The “Danish cartoons controversy” has often been cast as a paradigm case of the blindness of liberal language ideologies to anything beyond the communication of referential meaning. This article returns to the case from a different angle and draws a different conclusion. Following recent anthropological interest in the way legal speech grounds the force of law, the article takes as its ethnographic object a 2007 ruling by the French Chamber of the Press and of Public Liberties. This much-trumpeted document ruled that the Charlie Hebdo magazine’s republication of the cartoons did not constitute a hate speech offense. The article examines the form as well as the content of the ruling itself and situates it within the entangled histories of French press law, revolutionary antinomianism, and the surprisingly persistent legal concern with matters of honor. The outcome of the case (the acquittal of Charlie Hebdo) may seem to substantiate a view of liberal language ideology as incapable of attending to the performative effects of signs. Yet, a closer look challenges this now familiar image of Euro-American “representationalism,” and suggests some broader avenues of investigation for a comparative anthropology of liberalism and free speech.

Scholars of various backgrounds have noted how societies across the globe have come to rely on more and more policing and incarceration since the late 1970s. To date, however, detailed analyses of the causes and consequences of this “punitive turn” have been limited to the Global North, with the vast majority of studies focused on the expansion of states’ capacity for violence. This article offers a corrective to the global study of the punitive turn by tracing the rise of South Africa’s private security industry from its inception in the late apartheid period to its current position as one of the largest of its kind in the world. Using newspaper reports, archival material from the apartheid state’s security apparatus, and ethnographic interviews of former and current members of the security industry, it shows how counterinsurgency doctrine, civil war, and deindustrialization shaped South Africa’s punitive turn, precipitating a process where violence was devolved from the state to private actors, including local militias, vigilante groups, and private security firms. This process, it is argued, is far from anomalous, and should be seen as a paradigm for the way the post-1970s punitive turn has unfolded in the majority of the world.

This article investigates geosocial patterns of marriage strategies among the leadership of Hasidism, arguably the most prominent socio-religious movement of modern Jewry, known for its unique network of charismatic leaders organized in hereditary dynasties. The article’s core premise is that grasping the network structure of the Hasidic movement’s dynasties, which has been under-researched, is crucial to understanding the movement’s social and cultural dynamics. The study employs social network analysis (SNA) and spatial analysis to examine marital unions among these leaders (2,375 cases), from the early stages of the movement in the eighteenth century until the early twenty-first century. The article explains, for the first time, how Hasidic dynasties expanded, eroded, and negotiated their status within the network of other dynasties. More specifically, we analyze the position of the dynasties within a wider context of social and spatial interconnection patterns, the significance of endogamy, the impact of territorial factors on marriage preferences, and the creation of dynastic clusters. A significant conclusion of this article is that, rather than a set of unrelated dynasties, Hasidic leadership gradually became a web of interconnected families with explicable patterns of organization. These findings can help explain historical processes in Hasidism, such as its persistence through historical crises. It can also illuminate leadership processes in other religions in which, as in Hasidism, the social structure of charismatic leadership is based on clans.

Forty years into Botswana’s AIDS epidemic, amidst persistently low rates of marriage across southern Africa, an unexpected uptick in weddings appears to be afoot. Young people orphaned in the worst years of the epidemic are crafting creative paths to marriage where—and perhaps because—their parents could not. Taking the lead of a pastor’s assertion that the wife is mother of her husband, I suggest these conjugal creativities turn on an understanding of marriage as an intergenerational relationship. Casting marriage in intergenerational terms is an act of ethical (re)imagination that creates experimental possibilities for reworking personhood, pasts, and futures in ways that respond closely to the specific crises and loss the AIDS epidemic brought to Botswana. This experimentation is highly unpredictable and may reproduce the crisis and loss to which it responds; the multivalences of marriage-as-motherhood can be sources of failure and violence, as well as innovation and life. But it also recuperates and reorients intergenerational relationships, retrospectively and prospectively, regenerating persons and relations, in time. While different crises might invite different sorts of ethical re-imagination, marriage gives us a novel perspective on how people live with, and through, times of crisis. And marriage emerges as a crucial if often overlooked practice by which social change is not only managed but sought and produced.

This article presents a little-known story of Jewish-Muslim coexistence in Germany after World War Two. Using an ethnographic case study of Frankfurt am Main’s train-station district (Bahnhofsviertel), the analysis investigates long-term and partially forgotten Jewish-Muslim narratives, relations, and neighborhood encounters, paying particular attention to the changing political, spatial, and temporal dimensions that have blurred or closed symbolic boundaries between Jews and Muslims since the late 1960s. Bringing together the scholarship on symbolic boundaries and urban diversity, the theoretical discussion contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the variegated processes of Jewish-Muslim boundary-making and un-making over time, as well as the macro- and micro-level influences which shape these negotiations and outcomes. Studying Jewish-Muslim relations at the neighborhood level by adopting a boundary-related approach brings out more clearly the tensions over groupism and fluidity in theoretical debates and removes the current exceptionalism around Jewish-Muslim themes, making them more easily compared with other boundary processes within everyday life.

The Greek anti-Ottoman revolt in the 1820s brought increased suspicion among the empire’s ruling circles toward not only Greeks but non-Muslim subjects in general. This sparked government security measures in Istanbul, home to substantial Christian and Jewish populations. This article examines such measures intended to bring non-Muslim subjects under control, and the overall impact the Greek revolt had on the Ottoman approach to its subjects. It argues that the revolt catalyzed changes in the state’s attitude toward population surveillance and its treatment of non-Muslims. When the empire felt the need to bring non-Muslims under control, a major challenge was how to verify and vouch for the latter’s identity, since they deemed Muslim officials incapable of doing so. Thus, though they were suspicious of non-Muslims, they actively used the religious authorities of their communities to implement various security measures, including the creation of a population record and the introduction of internal passports. At the same time, religious authorities found it essential to demonstrate their and their community’s pro-Ottoman position by cooperating with the state in its efforts to find enemies within. Incorporation of non-Muslim religious authorities into imperial governance led to official recognition of the representatives of smaller non-Muslim groups, including Latin subjects, Armenian Catholics, and Jews. The result was a standardization of non-Muslim communities with officially recognized representatives before the government.

The article tells the story of the remains of the last Russian Tsar Nicholas II and his family, who were killed in Ekaterinburg in 1918, discovered in 1979, found again in 1991, solemnly buried in 1998, and canonized as saints by the Russian Orthodox Church in 2000. Thoroughly researched in the cause of official criminal investigation and identified with genetic tests in several labs in Russia and abroad, the royal remains have not been recognized by the Church. The failure to reach a consensus on the veracity of the remains of the Romanovs occurred in parallel with the inability to decide what to do with the mummified body of Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin, a contemporary of Nicholas II who has been kept in a mausoleum in the Red Square since the 1920s. Though, after 1991, voices have been raised for removing his body from this symbolic center of the country, no consensus has been reached so far as to where to move it and why. Revisiting Verdery’s famous work, the present article argues that such a movement necessitates a political commitment to voicing new notions of belonging and citizenship. The liminal status of these two bodies proves that the contemporary state in Russia is a continuation of both the Soviet and imperial state programs, not a new political structure like other post-socialist countries. Based on the works by Kantorowicz and Cherniavsky, this research develops the concept of popular theopolitics and aims to examine how people’s political and religious ontologies make use of the Tsar’s image.

Scholars have long recognized the importance of so-called “Ghent” systems of unemployment insurance for working-class strength and therefore national capitalist development. While only three European countries currently maintain “pure” Ghent systems, nearly a dozen did so during the first half of the last century. This article investigates the discontinuation of these systems in two paradigmatic cases, Belgium and the Netherlands. By focusing on the irreconcilable nature of trade union goals regarding the delivery, range, and funding of unemployment insurance, the analysis explains how the discontinuation of Ghent in these two countries could occur under distinctly union-friendly governments and with the explicit consent of their trade union movements. By showing that both the Belgian and Dutch trade union movements displayed great uncertainty regarding the organizational costs and benefits of assuming responsibility for benefit delivery, the article also explains why Belgium subsequently created a semi-Ghent system that continued to significantly boost union membership, while the Netherlands did not.

The nation-state is as much a narrative and ideational project as it is a spatial-territorial one. In the People’s Republic of China, Xi Jinping’s calls to “revitalize” China’s traditional culture, “Sinicize” religions, and “rejuvenate” the Chinese nation reflect a broader effort to reframe the national narrative and strengthen Communist Party control. This article examines the implications of Xi’s revisionist nationalism for China’s fifty-five minority nationalities, in particular the Hui, one of ten Muslim minority groups. It does so by analyzing the rise and demise of World Muslim City (WMC), a development project in western China that mobilized Hui identity and traditions for economic and diplomatic purposes. WMC was facilitated by a multicultural national narrative and by a fragmented authoritarian political system that for many years fostered policy improvisation, and deviation, at the local level. Its suspension underscores the increasingly anti-Muslim, anti-religious tenor of PRC policy, as evidenced by the Sinicization campaign that was a proximate cause of WMC’s demise. Its demise also highlights ongoing efforts to reassert CCP control over government, business, and the Party’s own rank-and-file. The fate of WMC furthermore reveals the spatial dimensions of Sinicization, and of Chinese cultural governance past and present. To paraphrase theorist Henri Lefebvre, Sinicization entails “spatial practices” that impose Xi-ist “representations of space” on lived “representational spaces,” from mosques and businesses to theme parks and luxury resorts.

This article explores the Brazilian aftermath of Japan’s unsuccessful bid to include racial equality as a principle in the League of Nations charter in 1919. While U.S. and Japan specialists have written about the proposal, its little-known fallout in Brazil contains key insights about racial ideology and the contested meanings of racial equality in the aftermath of World War I. The Brazilian side of the story, which overlapped with a contentious presidential campaign, is significant for three reasons. First, the proposal’s impact on that campaign and among Black intellectuals illuminates a previously overlooked path—what I call the “Pacific route”—that identifies Japan as one unlikely site of genesis for Brazil’s vaunted mythology of “racial democracy.” Second, debates about the proposal anchor our understanding of that mythology in the early twentieth century, pushing back the timeline often associated with “racial democracy” and revealing an early moment when Black intellectuals staked claim to the idea. Third, while Whites in the United States and the British Empire rejected the proposal and opposed Asian immigration in openly racist terms, in Brazil opponents sought to square their position with an inchoate national ethos of racial harmony. The failed proposal offered an opportunity to do so and helped cast Japanese immigrants as uniquely possessing race, in contrast to Brazilians, who had melded into a raceless nation. The Pacific route therefore holds lessons about Brazilian history and the global trajectory of the idea of racial equality.

This article explores the geographical imagination of diasporic activists from Afghanistan. It examines the significance of the historic-geographic region of Khorasan for their attempts to re-imagine Afghanistan and its place in the region and wider world. The article documents ethnographically the forms of intellectual exchange in which these intellectual-activists participate, and their modes of materializing the geographical imagination of Khorasan in everyday life. Rather than analyzing their geographical imagination solely through the lens of ethnicity, it treats it as reflecting the activists’ underlying yearning for sovereign agency and as an attempt to forge politically recognizable subjects capable of action.

One of the chief debates in the academic study of transhumanism is whether or not this emergent movement that advocates for the technological overcoming of the limits of humanity should be considered religious in nature. This question stems from the fact that, while the vast majority of transhumanists explicitly reject established religion, elements of transhumanism seem strikingly similar to Christian eschatology. This article explores this question by asking how the ontology of an avowedly religious transhumanist movement, the Mormon Transhumanist Association, differs from the informatic ontology identified in secular transhumanism. It shows how contemporary Mormon Transhumanist imaginings of various forms of technological resurrection are informed by the infrastructure and materialist ontology associated with the Mormon practice of “Proxy baptisms” (otherwise known as baptisms for the dead) and other initiatory rituals conducted by proxy on behalf of the deceased. This influence suggests that, at least in this case, there are identifiable differences between secular transhumanism and religious transhumanism that complicate any easy reading of secular transhumanism as being crypto-religion.

This paper traces discourse and practices among Jewish communal leaders in Western Europe and the United States regarding the need for Jewish missions to China and Ethiopia. Though thousands of miles apart, China and Ethiopia became closely entwined in their racial imagination. Beginning in the 1840s, the Jewish international press depicted both as biblical lost tribes, languishing in isolation and ignorance, and in need of a guiding hand with the mounting threat of Christian missionizing. Jewish communal leaders began to call for Jewish missions in the 1850s, and they looked to contemporary scientific, evangelical, and civilizing missions as models, merging elements from all three. Throughout the 1860s, in debates over who should lead a Jewish mission, three different types surfaced: an explorer, rabbinic emissary, and Orientalist. Each of these reframed prophetic calls for the return of the lost tribes within a modern scientific and imperial project. Drawing on the work of Sylvia Wynter, I argue that these communities in China and Ethiopia came to serve as boundary markers, demarcating the outer limits of the Jewish world, of Jewishness, and Judaism as it became increasingly circumscribed through theological, behavioral, and racial norms. Not only does this upend assumptions about Jewish solidarity and internationalism, but it also points to how missionizing was deployed by minoritized communities in the nineteenth century.

The scholarly and popular commonsense about corruption in the Philippines is that the country has always been corrupt. Seventy-eight years of corruption as an independent state (1946–2024) may as well have been a thousand. Lay and scholarly accounts explain this continuity with respect to traditional values and premature democratization. In both accounts, corruption is all but genetic to Philippine culture or politics. To be sure, continuity is self-evident if we are looking only at corruption scandals—but scandals have been accompanied by anti-corruption movements, broadly speaking. The two have gone hand-in-hand historically, suggesting that we need to understand them together. Taking them together, that is, focusing on their dialectic, produces, as I will show, a history of change. Specifically, how Filipinos relate to corruption has changed. They have become less tolerant of it in general and learned to embrace an anti-corruption model of politics. How scholars and policymakers conceive of corruption has changed. They have come to adopt a view of corruption as a generic social problem, effectively disembedding it from society. These developments have enabled a more intolerant approach such that, today, the greater danger lies in an anti-corruption “fundamentalism” leading to the rejection of politics altogether. Viewed as a whole, the history of corruption/anti-corruption has been a popular struggle over what politics should look like, and thus we might read their dialectic as driving the progress of political modernization from below.

This article explores the path of the microscopic phylloxera insect as it made its way from the United States to the Eastern Mediterranean in the late nineteenth century. As the pest devastated vineyards in Western Europe it also catalyzed grape production in the western Ottoman Empire around Izmir, before this region, too, succumbed. One response to the outbreak was the first legal code controlling plant traffic across nations, and another was an effort to plant American rootstocks, which were relatively resistant. The Ottoman response to phylloxera offers another example of the ways in which the alleged “sick man of Europe” was actually much more dynamic than its detractors insisted. The invocation of phylloxera moreover became a way for post-Ottoman states like Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, and Serbia to protect their national grape economies. The article’s broader analysis explains how the shared environment of the Aegean and the Eastern Mediterranean incubated both the spread of phylloxera and—in the protectionist legal regimes formed in response—the architecture of the region’s peculiarly integrated disconnection. The article closes by considering the agriculture of displacement amidst the Greek-Turkish Population Exchange, and how it further entrenched these dynamics as migrants took vines with them and planted them in the remarkably similar environments of their new national homes.

Japan is the only place in the world where bananas are marketed and priced by cultivation altitude. In the late 1980s, plantation managers sourcing the fruit from the southern Philippine region of Mindanao discovered a paradigm-shifting formula: the higher up one grew, the sweeter the bananas became. And the sweeter the bananas were, the closer they were to replicating the taste of colonial Taiwanese bananas, lost in the switch to Philippine supply. This paper offers the first transnational history of the banana’s transition along the spectrum from a fungible commodity to a nonfungible product in the Asia-Pacific region. Engaging critical studies of commodities and plantations, it takes fungibility as the characteristic that makes goods interchangeable and as the principle that renders landscape and labor as empty vessels open to the projection of others’ desires. The paper argues that the introduction of kōchi saibai banana or “highland cultivated bananas” for the Japanese market brought not the reversal of fungible life to the Philippine highlands but rather its continuation. In so doing, this work critiques conceptual frameworks that understand fungibility through the idioms of liquidification and immateriality. Instead, it proposes a topographical approach, which sees processes of fungibilization as operating through the profoundly material rearrangement of human and environmental communities. By focusing on the tensions between fungibility and differentiation, this paper offers an account of both an idiosyncratic marketing strategy particular to the Philippines and Japan, and a dynamic that pervades the creation of all commodities under capitalism.

From less than three dozen in 1949, the number of small hydropower stations in the People’s Republic of China grew to nearly ninety thousand by 1979. By the early 1980s, these stations were distributed across nearly 1,600 of China’s 2,300 counties. In 770 counties, small hydropower was the primary source of rural electricity generation. This article offers a history and assessment of these developments, unsettling our traditional emphasis on large-scale hydroelectricity. The article begins by reconstructing the PRC’s enormous investments in small hydropower from the 1950s to the early 1980s. This reconstruction, the first of its kind in the English language, not only helps reassess key periods and events in the history of the PRC but also establishes the position of small hydropower in the hydraulic history of the twentieth century. The article then turns to a discussion of the claimed impacts of small hydropower. As electricity became available for the first time in many parts of the Chinese countryside, it affected patterns of economic and social activity for hundreds of millions of people. Finally, the paper explores what the case of small hydropower can offer to conceptual and theoretical problems surrounding development, innovation, and the environment. Returning to the long-standing debate over scale and development, China’s experience with small hydropower reminds us of the important role played by smaller-scale, appropriate, and self-reliant technologies in global energy history.