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This article explores the elaboration and application of the Old Testament idea of 'covenant' among Zambian church leaders who are Christian nationalist activists. In this framework, Zambia serves as an analogue of biblical Israel, while contemporary government and church leaders are the analogues of Old Testament kings, priests, and prophets. This covenantal approach presents challenges. On the one hand, government support for Christian nationalism encourages the compliance of church leaders with state‐led religious projects; on the other hand, however, the analogical reading of the biblical text on which this support depends casts the church in a prophetic role, which in turn opens the door for criticism of the government. Christian nationalist activists in Zambia therefore find themselves caught in a double‐bind that simultaneously encourages submission and critique. An analysis of this process contributes an important non‐Western perspective to contemporary discussions of Christian nationalism. It also complicates easy interpretations of Christian nationalism as abetting state power by demonstrating its critical possibilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Chinese Communist Party is confronted with a growing gap that separates the rhetoric about socialism and party rule from the individualism and materialism caused by capitalism and opening up to the outside world. In response, the Party has developed strategies that draw on an understanding of the dedication to the Party that is specifically religious, yet does not require belief, conviction, or faith in a doctrine. These strategies revolve around the Leninist concept of 'party spirit', which, paradoxically, has been turned into a commodity that can be produced, supplied, and consumed. Drawing on insights from the anthropology of pilgrimage, tourism, and religion, this article discusses these strategies in the context of party cadre education and so‐called 'red tourism'. The article concludes that the Party is shaping its evolution from an infallible bearer of ideological dogma to a sacred object of worship as part of a new 'communist civil religion'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The anthropology of art and craft has been reinvigorated by new theoretical approaches to materiality, creativity, and skill. While this research has been connected to larger political economic processes such as nationalism, identity, and consumerism, these approaches have not been wholly brought to bear on questions of labour. Based on ethnographic research in San Martín Tilcajete, a woodcarving village in Oaxaca, Mexico, this essay shows how labour is made in artisanal workshops through the social and material relations that take place within them. I argue that rather than ownership of the means of production, in San Martín relations of labour are generated by the intermingling of the art world's ideology of ‘authorship’ with the intimate relations of kinship. The art market locates the production of value in the work of those who are recognized as authors, eliding the labour of many of the workers who produce the carvings. Labourers who work for family members struggle to establish themselves independently in this market because of the multiple and socially salient relations of obligation and respect that are central to kinship and because their own creative work becomes subsumed into the general style of the workshop where they are employed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Labour migration from subsistence households in Tamang‐speaking communities of Northern Nepal heralds their transition from an agrarian to a remittance economy. This migration entails the abandonment of subsistence labour processes that once wove households together in reciprocal mutuality. Migration thus dislocates persons from moral economic institutions and norms, and reciprocity is replaced by cash‐calculative decisions about food systems. However, migration is a broader sociocultural response to historical precarities and struggle over de‐territorializing effects of state development. Moving beyond standard ‘peasant economy’ forms of analysis, and domestic autarky in particular, this essay explores neglected areas of the comparative anthropology of subsistence labour, and situates the ethnography of work and power relations in indigenous and other critiques of development nationalism in Nepal. Redirecting labour abroad creates tensions in domestic reproduction. These surface in intra‐clan gift exchange, in managing agro‐pastoral viability, and in the ritual maintenance of order among humans and nonhumans that invokes ancestral migrations for dealing with dilemmas about contemporary dispersals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how the Indonesian state's efforts to style itself as an Islamic authority have influenced the behaviour of its Muslim citizens. I present cases in which Muslims in Indonesia's Riau Islands comply with Islamic state directives in order to transfer responsibility for their actions to the state, showing how such a mode of practice can support Islamic governmentality, bolster nationalism, and constrain civic activism. Interestingly, compliance may occur even when citizens harbour deep misgivings towards a directive, leading me to query whether suspicion is necessarily inimical to authority. I conclude that a pronouncement's Islamic authority hinges on how Muslims relate to their suspicions regarding it, and that, for Riau Islanders, suspicion's urgency has been tempered by cultural models of personhood, individual subjectivity, and the moral murk of post-Suharto Indonesia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gauri Viswanathan's notion of religious conversion as an 'unsettling' political event has recently figured prominently in the scholarship on conversion. However, although numerous scholars have productively applied Viswanathan's understanding in their work, primarily in the context of conversion to religious minorities within the nation-state, to focus too heavily on conversion's unsettling effects risks overlooking political constellations in which it might have rather settling effects. In contrast to the scholarly focus on conversion's disruptive qualities, this article offers an ethnographic account of the 'settling' ambitions and logics that underwrite the state politics of Jewish conversion ( giur) in contemporary Israel. By looking ethnographically into the mundane discursive, pedagogic, and bureaucratic processes through which the Jewish state converts non- Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union, I demonstrate how religious conversion works to restore the bureaucratic logic of Israeli nationalism, thereby reinstating unambiguous forms of Jewish belonging. Religious conversion can also be an act of taxonomic repair. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]