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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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In January 1909, the students of the Azhar, the Islamic world's most prestigious university, went on strike. Protesting recent curricular and administrative changes introduced by the Egyptian Khedive, they demanded increased material support and asserted the university's right to govern itself. After several weeks of demonstrations that drew thousands of supporters into the streets of Cairo, the Khedive suspended the reforms that first caused the Azharis to walk out. Oddly, this remarkable mobilization has nearly vanished into obscurity. Drawing on reporting from the Egyptian press and intelligence memoranda from the Egyptian Ministry of Interior, this article argues that the apparent incongruity of Azharis on strike was no mistake. Their willful rejection of ascribed categories helps to explain both why this movement of unionized seminarians speaking a language of self-government proved so striking for contemporary supporters and critics alike and why this event has slipped through the cracks of a historiography still framed by those very categories. Long forgotten in histories of both nationalism and organized labor, the Azhar strike represented a pivotal moment in the emergence of mass politics in Egypt. In invoking "union," the Azharis engaged in multiple, overlapping acts of comparison. Inspired by the modular repertoires of militant labor, they simultaneously hailed the constitutional revolution of the Ottoman Committee of Union and Progress as a model for political transformation. Rooted in a self-conscious critique of colonial comparativism, their struggle thereby furnished new materials with which to elaborate a telescopic series of anti-colonial solidarities that were themselves fundamentally comparative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

La Verge de Montserrat is a statue of the Virgin Mary and her son found in Catalonia in the eleventh century in which both characters are depicted as "Black." This female figure occupies a particular position in current Catalonia since she is considered the patron saint of the country and constitutes one of the symbolic cornerstones of Catalan nationalism. Through the concept of "iconic path," this article tracks the formation and evolution of this image in Catalonia from its inception until the present day, bringing special attention to the roles and significances that it has acquired within the context of the current pro-independence movement. We also draw a comparison between the "lives" of this image in Catalonia and its development in other countries, namely Puerto Rico, Equatorial Guinea and Sardinia. In each of these places, the image of the goddess has been reinterpreted according to local viewpoints. Yet these conceptualizations are not fixed or homogeneous, but radically dynamic and problematic. The iconic paths of images diverge and converge across time giving birth to new creative exercises. Through this approach, our aim is to propose a relational and processual model for the study of religious images, and images in general, as historical objects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How were monarchy, gender, and nationalism entwined? Through contextualized comparisons of selected case studies (two generations of royal women in four countries: Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, and Serbia/Yugoslavia), this article explores, in gendered terms, the instrumentalization of nursing as an evolving relationship between state building, warfare, welfare, and voluntary organizations. It argues that certain queens' interventions in nursing successfully contributed to the "naturalization" of the ruling foreign dynasties in the Balkans and to the militarization of charity. Through such "soft power" they mobilized nursing in different ways to carve out an autonomous space and visibility in wartime as queen-nurses and in peacetime as queen-benefactors. In both cases, royal women personified the "curing" and "caring" dimensions of the modernizing state. Queens' honorific leadership clearly linked the monarchy and the philanthropic sector but also discreetly expanded the power of the nationalizing state. Queens skillfully promoted a gendered culture of sacrifice, by representing women as caring "by nature," and thus reinforced neo-traditionalist patriarchal regimes and weakened women's effectiveness in pursuing their political and economic demands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Shahab Ahmed's What Is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic (2016) challenges Islamic Studies scholars, (art) historians, and anthropologists to reconsider theoretical frameworks underpinning historical and ethnographic research. This article addresses Ahmed's concerns that studies of Islam often conceptually privilege orthodoxy, by including drinking and intoxication as worthy of close attention in examining the history and the anthropology of Islam. The case of Wine Shop the Philosopher, run by a former Afghan refugee in The Hague and Amsterdam, is presented after establishing the comparative and interdisciplinary relevance of alcohol consumption in studies of Islam and Muslims. Ahmed's conceptual framework is used and assessed in comparison with the wine shops' contemporary pluralist reality by exploring the idealized boundaries of Persianate culture and Islam in dialogues between Persian-speaking interlocutors. It is argued that alcoholic drinks lend themselves to competing gastro-nationalisms and prompt ethnolinguistic tensions between and within groups with Turkish, Moroccan, Iranian, and Afghan backgrounds in the Netherlands. The focus on diverse, coexisting and clashing drink regimes, in conclusion, allows us to deconstruct dichotomies between sober Muslims and European drinkers, African and Asian believers and European unbelievers, and refugees and citizens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Insisting on a radical divide between post-1750 ideologies in Europe and earlier political thought in both Europe and Asia, modernist scholars of nationalism have called attention, quite justifiably, to European nationalisms' unique focus on popular sovereignty, legal equality, territorial fixity, and the primacy of secular over universal religious loyalties. Yet this essay argues that nationalism also shared basic developmental and expressive features with political thought in pre-1750 Europe as well as in rimland—that is to say outlying—sectors of Asia. Polities in Western Europe and rimland Asia were all protected against Inner Asian occupation, all enjoyed relatively cohesive local geographies, and all experienced economic and social pressures to integration that were not only sustained but surprisingly synchronized throughout the second millennium. In Western Europe and rimland Asia each major state came to identify with a named ethnicity, specific artifacts became badges of inclusion, and central ethnicity expanded and grew more standardized. Using Myanmar and pre-1750 England/Britain as case studies, this essay reconstructs these centuries-long similarities in process and form between "political ethnicity," on the one hand, and modern nationalism, on the other. Finally, however, this essay explores cultural and material answers to the obvious question: if political ethnicities in Myanmar and pre-1750 England/Britain were indeed comparable, why did the latter realm alone generate recognizable expressions of nationalism? As such, this essay both strengthens and weakens claims for European exceptionalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1922, one of the most famous Muslim scholars of modern times, the Syrian-Egyptian reformer Rashīd Riḍā, published in his journal a detailed fatwa in defense of alcohol. He did so in reaction to an obscure Indian jurist's fatwa that had warned Muslims not to use alcoholic products. On the surface, the authors of the fatwas appeared to be principally concerned with the right way to interpret sacred laws of purity and pollution. However, this article reveals that their disagreement had much to do with differing approaches to the politics of independence. Their divergence is intriguing because the cities where they lived, Cairo and Bombay, had just experienced the convulsions of anti-British consumer boycotts. And it emerged at a time when anti-imperial Muslim activists from the Middle East and South Asia were rallying together for a pan-Islamic cause—to prevent the final collapse of the caliphate. These movements swayed both Riḍā and his rival, who may well be described as Muslim nationalists. Yet they embraced radically different strategies for independence. One aimed for national purity, the other for national power. This discrepancy led to the battle of fatwas—a forgotten battle that is worth remembering because it suggests some of the difficulties that Muslim jurists of Arab or Indian ancestry faced during the interwar period when they tried to turn Islamic law into an effective nationalist discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When religious institutions engage the secular emotively and publicly, they can foster an affective atmosphere of religiosity, which potentially has motivational power, even for non-believers, because it shapes the sensorium of those who circulate in public space. When individuals appeal to "places animated with prayer" for the transformative energy that resides there through ritualized practices, they reaffirm an affective atmosphere of religiosity. In Orthodox Eastern Europe and elsewhere, a confessional tradition is allied with state borders, further normativizing this affective atmosphere and giving it pronounced political implications. When an affective atmosphere of religiosity inspires practices that are intentionally designed to prompt experiences rendered meaningful in otherworldly terms, over time such performativity can create mimetic instincts that become second nature. This is an essential step to religion becoming an expedient political resource and to the emergence of religious nationalism or a confessional state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How and where were new African nations made at the moment of decolonization? Focusing on the periphery rather than the center provides an insightful answer to this question: imposing national identity in border regions with mixed and mobile populations, dynamic migrant flows, and cross-border linkages was a task fraught with contradiction. This article explores the establishment of Zambian political and diplomatic space in the Democratic Republic of Congo and the activities of Zambian political and diplomatic representatives in the southern Congolese city of Elisabethville in the early-to-mid 1960s. It does not assess how effective these officials were in imposing a sense of Zambian national identity, but rather what their efforts reveal about the ideas and values that informed state elites' assertions of national identity and their relationship to history, local identities, and moral codes regarding, among other things, customary authority and gendered behavior. The article argues that nation-making in newly independent states involved the assertion of not only state sovereignty over territorial space but also symbolic power, the right to classify, and the moral and political notions that underlay ostensibly bureaucratic, disinterested state structures. Analysis of the attempts of Zambia's first diplomatic representatives to establish and assert their notion of Zambian-ness reveals the fragility of new national identities and the extent to which elites sought to underpin these identities by the assertion of moral certainties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article compares two German-speaking Mennonite colonies in Paraguay and their encounters with Nazism during the 1930s. It focuses on their understandings of the Nazi bid for transnational völkisch unity. Latin America presents a unique context for studying the Nazis' relationship to German-speakers abroad because it held the allure of being the last prospect for German cultural and economic expansion, but was simultaneously impossible for the German state to invade. The Menno Colony was made up of voluntary migrants from Canada who arrived in Paraguay in the 1920s. The Fernheim Colony was composed of refugees from the Soviet Union who settled alongside the Menno Colony in the 1930s. Both groups shared a history in nineteenth-century Russia as well as a common faith and culture. Nevertheless, they developed radically different opinions about völkisch nationalism. The Menno Colony's communal understanding of Germanness made völkisch propaganda about Hitler's "New Germany" unappealing to their local sensibilities. They rejected all forms of nationalism as worldly attempts to thwart their cultural-religious isolationism. The refugees of Fernheim Colony, by contrast, shared little communal unity since they originated from diverse settlements across the Soviet Union. They viewed Germanness as a potential bridge to an imagined German homeland and believed that the highest goal of völkisch unity was to promote communal unity. Resembling other German-speaking communities in Latin America, the two colonies—which seemed identical to Nazi observers—held vastly different interpretations of völkisch nationalism at the height of the Nazi bid to establish transnational German unity in Latin America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In July 2010, following a year-long nationwide debate over Islamic veiling, the French government passed a law prohibiting facial coverings in all public spaces. Prior research attributes this and other restrictive laws to France's republican secular tradition. This article takes a different approach. Building on literature that sees electoral politics as a site for articulating, rather than merely reflecting, social identities, I argue that the 2010 ban arose in significant part out of political parties' struggles to demarcate the boundaries of legitimate politics in the face of an ultra-right electoral threat. Specifically, I show that in seeking to prevent the ultra-right National Front party from monopolizing the religious signs issue, France's major right and left parties agreed to portray republicanism as requiring the exclusion of face veiling from public space. Because it was forged in conflict, however, the consensus thus generated is highly fractured and unstable. It conceals ongoing conflict, both between and within political parties, over the precise meaning(s) of French republican nationhood. The findings thus underscore the relationship between boundary-drawing in the political sphere and the process of demarcating the cultural and political boundaries of nationhood in contexts of immigrant diversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the work of Robert Hurd (1905–1963), a Scottish nationalist architect, planner, and admirer of Scottish civic traditions, in order to query and enrich current anthropological approaches to "material politics" with their focus on material assemblies, infrastructures, and interactions that operate across scales and beyond discourse. Hurd was both an expert and planner and also an "artisan of nationalism" who sought to restore Scotland's built environment as at once a civic heritage and a material resource for a future of independence and self-determination. Hurd's attention to distinctively Scottish architectural forms and to historic centers and their development over time is significant as an idiom of nationalist thought, while his architectural work highlights the formal manipulation of scale and centrality to express political aspirations. He was an expert not only of infrastructure, plans, or populations and their needs, but also of the mediation of such material facts into architectural form and, in a broader sense, forms of life. Finally, Hurd's writing on "burgh" civic and architectural traditions, and his work as a conservation architect, together allow a better understanding of the role played by a conservative, tradition-minded modernism, and of narratives of tradition and national evolution, in the twentieth-century history and present development of Scotland's national and constitutional politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The entry of a universal revelation into the mundane world of language threatens to be paradoxical: it must take a specific and local form. As such, it becomes implicated in nationalist, ethnic, linguistic, and other sources of community. This article centers on a small melodrama in late twentieth-century Indonesia, home to the largest number of Muslims of any country. After undergoing a mid-life spiritual awakening, H. B. Jassin, a modernist literary critic, editor, and ardent defender of freedom of expression, undertook two projects intended to convey the aesthetic power of the Qur'an to a non-Arabic speaking public. But if Qur'anic Arabic summons a transnational community of the faithful, standardized Indonesian was developed to address a nation of citizens. If scripture speaks in a divine, uncreated idiom, the national language is shaped by human efforts. Jassin's career had served a vision of literature and its public whose values and semiotic ideologies were dramatically at odds with Qur'anic traditions. Although this may appear at first glance to be a familiar story of progress and its opponents, this article asks whether Jassin's critics grasped something about signs and communities that his defenders did not. Examining the furor that resulted from his Qur'ans, it explores an array of conflicting assumptions about language, freedom, truth, and people's lives together in the late twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the aftermath of World War II, a new international infrastructure based on United Nations agencies took charge of coordinating global biomedical research. Through this infrastructure, European and American geneticists hoped to collect and test blood samples from human populations across the world to understand processes of human heredity and evolution and trace the historical migrations of different groups. They relied heavily on local scientific workers to help them identify and access populations of interest, although they did not always acknowledge the critical role non-Western collaborators played in their studies. Using scientific publications, personal correspondence, and oral histories, I investigate the collaborative relationships between Western scientists, their counterparts in the Middle East, and the human subjects of genetic research. I comparatively examine the experiences of Israeli and Iranian scientists and physicians engaged in genetic anthropology and medical genetics between the mid-1950s and the late 1970s, noting how they both applied nationalist historical narratives to their genetic data and struggled to establish the value of their local knowledge and scientific labor. I argue that the Israeli and Iranian experience of transnational scientific collaboration is representative of how Western scientists relegated their collaborators from "developing" regions to a subordinate positionality as collection agents or native informants. Meanwhile, within their own countries, the elite professional identity of Israeli and Iranian scientists granted them the authority to manipulate their research subjects, who often belonged to marginalized minority communities, and to interpret their biology and history within contexts of Jewish and Persian nationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the legal structures and discursive framings informing the governance of one particular “backward” region of India, the Andaman Islands. I trace the shifting patterns of occupation and development of the islands in the colonial and postcolonial periods, with a focus on the changes wrought by independence in 1947 and the eventual history of planned development there. I demonstrate how intersecting discourses of indigenous savagery/primitivism and the geographical emptiness were repeatedly mobilized in colonial-era surveys and postcolonial policy documents. Postcolonial visions of developing the Andaman Islands ushered in a settler-colonial governmentality, infused with genocidal fantasies of the “dying savage.” Laws professing to protect aboriginal Jarawas actually worked to unilaterally extend Indian sovereignty over the lands and bodies of a community clearly hostile to such incorporation. I question the current exclusion of India from the global geographies of settler-colonialism and argue that the violent and continuing history of indigenous marginalization in the Andaman Islands represents a de facto operation of a logic of terra nullius. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the conception of nationhood developed by a political movement referred to as Ulusalcılık (nationalism), which emerged at the turn of the century. We focus on ways in which the Ulusalcı movement makes use of nation-building techniques to establish and propagate its own version of Turkish nationhood as one that is primordially secular and patriotic. This is expressed in its opposition to Islamism, Ottomanism, and what it sees as imperialist Western powers. We argue that the most significant technique Ulusalcı nationalists use to rebuild Turkish nationhood is a relocation of the nation's founding moment, from the official Kemalist one marked by the founding of the Republic in 1923 to the War of Independence fought against the European powers between 1919 and 1922. Our premise is that nationhood is ultimately the product of storytelling, and that the politics of nationhood involves the contentious production, dissemination, and negotiation of different stories and their corresponding founding moments. We analyze the story of Turkish nationhood told in the bestselling book Those Crazy Turks, which became the bible of the Ulusalcı movement. We argue that the Ulusalcı narration of Turkish nationhood interpellates a new national subject that is primordially secular, militaristically patriotic, and adamantly anti-Western. These are projected as essential qualities that must, at all cost, be upheld and defended against Islamist, Ottomanist, and Western powers that are conspiring to bring Turkey down. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Extant South Asian histories of race, and more specifically biometrics, focus almost exclusively upon the colonial era and especially the nineteenth century. Yet an increasing number of ethnographic accounts observe that Indian scientists have enthusiastically embraced the resurgent raciology engendered by genomic research into human variation. What is sorely lacking is a historical account of how raciology fared in the late colonial and early postcolonial periods, roughly the period between the decline of craniometry and the rise of genomics. It is this history that I explore in this article. I argue that anthropometry, far from being a purely colonial science, was adopted by Indian nationalists quite early on. Various distinctive shades of biometric nationalism publicly competed from the 1920s onward. To counter any sense that biometric nationalism was teleologically inevitable, I contrast it with a radical alternative called “craftology” that emerged on the margins of formal academia amongst scholars practicing what I call “vernacular anthropology.” Craftology and biometric nationalism continued to compete, contrast, and selectively entangle with each other until almost the end of the twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The conflict in Palestine has been the subject of numerous international investigative commissions over the past century. These have been dispatched by governments to determine the causes of violent conflicts and how to resolve them. Commissions both produce and reflect political epistemologies, the social processes and categories by which proof and evidence are produced and mobilized in political claim-making. Using archival and ethnographic sources, my analysis focuses on three investigative commissions: the King-Crane (1919), Anglo-American (1946), and Mitchell (2001) commissions. They reveal how “reading affect” has been a diagnostic of political worthiness. Through these investigations, Western colonial agents and “the international community” have given Palestinians false hope that discourse and reason were the appropriate and effective mode of politics. Rather than simply reason, however, what each required was maintenance of an impossible balance between the rational and the emotional. This essay explores the ways that affect as a diagnostic of political worthiness has worked as a technology of rule in imperial orders, and has served as an unspoken legitimating mechanism of domination. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Situated in the borderlands of Southeast Europe, this essay explores how enduring patterns of transregional circulation and cosmopolitan sensibility unfold in the lives of dervish brotherhoods in the post-Cold War present. Following recent debates on connected histories in post-colonial studies and historical anthropology, long-standing mobile and circulating societies, and reinvigorated interest in empire, this essay focuses ethnographically on how members of a dervish brotherhood in Bosnia-Herzegovina cultivate relations with places, collectivities, and practices that exist on different temporal, spatial and geopolitical scales. These connections are centered around three modes of articulation—sonic, graphic, and genealogical—through which the dervish disciples imagine and realize transregional relations. This essay begins and concludes with a meditation on the need for a dialogue between ethnography and transregional history in order to appreciate modes of identification and imagination that go beyond the essentializing forms of collective identity that, in the post-imperial epoch, have been dominated by political and methodological nationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Why did nationalism and socialism combine during Serbia's “anti-bureaucratic revolution”? This article critiques the elite-centric approach prevalent in the literature and suggests a cultural argument instead. Three interconnected “elective affinities” brought nationalism and socialism together and separated them from a weak liberal alternative: (1) the emergence of bureaucracy as a “floating signifier”; (2) the search for enemies and a predilection for conspiracy theories; and (3) anti-intellectualism with special emphasis on the search for “one truth.” The elite-centric approach is assessed by looking at actors who, if the thesis is correct, should have been the least likely adopters of nationalist ideas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sai Baba of Shirdi, who died in 1918, was raised as a Muslim but is today revered as a Hindu saint. One of his most important perceived qualities was his ability to provide miraculous cures for his devotees, and this has continued after his death. I argue here that the emphasis in the Hindu tradition on saintly figures healing the sick is a relatively modern phenomenon. Earlier, though such figures were renowned for their miracles, healing played a very minor part in this. Their miracles were generally designed to worst religious rivals and to enable them to speak truth to power. In the modern era, however, such saintly figures can gain a reputation through healing in a way that is presented as beyond the comprehension of modern medical science. Such people are seen to provide living evidence of the superiority of Indian civilization and its religious beliefs. This move became entangled with nationalist sentiments, so that getting the better of the “English” doctor became a means to reveal the limited scope of Western science and culture. Although this appears to suggest that many Indians have rejected the biopolitics associated with Western modernity (as defined by Foucault), I argue that certain elements of such biopolitics are central to this process, and illustrate this through a study of Sai Baba, a village holy man taken up by the Indian middle classes and made into a pan-Indian figure, with a now global presence. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In tracing a discourse history for the emergence and enregisterment of Bozal, a Cuban speech style that robustly indexes the historical persona of the African slave, this paper proposes that such discourse “genealogies” are more accurately reconstructed not through a linear, teleological metaphor of “speech chains” but through a more reticulated, multiply stranded web of interdiscursive connections. Bozal, in contemporary Cuba, characterizes the voices of African deities and spirits of the dead who possess their devotees to speak during folk religious ceremonies. I consider a deeper history of theatrical “blackface” influences on religious performances of spirit possession, a discourse history that destabilizes facile notions of “authentic, African” cultural sources in Cuba. I argue that rather than reflecting direct memories of actual speech by African-born slaves, once upon a time, Bozal's enregisterment began with, and always involved, double-voiced representations of imagined social types—what recent scholarship has described as “mock” forms disparaging the speech of racialized Others. The “Bozal slave” was a figure caricatured for comedic effect, proliferating into a whole set of stock theatrical characters, some of which became focal points for building nationalist sentiment in mid-nineteenth-century Cuba. The lesson for understanding the role of Bozal or any “Africanizing” voice in performance today is clear: we must always consider the mediating effects of metacultural practices in shaping our understanding of the social meaning of speech styles. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper contributes to the study of new forms of transnational power constituted by the action of international and nongovernmental organizations, to which gravitate loose networks of activists variously promoting democracy, human rights, the empowerment of women, and environmental conservation. The paper's focus is impacts that the massive reconstruction effort is having on Afghan society, examined through a case study of The National Solidarity Programme (NSP), the main project of rural rehabilitation underway in the country. Launched in 2003, its objective is to bring development funds directly to rural people and to establish democratically elected local councils that will identify needs, and plan and manage the reconstruction. Although the NSP's political significance faded in the context of the presidential elections of 2009, which were characterized by quickly evolving alliances, the program illustrates how reconstruction funds are an integral part of Afghanistan's social and political landscape. My arguments are four-fold: First, the NSP subtly modifies participants' body gestures and codes of conduct. Second, the program's fundamental assumptions are at odds with the complex social fabric and the overlapping sources of solidarity and conflict that characterize rural Afghanistan. Third, the ways in which political actors use material and symbolic resources channeled through the NSP mirror national struggles for power. Finally, such programs are one element in a much larger conceptual and bureaucratic apparatus that promotes new forms of transnational governmentality that coexist with and sometimes challenge the more familiar, territorialized expressions of state power and sovereignty. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Canadian government recently concluded a series of land claim and self-government agreements with many First Nations in the Yukon Territory. A result of First Nation claims to land and sovereignty in the region, these modern treaties grant First Nations some real powers of self-governance. They are framed in the idiom of sovereignty, but they also compel First Nation people to accept—in practice if not in theory—a host of Euro-American assumptions about power and governance that are implicit in such a framing. This article focuses on a central premise of the sovereignty concept: territorial jurisdiction. The Yukon agreements carve the Yukon into fourteen distinct First Nation “traditional territories.” Although many assume that these territories reflect “traditional” patterns of land-use and occupancy, indigenous society in the Yukon was not composed of distinct political entities each with jurisdiction over its own territory. Thus, the agreements do not simply formalize jurisdictional boundaries among pre-existing First Nation polities; rather, they are mechanisms for creating the legal and administrative systems that bring those polities into being. The powers these agreements confer come in the territorial currency of the modern state, and territorialization processes they engender are transforming First Nation society in radical and often unintended ways. One significant aspect of this transformation is the emergence of multiple ethno-territorial identities, and corresponding nationalist sentiments. I examine these processes by focusing on two cases of contemporary boundary making among Yukon First Nations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Physicians and scientists dominated the first generation of nationalists in at least three East Asian colonies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the Philippines under the Spanish and United States' regimes, the Dutch East Indies, and the Japanese territory of Taiwan. There is substantial evidence that, in each place, decolonization was yoked to scientific progress—not only in a practical sense, but symbolically too. The first generation to receive training in biological science and to become socialized as professionals used this education to imagine itself as eminently modern, progressive, and cosmopolitan. Their training gave them special authority in deploying organic metaphors of society and state, and made them deft in finding allegories of the human body and the body politic. These scientists and physicians saw themselves as representing universal laws, advancing natural knowledge, and engaging as equals with colleagues in Europe, Japan, and North America. Science gave them a new platform for communication. In the British Empire, for example in India and Malaya, medical science also proved influential, though it seems lawyers cognizant of precedent and tradition more often dominated decolonization movements. This essay will examine how scientific training shaped anti-colonialism and nationalism in the Philippines and the East Indies, concluding with a brief comparison of the situation in Taiwan. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In two landmark essays published in 1973, the eminent anthropologist Clifford Geertz offered an early assessment of what he termed “The Fate of Nationalism in the New States,” referring to the newly independent nation-states of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Ranging with characteristic ease and flair across Burma, India, Indonesia, Lebanon, Malaysia, Morocco, and Nigeria, Geertz argued that an “Integrative Revolution” was under way, but one complicated and compromised by the inherent tension between “essentialism” and “epochalism,” between “Primordial Sentiments and Civil Politics in the New States.” Geertz argued: The peoples of the new states are simultaneously animated by two powerful, thoroughly interdependent, yet distinct and often actually opposed motives—the desire to be recognized as responsible agents whose wishes, acts, hopes, and opinions “matter,” and the desire to build an efficient, dynamic modern state. The one aim is to be noticed: it is a search for identity, and a demand that the identity be publicly acknowledged as having import, a social assertion of the self as “being somebody in the world.” The other aim is practical: it is a demand for progress, for a rising standard of living, more effective political order, greater social justice, and beyond that of “playing a part in the larger arena of world politics,” of “exercising influence among the nations.” [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Asianisms, that is, discourses and ideologies claiming that Asia can be defined and understood as a homogenous space with shared and clearly defined characteristics, have become the subject of increased scholarly attention over the last two decades. The focal points of interest, however, are generally East Asian varieties of regionalism. That “the cult of Asianism” has played an important role on the Indian subcontinent, too—as is evident from the quote above—is less understood. Aside from two descriptive monographs dating back to the 1970s, there has been relatively little scholarly engagement with this phenomenon. In this article, we would like to offer an overview of several distinct concepts of Asia and pan-Asian designs, which featured prominently in both political and civil society debates in India during the struggle for Independence. Considering the abundance of initiatives for Asian unification, and, in a more abstract sense, discourses on Asian identity, what follows here is necessarily a selection of discourses, three of which will be subjected to critical analysis, with the following questions in mind: •What were the concrete motives of regional—in this case Indian—actors to appropriate the concept of Asianism? Is the popularity of supranational frames of reference solely to be explained as an affirmation of a distinctive identity vis-à-vis the imagined powerful West, or are there other motives to be found?•What were the results of these processes of appropriation, and how were these manifested politically and culturally?•What tensions resulted from the simultaneous existence of various nationalisms in Asia on the one hand and macro-nationalistic pan-Asianism on the other? [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article presents an examination of Islam in French colonial Algeria and explores how resistance to colonial rule was mounted by individuals who collaborated with the colonial system's administration over religion and state. It examines how positions of religious authority, that served as platforms for community leadership, were leveraged in order to gain colonial resources, but were then de-legitimized and replaced with non-colonial systems of authority. It discusses issues related to failed colonial policy, the growth of nationalism and the relationship between colonial collaborators and resisters.

The article presents an exploration into the 1950s mass-scale medical campaign to vaccinate India against tuberculosis and its popular resistance movement. Details are given outlining the initial plans of organizations such as the World Health Organization (WHO) and others to globally suppress the disease as well as their failures in promoting the move. Examination is given to several leaders and perspectives concerning Indian resistance to the medical campaign, including sentiments of nationalism and anti-modernism. The influence of specific Indian leaders is also discussed in figures such as A. V. Raman, Mahatma Ghandi, and Chakravarti Rajagopalachari.

The article presents an exploration into the intersection between nationalism and archaeology, particularly as seen in the aftermath of the War of the Pacific between Chile and Peru at the turn of the 20th century. Introductory comments are given noting the impact of the conflict on territorial gains and disputes over cultural property between the two nations. The appropriation of borderland Peruvian antiquities by Chilean archaeological excavations is highlighted and the contested nationalistic responses to the incidents are discussed. Further comments are given addressing the larger social-philosophical implications of identity, borders and historical appropriation.

The article discusses the mass conversion of Armenians to Islam in the 1890s. It highlights the critical issue situating within the massacres of Armenians carried out by Kurds and the conversions during the rise of Turkish or Ottoman nationalism and examines the role of the government in the massacres. The author implies that Turkish authorities attempted to succeed the solidarity of Kurdish tribes and coerce Armenians into relinquishment, for which he believes Sultan Abdulhamid II was responsible.

The article focuses on digital archives and technical revisionism related to the search for "Kilometer Zero," the Sino-Vietnamese border which is a prominent symbol of sovereignty in Vietnam. It talks about rumors on a secret agreement between the Communist Parties of China and Vietnam which moved the boundary between their countries in 1999. The emergence of new models of Vietnamese national identity and the inability of the Vietnamese government to control the consideration of Kilometer Zero as a symbol of space, virtual, domestic and diasporic are discussed.

The article presents an analysis of the grassroots of Tanzania in their attempt to spoil scientific forestry within the larger context of Cold War global economy and anti-colonial nationalist movements. The author said that the interest of the governmental and industrial sectors in Great Britain created huge reserves of hardwood forests in Tanzania. Events leading to Tanzanians in the newly-formed reserves losing access to living space, grazing areas, new farmlands religious sites were presented. The author also discussed the popular dissatisfaction with the reserves and working conditions that was channeled for the Tanzanian independence movement. It was also inferred that the collision of factors led to national independence.

The article discusses the bestowment of Italian nationality after Word War II. It describes linguistic nationalism (language as national identity) and the legal rights and benefits of repatriated citizens and foreign immigrants. The article also discusses the fall of the Italian empire and the loss of several territories in the African and Mediterranean areas.

Examines the concept of Internet identity in the international movement of indigenous peoples. Potential of the Internet to globally reshape the politics of identity; Factors influencing Internet activism; Analysis of Internet's expressions of indigenous distinctiveness in the context of a more general understanding of identity construction; Origins of the indigenous peoples' movement; Content, cultural dynamics and implications of indigenous peoples' Internet activism.

Discusses the progress of Africanization in the South Pacific region. Explanation for real or perceived crises in Melanesia and other Pacific islands; Formation of a national identity; Rate of fertility in Oceania.

Focuses on the movement of Creole nationalism in colonial Indonesia. Comparison of the historical perspectives on Creoles between colonial Bengal and Senegal; Historiographical attempts to define Creole nationalism; Loyalty of Creoles to the colonial government.

Argues that nationalist essentialism, banished from most spheres of social inquiry by a constructionist sense of the object, nevertheless continues to prevail in the study of warfare. Development of an alternative understanding of the cultural constitution of military force through a study of the place of ethnicity in the organization and the use of force in the multi-ethnic army Britain assembled to fight the Japanese in Burma in the Second World War; Review of the contrasting emphases placed on military and society in accounting for combat motivation; Analysis of the organization of ethnicity in the British Indian Army.

Examines the logic of nationalism based on the national identity of Crete in Greece. Divergence of cultural and social entities; Contradiction between localist enthusiasm and nationalist passion; Threat of political separation.

Examines the relational nature of ethnicity and nationalism. Structure interactions across social boundaries; Symbolism of political identity; Construction of national and ethnic identity for anthropological purposes.

Focuses on the study of nationalism and identity in India. Definition of a crucial process in state-building and identity formation; Diversity of colonial practice; Dispute over social practice.

Analyzes the concept of social theorist Benedict Anderson concerning modular nationalism to mediate the canonical opposition between objectivity and subjectivity. Key aspects of the conflict between objectivist and subjectivist approaches to nationalism; Global articulation of the nation as a social form; Key processes that conditioned the constitution of a modular nation form.

Focuses on the concept of education as the main motor of nationalism and source of patriotic allegiance. Role of education in the Cypriot conflict; Analysis on the forms of selfhood; Systemic transformation of Cypriot education.

Focuses the implication of the first expeditional ascent to Mount Everest for nationalism, postcolonialism, gender and subaltern studies. Account on the unified efforts of Nepal, India, Great Britain and New Zealand in the conquest of Everest; Details on the reception and honoring of the expedition team; Consideration of the conquest as a symbol of the nation.

Examines forms of Korean agrarianism for illustrating the diversity in representations of national community under colonial rule. Relationship between colonialism, nationalism and modernity; Effect of capitalism on colonial economy and society; Interaction between tradition and modernity; Bifurcation of Korean nationalism into bourgeois capitalist and communist forms.

Investigates the process for establishing a nationalist core in India. Assertions of citizenship and demand for proof of loyalty; Analysis on the construction of the unhyphenated and hyphenated nationals; Details on the transfer of power and partition of the subcontinent in 1947; Composite character of Indian society; Development of Hindu nationalism.

Discusses the emergence of naturalistic nationalism in the United States and Canada. Role of Romanticism in altering perceptions of the landscape; Traditional attitudes toward nature; Rise of the sublime aesthetic; Nationalized nature and naturalistic nationalism in the 20th century; Perception of landscape in Canadian identity.

Explores the role of Alpine landscape in the formation and reconstruction of Swiss national identity from the late 18th century to the end of the Second World War. History of thinking about geography and national character; Landscape symbolism and the study of national identity; Nationalization of nature; Naturalization of the nation; Plausibility structure of the Alpine myth.