Kidul as auratic conduits of her spiritual power reveal the continued presence of a visuality within Indonesian national modernity that runs counter to dominant logics of transparency. I offer an ethnographic examination of images of Ratu Kidul across a range of media, attending to their material qualities as mediums by which the spirit queen appears and circulates. Broadly, the essay argues that national political orders and their public spheres cannot be understood apart from a history of visual mediation.

This article uses commentary on and consumption of popular music as a lens to explore how Peruvian immigrants in Spain experience new notions of belonging and alterity as they tack between official Spanish discourses about difference and otherness and distinct notions of unity and sameness that circulate within the country's wider Latin American community. I examine the uneven, tentative emergence of a local Latino identity, and how this formation compares to the tenets that accrue to the formation found in the United States. I explain how the naturalization of this new and alien way of organizing national difference, in concert with native Spanish ideas about European modernity and the need to suppress ethnicity tout court, tends to marginalize distinctive experiences valued by indigenous and mestizo Peruvians from the country's Andean region. I show how they evade the homogenizing tendencies of Latino discourse, bypass native Spanish opposition to the very notion of deep difference, and seek out spaces for asserting difference. Considered also are challenges faced by a country that has undergone rapid and recent multicultural change, even as it seeks to become part of a European project that citizens view widely as an effort to transcend divisive particularity.

Buddhism contributed to the culture and politics of thirteenth-century Eurasian intellectual exchange, depositing literary, artistic, and architectural traces subsequently eclipsed by layers of Islamic and Eurocentric history. Within extensive cross-continental networks of diplomatic and commercial activity, Ilkhanid Buddhism and the Buddhist revival of which it was a part drew serious attention among contemporary travelers, scholars, and statesmen including Ibn Taymiyah, Roger Bacon, and Rashid al-Din. This article argues that awareness of a Buddhist scholarly and political elite in the Muslim heartland, with its center at Tabriz, generated a historically significant Eurasian Buddhist discourse during a critical passage in the turn to modernity.

The public and professional significance of precolonial History as a discipline has declined markedly across much of sub-Saharan Africa over the last forty years: History has been both demonized—depicted as deeply dangerous and the source of savagery and instability—and portrayed as irrelevant when set alongside the needs for economic modernization and “development.” This paper explores this trend in the context of Uganda, with a particular focus on the kingdom of Buganda, chosen for its particularly rich oral and literary heritage and the thematic opportunities offered by its complex and troubled twentieth century. The paper aims to explore how “the past”—with a focus on the precolonial era—has been understood there in several distinct periods. These include the era of imperial partition and the formation of the Uganda Protectorate between the 1880s and the 1910s; competition for political space within colonial society to the 1950s; decolonization and the struggle to create new nationhood in the mid-twentieth century; and political crises and partial recovery since the 1970s. Ultimately, the paper seeks to assess the role of History in a modern African society vis-à-vis the developmental agendas and notions of economic growth against which African “progress” and prospects for “stability” are currently measured.