The region of Khevsureti in Georgia is the historic home of a group of Kartvelian highlanders known as Khevsurs. As Khevsureti’s popularity as a mountain tourist destination has grown, so too has the popularity of an old story that asserts the Khevsurs are the descendants of a lost band of Crusaders. For 200 years, this meme has manifested itself in books about the region, newspaper articles, the work of a few scholars, and now much Internet discussion. The growing collection of cases has created the illusion of an unconsolidated quantity of evidence and many commentators have since taken the story to be a credible theory or actual legend. A systematic deconstruction and analysis of this story shows how this set of details initially formed, grew, and spread based on a few unreliable accounts in circulation beginning in the early 19th century. This article offers a case study of how such memes form and propagate; it provides an additional example of a Western tendency to romanticize and project elements of their own ethnicities into the Caucasus; and it examines this false history in terms of cultural appropriation and the relationship between ethnicity and narrative, adding to the literature on invented histories and pseudoarchaeology. Finally, this careful deconstruction and repudiation will help remove this story from serious discussions of cultural heritage in Khevsureti and show how historical memes and popular examples of pseudoarcheology spread and capture imaginations.

This article studies the famine of 1921–1922 and 1932–1933 in the Southern Russian regions. Famine as a socio-historical phenomenon is considered in the context of the relationship of state power, the Cossacks, and the Church. The authors reveal the general and special features of the famine emergence and analyze the differences in the state policies of 1921–1922 and 1932–1933. Considerable attention is paid to the survival strategies of the Don, Kuban and Terek populations. Slaughtering and eating draft animals, transfer from the state places of work to the private campaigns and cooperatives, moving to shores and banks, and eating river and sea food became widespread methods of overcoming famine. Asocial survival strategies included cannibalism, abuse of powers, bribery, and more. In 1921–1922, the Russian Orthodox Church fought actively against the famine. In 1932–1933, the Church was weakened and could not provide significant assistance to the starving population. The article was written based on declassified documents from the state and departmental archives, including criminal investigations and analytical materials of the Obedinjonnoe gosudarstvennoe politicheskoe upravlenie [Joint State Political Directorate] (OGPU) recording the attitudes of minds. Also used are personal stories—namely, interviews with eyewitnesses of the famine of 1932–1933, recorded by the Kuban folklorists in the territory of the Krasnodar and Stavropol Krai.

Premised on elite accommodation, consociations provide little consideration for citizens’ input on institutional change. Likewise, valuable analyses of cross-community political participation in divided societies have emerged in recent years, yet whether the relationship between the grassroot and formal political process has broader consequences remains to be fully explored. The article examines the conditions in which nonelectoral participation takes place and the ways in which actors involved therein negotiate constraints for continuous cross-community mobilization. The structure of political systems and the nature of deep divisions in Northern Ireland and Federation of Bosnia-Herzegovina invite a comparison of the consequences of nonelectoral political participation in these two illustrative case studies. The article concludes that while the formal political context shapes the likelihood of engagement on a cross-community basis, whether nonelectoral participation changes the structure of political decision-making depends on the willingness and ability of those involved to cooperate with formal institutional politics.

The current article explores the distribution of PP-adverbs, such as this month, this year etc., within English determiner phrases. Examples extracted from English newspapers show that PP-adverbs surprisingly separate head nouns from their PP-complements (i.e. of-phrases), e.g. the election this month of the first female president. At other times, PP-adverbs follow PP-complements, e.g. the election of the first female president this month. Assuming that these PP-adverbs have a null preposition (Larson 1985; McCawley 1988; Caponigro & Pearl 2008, 2009; Shun'ichiro 2013), I put forward three possible syntactic analyses to account for the examples above: (i) adjunction of both the PP-complement and the PP-adverb; (ii) leftward movement of the head noun or the noun phrase; and (iii) rightward movement of the PP-complement. Following Stowell (1981), Higginbotham (1983) and Anderson (1984), the adjunction proposal argues that both PP-adverbs and of-phrases are adjuncts, thus being freely ordered in the nominal hierarchy (Bresnan 1982; Svenonius 1994; Stroik & Putnam 2013). In contrast, the leftward movement analysis respects Kayne's (1994) Antisymmetric Theory of Linearization and argues that the of-phrase in the examples above is still a genuine complement, but the head noun, or sometimes the noun phrase, moves leftwards to a position higher than spec,FP where PP-adverbs are situated. As for the rightward movement account, it follows the leftward movement in treating the of-phrase as a complement but differs in that it extraposes the PP-complement outside PP-adverbs and right-adjoins it inside the DP. The article shows that the first two proposals are untenable, and sometimes cannot derive the wanted data. The third account is superior in that it accounts for the required data as well as other island-sensitive facts.

This review article outlines the literature on nonterritorial autonomy (NTA) from the renewed interest in the concept in the mid-2000s until today. First, the article provides a brief overview of the meaning of NTA and the rationale behind it, highlighting how, in academic literature, NTA oscillates between positions that treat it as an attractive option and a highly impractical system (difficult to realize in practice or even pin down conceptually). Second, the article looks at trends in the existing literature, which has approached NTA with various emphases: the functions it fulfils (or has fulfilled); its (at times) supplementary role vis-à-vis territorial autonomy; and the dynamics that have led to its introduction in some countries, with attendant implications. Third, the article outlines some of NTA’s complexities, suggesting future areas of research, with reference to the interaction of territoriality and nonterritoriality, collective rights and participation, and potentially negative consequences of NTA regimes.

A single eighteenth-century British manuscript recipe book, bound in parchment decorated with gold tooling, can tell us an enormous amount about Britain's gastronomic and imperial ambitions. That is because this book, now known by its call number, V.a.680, and held by the Folger Shakespeare Library, contains recipes like “Indian Pickle,” which included ginger, garlic, cauliflower, mustard, turmeric, and long pepper. How did this distinctly South Asian recipe find its way into a London recipe book? In this essay, we explore how British households engaged with and circulated new ideas about food during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. We analyze two remarkable recipes, one for mutton kebabs and another for sago pudding, both brought to Britain through emerging imperial projects. Although one recipe originated in the eastern Mediterranean and the other in Southeast Asia, both were changed and altered to suit British metropolitan tastes. We then examine the book itself as a material object created and altered over time, offering evidence of the ways that seventeenth- and eighteenth-century manuscripts were amended, torn apart, repaired, organized, and ultimately professionalized over multiple generations. As physical testaments to the social alliances and networks of knowledge of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britons, manuscript recipe books were tools of empire, used to appropriate, translate, and transmit the global foodways that permeated Britain's earliest colonial schemes.

What is a British colony for, and who is it for? These were the questions at the crux of a public debate in 1933 in Hong Kong sparked by a British resident claiming to have formed an organization for the “protection and advancement” of the “British white race.” This article explores how anxieties about fascism, white privilege, and “others” in the empire allowed the very idea of such a political movement to be elevated to the subject of heated debate. The discussion on British unemployment, poor whites, and European “intruders” in the colony tells us less about the actual socioeconomic conditions that Hong Kong Britons faced than about their subjective experience of being “British” in an imperial context. The articulation of imperial anxiety also shows us how the fluid, ambiguous borders of whiteness and Britishness were negotiated at the intersections of nationalism, ethnicity, class, and race. Highlighting the global perspectives demonstrated in the debate and the various transnational networks across Hong Kong, this article argues that the debate was as much about global sociopolitical circumstances as about what was happening in Hong Kong. It therefore offers a timely opportunity to rethink how the local, “national,” regional, and global were interwoven in the “global 1930s,” even among the English reading public in the British colony of Hong Kong.

This article focusses on the issue of “traditional Islam” in Russia and the practices associated with it. Employing an approach that combines the concepts of lived religion and everyday nationalism, those practices are taken into consideration that are often interpreted in terms of vernacular Islam and regarded skeptically, if not outright rejected, by proponents of a more global Islam. Discussed in detail are commemoration ceremonies for the dead, prayers in the cemetery, saint veneration and local pilgrimage, the mawlid celebration and the use of prayer beads. These practices indicate an outlook on life, where Muslim believers cultivate a close connection to their environment and maintain personal relations to various human and more-than-human beings, thus creating the space for an exchange crossing the boundary between life and death. The article contributes to the anthropological study of Islam in Russia and—by focusing on religious practice—specifically attempts to capture the main characteristics of “traditional Islam.”

The literature on “everyday nationalism” foregrounds constructivist practice theory as well as interpretivist methodologies. Our project—Making Identity Count—does something similar but with an aim to advance the study of International Relations rather than the study of nationalism. Here, we suggest that these two approaches are basically complementary, and that a theoretical and methodological cross-fertilization between them may yield new insights in both fields.

This article explores the nature and limitations of humanitarian political economy by discussing metropolitan British responses to a major famine that took place in the Agra region of north-central India in 1837–38. This disaster played a significant role in catalyzing wider debates about the impact of East India Company governance and the place of the subcontinent within the post-emancipation British Empire. By comparing the responses of organization such as the Aborigines Protection Society and British India Society to that of proponents of the newly emergent indenture system, the paper seeks to contextualize responses to the famine in terms both of longer histories of famine in South Asia and of the specific imperial circumstances of the late 1830s. In doing so, it explores how ideas of agricultural distress in India fed into competing strategies to utilize Indian labor in the service of colonial commodity production both within India and around the empire.