MARITAL STRATEGIES The question of marriage has played a critical role in shaping broader understandings of kinship within the social sciences. From Lévi-Strauss’s postulate of a universal incest taboo as setting the groundwork for a theory of exchange, to historical narratives that trace the emergence and attempted universalization (often through nineteenth-century imperialism) of companionate marriage and monogamy, marriage, many have noted, has to do with everything, except love. While alliance and affinity—the seemingly lateral forms of exchange that structure marriage—have been contrasted with descent—the lineal and “natural” stuff of kinship, the analyses in the two essays under this rubric productively unsettle these distinctions while bringing together radically distinct methodologies.

In “Hasidic Dynasties: Geosocial Patterns of Marriage Strategies,” Marcin Wodziński, Uriel Gellman, and Gadi Sagiv assemble an impressively dense dataset of marital unions involving leaders of various dynasties within Hasidim to understand the role of marriage in shaping inter- and intra-dynastic forms of power and social mobility. A distinctive character of the Hasidic community, as the authors note, is the key role played by religious leaders as well as the dynastic nature of leadership. From the end of the eighteenth century onward, Hasidic leaders began to employ a mechanism of inheritance through sons or sons-in-law where kin would inherit followers, a residence, or “court,” giving rise to multi-generational dynasties. Marriage strategies, including shifting preferences between endogamy and exogamy, were key in shaping these inter-generational leadership structures as well as navigating major ruptures, including the reshaping of Hasidim in the United States and Israel after the Holocaust. As the authors note, through these deliberate marriage strategies, over time Hasidic dynasties transformed from a set of unrelated dynasties to a web of interconnected families.

Similarly, foregrounding the intergenerational aspects of marriage, Koreen M. Reece in “The wife is the mother of the husband”: Marriage, Crisis, and (Re)Generation in Botswana’s Pandemic Times,” emphasizes the “conjugal creativities” afoot in Botswana, where an uptick in marriage within the long shadow of the AIDS pandemic is shaped by ethical re-imagination and experimentation in times of chronic crisis, including the recognition of the “wife as the mother of the husband.” By reframing marriage as an intergenerational act and a mode of re-imagining kinship, including the asymmetries and hierarchies of imagining wives as mothers and husbands as fathers, Reece’s ethnography notes that for a generation orphaned by the AIDS pandemic, marriage serves to “regenerate intergenerational relations, retrospectively and prospectively, in the context of crisis and loss.” Marriage as ethical experimentation in terms of kinship relations and modes of imagining new kinds of moral and social selves has, Reece argues, transformed practices of care and responsibilities, while also creating new kinds of tenuousness in marriage relations. By taking these practices seriously, the essay is an argument for understanding kinship and its possibilities as more than simply a “mutuality of being,” and emphasizes the generative possibilities of asymmetry.

INSTITUTIONAL POWER Where lies the power of institutions? Institutions are often understood as practices, relationships, or organizations that shape social, economic, and political life. In opposition to an understanding of institutions as mere tools that serve a variety of interests, the three papers in this rubric emphasize the contingent and dialectical nature of institutional power. Power and institutions do not simply follow a one-way causality but emerge in complex webs of contestation.

In “Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Why Labor (Partially) Relinquished Its Institutional Resources in Belgium and the Netherlands,” Dennie Oude Nijhuis turns to the “Ghent” system of unemployment insurance under which national governments or local authorities subsidized union-organized unemployment insurance funds as opposed to administering their own unemployment systems. While most European countries have moved away from a pure Ghent system, Nijhuis looks at Belgium and Netherlands, two paradigmatic sites where the Ghent system was prevalent, to understand why Belgian and Dutch trade unions turned away from it. What is curious about these two countries is that the move occurred under union-friendly governments and with explicit support of their trade union movements. Instead of a simple opposition between state and labor, Nijhuis’s analysis emphasizes the contingent and complex calculations that led unions in these two countries to ostensibly and voluntarily relinquish institutional power.

Institutions and institutional settings become sites for redefining and contesting a variety of ideologies. Marc A. Hertzman takes us to the 1919 Paris Peace Conference where a contentious debate emerged around Japan’s proposal to include racial equality as a foundational principle of the League of Nations. His essay, “The Pacific Route: Brazil, Japan, the Paris Peace Conference, and the Meanings of Racial Equality” tells a lesser-known story of the origins and meanings of race in Brazil by focusing on these Pacific conversations. Japan’s proposal, as well as Brazil’s purported opposition to it, lead to a vociferous debate in Brazilian newspapers in which, simultaneously, a discourse of Brazil’s racial democracy was reinforced while Japan and Japanese immigrants in Brazil were located as external and unwanted others.

The dialectic nature of power, politics, and institutions emerges powerfully in Marco Garrido’s essay, “A Thousand Years of Corruption: A History of Corruption and Anti-corruption in the Philippines since 1946.” Popular and scholarly accounts have emphasized a continuous and long history of corruption in Philippines. Garrido counters this tale of continuity by focusing on numerous well-publicized scandals that implicate all sectors of government, but without resorting to a narrative that is reductively “culturalist,” or that simply blames lack of state capacity. Instead, in engagement with anthropological studies of corruption and a sweeping history of Philippines since the 1940s, he highlights a changing and dialectical relationship between corruption and anti-corruption. As he notes, “the history of corruption/anticorruption has been a popular struggle over what politics should look like.” Rather than thinking of corruption as a generic social problem disembedding it from politics and society, his essay is a call to think of the dialectic of corruption/anti-corruption as a “struggle for the very soul of politics.”

IMPERIAL GEOGRAPHIES Empires operate in temporal and spatial scales that are uneven and unruly. Imperial power is projected through a constellation of actors and practices that crisscross wide geographies and extend beyond scales of local and global. These geographies (and geologies) are sites of extraction and encounter shaped through a variety of contested knowledge practices. The three essays in this rubric traverse imperial geographies and specifically ways of navigating, contesting, and extracting in spaces often deemed peripheries and frontiers.

Serkan Yolaçan offers an innovative reading of the satirical weekly Molla Naraddin, published in early twentieth-century Tbilisi as a project of “inter-imperial literacy” that drew from a variety of literary sensibilities ranging from Ottoman Turkish to modern Russian satire and Persian classics in order to speak across a geography crosscut by multiple empires. His essay, “A Seven-Headed Public: Empire and Satire in Revolutionary Caucasus,” emphasizes satire as a mode of navigating, critiquing, and constituting a revolutionary public in the Caucasus in ways that exceeded conventional frameworks and binary oppositions of center and periphery, foreign and indigenous, and resistance and accommodation.

Contestation is key in Victoria Fomina’s article, “The Unsettled Frontier: Historical Imagination and Asynchronous Belonging on the Amur River.” This article centers around a controversy over the origin date of a city in Russia’s easternmost frontier to understand contestations over collective identity and historical imagination. As Fomina notes, the collapse of the Soviet industrial project and its economic and security logics that were key to establishing this remote manufacturing sector, as well as a failure to articulate a new mythos and orientation to nation-building in the Russian Far East, have resulted in a form of “asynchronous belonging.” Here, the absence of a shared political project for the future is expressed in bitter contestations over “founding moments” and other forms of historicity.

The final essay in this rubric moves underground to the two century-long history of geological exploration in Afghanistan. In “After Exploratory Geology: Gemological El Dorado in Global Afghanistan,” Ping-Hsiu Alice Lin shows how gemstones come to index social meanings for a variety of actors in colonial, imperial, and neo-imperial moments. She examines how the complex politics and afterlives of geological exploration maps transformed a seemingly peripheral “frontier” into a mineral rich “El Dorado.” Her essay explores how Afghanistan gained centrality within a global geography of extraction forged through knowledge practices such as imperial geological surveys and the profound legacies of this imaginary. Key to this story is a recognition that geological exploration rests on evaluation of potentialities that emerge within a transregional geography of extraction, expropriation, and conflict.

LONG HISTORIES Historians have long noted how received facts and settled truths are seldom straightforward but products of various ideological projects, including what we would term today as “misinformation.” While the vision of the historian as a sleuth in the archives has rightly been critiqued for its positivist assumptions regarding historical truth, there remains—perhaps more so today—a continuing importance and urgency to unsettling truths and experiments in historical writing that seek to query the making of certain commonsensical knowledge within long temporalities. What can we learn about ancient history and historical transmission by following the elephant?

In a reinterpretation of the war elephants of ancient India that is ambitious in both scale and scope, Thomas R. Trautmann’s essay, “Alexander and the Elephants,” argues that the contemporary skepticism of scholars toward the efficacy of war elephants is not only misplaced but the product of an anachronistic attribution to Alexander of Macedon. In an essay that brings together Greek, Roman, and Sanskrit sources across a sweeping historical time frame, Trautmann shows how the elephant, as a creature of flesh and blood, tied together regions and histories as well as visions of interpolity order that emerged in the aftermath of Alexander’s campaign, an order that becomes visible through the itineraries of the Indian war elephant.