This article explores a forcible, wartime transfer of women and minors from one ethnic group to another, and its partial reversal after the war. I analyze the historical conditions that enabled the original transfer, and then the circumstances that shaped the reverse transfer. The setting is Istanbul during and immediately after World War I, and the protagonists are various influential agents connected to the Ottoman Turkish state and to the Armenian Patriarchate. The absence and subsequent involvement of European Great Powers determines the broader, shifting context. The narrative follows the bodies of women and children, who were the subjects of the protagonists' discourses and the objects of their policies. This is the first in-depth study to connect these two processes involved: the wartime integration of Armenian women and children into Muslim settings, and postwar Armenian attempts to rescue, reintegrate, and redistribute them. I explain why and how the Armenian vorpahavak (gathering of orphans and widows) worked as it did, and situate it comparatively with similar events. I highlight its uniqueness, and the theoretical possibilities that it offers toward understanding why and how women, children, and reproduction matter to collectivities in crisis.

In this article I examine gratitude and ingratitude as valuable analytical tools for determining how social inequalities inform kinship practices. Accusing one's kin of ingratitude reveals the edges and fault lines of kinship, as well as closely related expectations about what should be given, how it should be given, and how it should be received. As such, this essay follows in an esteemed anthropological tradition of unifying analyses of the gift and of kinship. It argues that expressions of and talk about gratitude and ingratitude closely index dimensions of social relations such as gender, generation, and social class, and simultaneously reveal tensions within kinship relations where duty and obligation are contested. Ethnographic examples are drawn from fieldwork in Ayacucho, a small city in the Peruvian Andes, where informal fostering and the fraught relations between grown children and their aging parents provide two related arenas for expressions of ideas about gratitude and ingratitude. Analyzing these two examples, I argue for gratitude and ingratitude as analytical heuristics, useful to identify and focus upon dimensions of relations understood to fall within the domain of kinship, and potentially useful in other settings as well.

This article proposes a comparative analytical framework to study changes in Islamic law during the post-Mongol period, particularly the rise of the official school of law (or state madhhab). Taking as my case study the Ottoman adoption of a particular branch within the Sunni Hanafi school of law, I suggest that this adoption marks a new chapter in Islamic legal history. In earlier periods, while rulers appointed judges and thus regulated the adjudication procedures, they did not intervene, at least theoretically, in the structure and doctrine of the schools of law, which remained the relatively autonomous realm of the jurists. The Ottoman adoption of the school, by contrast, was not merely an act of state patronage, since the dynasty played an important role in regulating the school's structure and doctrine. To this end, it employed a set of administrative and institutional practices, such as the development of an imperial learned hierarchy with standardized career and training tracks and the appointment of jurisconsults (muftis). Some of these practices were found in other polities across the eastern Islamic lands in the post-Mongol period, but these similarities have not been treated comparatively in modern historiography. They suggest that the Ottoman case was part of a broader legal culture that spanned several polities across the region. This article outlines a framework that will enable historians of Islamic law to treat these similarities in a more coherent manner. The framework raises key issues in the historiography of Islamic law and its nineteenth-century modernization.

This essay concerns transformations in the judicial apparatus involved in implementing Islamic law (syariah/shari‘a) in Malaysia, a Muslim-majority nation in Southeast Asia. Three of my goals are to delineate some of the empirical complexities of the syariah judiciary's day-to-day operations and the mutually contradictory directions in which it is moving; to problematize the widely invoked trope of Islamization as a gloss for these phenomena; and to illustrate that this judiciary is profitably viewed as a global assemblage (Deleuze and Guattari 1987; Ong and Collier 2005). Another, more general, objective is to elucidate some of the ways that religion, law, and attendant phenomena are being bureaucratized, rationalized, corporatized, and otherwise transformed in an increasingly globalized world.

Rich vernacular traditions about the aftermaths of the social trauma of a major famine, sometime in sixteenth-century eastern Africa, narrate the founding of a new dynasty in Bunyoro, one of the region's oldest monarchies. Scholars often understand such traditions about the founding of new dynasties as chartering the new political order. Whether traditions credit that order with the aura of antiquity or strengthen it by excluding social elements discordant with the new orchestrations of power, they are exercises in legitimation. When scholars recognize that such traditions were set in the aftermath of widespread violence, a spirit of mourning emerges in them. Spirits of mourning, joined to those of legitimation, shape traditions about the founding of a new dynasty by deftly inflecting the problem of accountability. In Bunyoro, traditions about its founder depict him as a barbarian cultural neophyte, of fluctuating emotional stability, improvising a new political order. These unflattering, realistic representations of the founding dynast's affective comportment were designed to appeal to emotional repertoires in the different life experiences of audience members, enlisting their participation in the project of reviving sovereignty in the aftermaths of traumatic violence. Mourning and legitimation run through historical narratives initiating an aftermath to structural violence, and reveal that loss and worry shape narratives of transformed sovereign authority, and revive it in the aftermaths of structural violence. Mourning lends emotional depth and counterpoint to matters of bureaucracy, economy, gender, and so forth, in crafting satisfying accounts of transformation and accountability in political life. That emotional depth, in turn, helps explain the durability of traditions.

Taking inspiration from linguistic anthropological approaches to the work of the Russian philosopher and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975), this article uses a Bakhtinian perspective on voice as contested presence to analyze the post-Mao revival of mountain deity possession practices among Tibetans in China's northwestern province of Qinghai. I respond to recent work that suggests that state-led development processes have intensified grassroots contests over the moral sources of authority and legitimacy in China, by contrasting the ambivalent voices of an urbanizing village's Tibetan Party secretary with those of the village's deity medium, during a mid-2000s village conflict. The conflict underscored a crisis of authority or moral “presence” among Tibetans under intensifying central state-led development pressures that for many carried forward the disenfranchisement of Tibetans that started in the 1950s.

This article seeks to come to terms with the extraordinarily swift demise of the debtors' prison in multiple countries during the nineteenth century. While focusing primarily on the reform debate in England, I argue that the debtors' prison quickly came to be seen as a barbaric aberration within the expanding commercial life of the nineteenth century. By turning to a copious pamphletic literature from the era of its demise, I show how pamphleteers and eye-witnesses described the debtors' prison in the idiom of ritual; it was seen as a dangerous sanctuary that radically inverted all capitalistic economic practices and moral values of the world outside its walls. Reformers claimed that, inside these shrines of debt, citizens were ritually guided and transformed from active members of society into “knaves” or “idlers,” or both. As such, the debtors' prison needed to be eradicated. To do so, reformers mobilized at least three critical discourses, all of which sought to mark the debtors' prison as a zone of barbarism that threatened the civility of the state and its citizenry. By focusing on the debtors' prison as a powerful and transformative ritual zone, the article provides a counterintuitive history of this institution that was so crucial to the regulation of credit and debt relations for centuries. In so doing, the article contributes to a broader literature on the spatiality of debt.

This paper explores the movements of asylum patients in and out of psychiatric care in French Indochina as the product of everyday interactions between psychiatrists, colonial authorities, and the public, especially patients' families. Throughout the interwar years, families and communities actively participated in psychiatric decision-making in ways that disrupt our notions of the colonial asylum as a closed setting that patients rarely left, run by experts who enjoyed broad, unquestioned authority. Vietnamese families, by debating individuals' suitability for social life, engaged with professional psychiatrists to find common ground for thinking about and discussing mental illness. At the same time, they pursued their own strategies in ways that significantly limited the power of experts. Debates revolved around the mental health of patients, but also around the capacity of families to assume their care upon release, and whether the asylum itself was the most appropriate site for treatment and rehabilitation. By considering how lay people and experts came together to negotiate the confinement and release of asylum patients, this paper offers a novel perspective on the development of psychiatric knowledge and power in colonial settings. I argue that by situating the history of psychiatry within the local dynamics of colonial rule as opposed to expert discourse, the asylum emerges here less as a blunt instrument for the social control and medicalization of colonial society than as a valuable historical site for reframing narratives of colonial repression and resistance.