My goal in this paper is to revisit a classic text that raises the most contemporary of issues: Marco Polo's stereotyped, highly influential, and highly prejudicial description of the “Old Man of the Mountain,” a text of virtually mythic status and power. Having invoked the category of “myth,” however, in a context where it is not commonly applied, it is useful to indicate how I use this term and why it seems appropriate. To begin, I would reject three widely accepted notions. First, myths are not sacred narratives. Although many myths claim sacred status, in this they misrecognize their own nature, for they are human stories, like any other. They simply make more exaggerated claims to a more elevated kind of authority. Second, myths are not collective narratives or the speech of any group as a whole. Rather, they are stories that are told and retold in countless variants. Often the authorship of these variants is unacknowledged, forgotten, or deliberately hidden, but in its details each variant advances the specific interests of those responsible for its production, revision, and circulation. These anonymous agents and absent authors misrepresent themselves—and those for whom they speak—as the group as a whole. Third, myths are neither false stories, nor true, but simply stories that claim to speak with authority about issues of deep importance. Sometimes these claims succeed and sometimes they fail, and the same story can change its status over time from myth to fable and back again, since such status is a function of reception.

The Quincentennial of Columbus's Discovery of the Americas has come and gone. Some people celebrated, others protested. The Discovery has been called either “The greatest event since the creation of the world, save the incarnation and death of Him who created it” (Francisco Lopez de Gomera writing in 1552), or the greatest disaster in world history. Columbus is either a saint (who was actually proposed for canonization), or he is a sinner responsible for genocide. Can one even say that Christopher Columbus discovered America when there were already millions of people living in these lands? Did he discover America when he thought he had found a new route to Asia? The debates are interminable and the issues have become so politicized that an informed and informative discussion has been all but impossible; one steps warily into the fray. Yet, despite the voluminous literature by and about Columbus, Americans outside the rarefied circle of Columbus scholars still know little about the man and his mission. In this paper I discuss some of the little known religious beliefs that underpinned the “Enterprise of the Indies,” for I think they have the potential to change fundamentally our assessment of Columbus and relocate some of the responsibility for the consequences of the encounter.

On 12 June 1798, Napoleon Bonaparte took control of the islands of Malta. The Knights Hospitaller surrendered with little fight, and the independently recognized polity of the Knights of St. John, the last bastion of the medieval chivalric orders, fell. Founded in the Middle Ages as a military order created both to carry the sword against Islam and provide shelter and medical care for pilgrims to the Holy Land, the Knights had by the end of the eighteenth century become an anachronism. The Ottoman Empire, the last of the great Muslim powers of the Mediterranean, had long been considered little more than a pawn in larger political struggles on the Continent. The practical application of crusading as church policy had long fallen out of favor. As a military force, the Order was no longer of any consequence. The Grand Council that directed the Order consisted for the most part of Maltese or Italian nobles of little formal training in the strategy and tactics of “modern” warfare. Historians of the late eighteenth century had come to the conclusion that the crusades of the Middle Ages were little more than the fanatical hate mongering of an unenlightened time. As Edward Gibbon wrote: “The principle of the crusades was a savage fanaticism; and the most important effects were analogous to the cause…. The belief of the Catholics was corrupted by new legends…. The active spirit of the Latins preyed on the vitals of their reason and religion…. The lives and labours of millions, which were buried in the East, would have been more profitably employed in the improvement of their native country….”

Once it was thought that kinship was the preeminent subject of anthropology, one about which considerable progress was possible. “Kinship” itself was, for some, fairly unproblematic. Thus Radcliffe-Brown (1952: 46) asserted that, “if any society establishes a system of corporations on the basis of kinship … it must necessarily adopt a system of unilineal reckoning of succession,” and Fortes (1959: 209) announced that, “Kinship, being an irreducible factor in social structure has an axiomatic validity.” However, in the late 1960s and early 1970s one leading figure of anthropology after the other declared that there really was no such thing as kinship. “The process of making kinship into a single theoretical entity seems to me no better than the invention of ‘totemism’” (Terray 1969: 135–36; 1972: 140–41). “There is no such thing as kinship, and it follows that there can be no such thing as kinship theory” (Needham 1971: 5). “‘Kinship,’ like totemism, the matrilineal complex and matriarchy, is a non-subject since it does not exist in any culture known to man” (Schneider 1972: 59). “The whole notion of ‘a kinship system’ as an isolable structure of sentiments, norms, or categorical distinctions is misleading because it assumes, or seems to assume, that the ordering principles of a society are partitionable into natural kinds only adventitiously connected” (Geertz and Geertz 1975: 156). For various political and intellectual reasons, “kinship” appeared to many to have died out as an area of analytic interest within anthropology during the 1970s and 1980s, despite many indications to the contrary. Now Godelier has made a major effort to revive attention to matters usually bunched under the phrase “kinship,” and, at least as concerns French popular taste, seems largely to have succeeded. For him kinship has not died, but instead transformed itself both in fact and “theoretically.”

Historians of Europe may be generally aware of the former significance of Celtic child-fostering, so prominently documented in the law books and legends of medieval Ireland. Yet there is no comprehensive survey of such fosterage from a comparative historical perspective, nor has its archival documentation been collated for analysis. The present essay aims to redress this neglect: it reviews extant evidence of Celtic fosterage in the British Isles, examined with reference to comparable institutions of adoptive kinship documented throughout western Eurasia, which comprised some of its scarcely recognized “elementary structures” of familial clientage and feudatory state formation (cf. Guerreau-Jalabert 1981; 1999; Mitterauer 2006).

It seems remarkable how often we call “myths” the kind of arbitrary constructs in other peoples' worldview that we tend to attribute to the nature of things in our own case. Double standards may be involved, of course; but it could also be the case that one tends to miss the semiotic essence of the cultural construct one calls “reality.” As every anthropologist knows, one's most cherished cultural assumptions tend to remain implicit; otherwise put, worldview is largely unconscious. This paper explores the possibility of plumbing unconscious aspects of one's own culture in order to assess what some might call—regarding other cultures—the mythic underpinnings of worldview.

“What do you really want in German East Africa, Herr Professor?” was a question asked of the anthropologist Karl Weule by more than a few of his fellow passengers on board a ship bound for the German colony that is today Tanzania, in 1906. At least this was what Weule himself recalled after he returned from a journey during which he was caught up, and participated in, the counterinsurgency operations that followed one of the greatest anti-colonial uprisings that Africa had ever seen, the Maji Maji uprising. One elegant woman, Weule wrote, demanded: “And what do you want, Herr Professor, from all these tribes? Simply to collect for your museum in Leipzig? Or does the anthropology of today also have other, higher goals?” Anthropology did indeed, Weule explained, have “other, higher goals”: “The museum you speak of, my dearest, exists out in reality, as even the most hard-hearted Philistine would have to admit. … But how will anthropology be able to assert its much-contested status as a science, when it knows nothing higher and better than simply to bring together bows, arrows, spears, and thousands of other things? This collecting and preserving is really just … the elementary branch of our work. The other, higher part is the study [Aufnahme] of mental culture [geistige Kulturbesitzes].”

Could Britons in India commit murder? More precisely, could they be prosecuted and sentenced for doing so? As these epigraphs suggest, the Raj was deeply preoccupied with elaborating minute taxonomies of violence and death. In a variety of ways, British violence toward indigenes was made an object of policy initiatives by the Government of India. Defining violence, both indigenous and foreign, was one key task of the Raj, along with clarifying the boundary between legitimate and illegitimate violence. But this boundary shifted constantly over the colonial period, and indeed, it has continued to do so ever since. Given the extensive legal violence of colonial conquest, when and why were specific acts of white violence defined as murder?

Since the 1990s, a transnational network of activists and organizations has played a critical role in new perspectives on rural development and land rights. The individuals and groups that constitute this network are linked by the issues of environmental conservation, social justice, and indigenous peoples' advocacy. This network forms a loose-knit set of overlapping alliances, which have pushed for substantial changes in how international agencies and state governments conceptualize and operationalize plans for development, especially in the developing world. This network challenges many long-held notions, including those of cultural citizenship, individual and group rights, and the state's role in social and environmental projects. Before the 1990s, dominant assumptions about the inevitability of state-led modernity meant that scholars and organizations generally accepted the role of the state as a force of assimilation and social betterment. Now, however, with a concomitant rise in indigenous identity politics and new urban-rural linkages for social justice, many academics and activists have pointed to the negative effects of state policy. In turn, a rising number of actors now champion moves for state decentralization, and the creation and expansion of community-based management. During this time of rapid change, scholars and activists have played critical roles in shaping new international configurations and have contributed to the rise of community-based rights.

The ten authors in this volume address critical concerns about the economics of civil war in Sri Lanka, including how prolonged war affects economic development, why people volunteer to join the military during wartime, and who is benefiting economically from this violence. The collected essays provide analytical and methodological insight for scholars studying conflict and war throughout the world, and its authors question the economics of the current war on terrorism.