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Holy Infrastructures: Catholicism, Detroit Borderlands, and the Elements Comparative Studies in Society and History (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-08-14 Stephen Berquist, Valentina Napolitano, Elizabeth Rigotti
Through an ethnographic rendering of the Catholic Church at the Detroit-Windsor borderland, this article foregrounds the ways elemental forces, including water, earth/soil, and air, form an interconnected entity that constitutes part of the theopolitical and religious scaffolding of Holy Infrastructures. We argue that the repetitive inscription of social and affective flows within an urban terrain
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“If your ox does not pull, what are you going to do?”: Persistent Violence in South Africa’s Deep-Level Gold Mines and Its Contribution to the 1922 Rand Rebellion Comparative Studies in Society and History (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-08-14 John Edward Higginson
The 1922 Rand Rebellion was the only instance of worker protest in the twentieth century in which a modern state used tanks and military airplanes, as well as mounted infantry, to suppress striking workers. These circumstances were unprecedented in their own time and for most of the century. The compressed and intensely violent rebellion of twenty thousand white mineworkers in South Africa’s gold mines
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Return to Orléans: Racism, Rumor, and Social Scientists in 1960s France Comparative Studies in Society and History (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-08-14 Arthur Asseraf
How did it become possible to think of a racism without racists? This article tackles this question by looking at the contested interpretation of a racist incident in France. In 1969, Jewish shop owners in Orléans were baselessly accused of kidnapping women in fitting rooms and trafficking them into sexual slavery. This antisemitic agitation rapidly attracted the attention of local authorities, national
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Heterodoxies of the Body: Death, Secularism, and the Corpse of Raja Rammohun Roy Comparative Studies in Society and History (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-04-11 J. Barton Scott
In 1833, Rammohun Roy, the so-called “Father of Modern India,” died abruptly while traveling in England. Because cremation was then illegal in Britain, he was buried rather than immolated according to brahminical norms. This article situates the micro-history of his colonial corpse within the genealogy of secularism. I take secularism as a formation of the body in the most morbidly literal of ways—fused
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Law’s Logistical Media: The Installation of the File System in the Postwar Japanese Prosecutor’s Office Comparative Studies in Society and History (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-04-04 Miyako Inoue
This article traces the fraught history of the file system’s adoption by the Japanese Public Prosecutor’s Office (PPO) from the late 1940s to the early 1950s, when the U.S. General Headquarters (GHQ), the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, decentralized the PPO’s power and transformed it into a “democratic” judicial agency. This is also a postwar history of the introduction of Taylorism-derived
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The Devil and Florentino: Specters of Petro-Populism in Venezuela Comparative Studies in Society and History (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-04-01 Aaron Kappeler
Scholarship on the political economy of natural resources in the Global South has often relied on the concept of the “resource curse” to explain the negative features of extractive economies and their alleged tendency to promote rent capture at the expense of national sovereignty and development. Such theories link the behavior of social actors to an excess of “unearned income,” with little reference
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Of Rule not Revenue: South Sudan’s Revenue Complex from Colonial, Rebel, to Independent Rule, 1899 to 2023 Comparative Studies in Society and History (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-04-01 Matthew Sterling Benson
This article analyses taxation practices in colonial, post-colonial rebel-led, and independent South Sudan and argues that the ethos of taxation in the region has been and remains primarily oriented around predatory and coercive strategies of rule. This overarching pattern endures because the fundamental structure and rationale of revenue-raising practices, which collectively constitute South Sudan’s
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Recovering the Dalit Public Sphere: Vernacular Liberalism in Late Colonial North India Comparative Studies in Society and History (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-04-01 Ramnarayan S. Rawat
Drawing from publications by Swami Achutanand and the Adi-Hindu Mahasabha press between 1916 and 1940, this article examines the role of this north Indian Dalit organization in creating language and categories of liberalism in the Hindi vernacular. The Mahasabha poet-activists published numerous song-booklets in a variety of Hindi song genres to intervene in ongoing discussions on the subjects of representation
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Re-Territorializing the Neolithic: Architecture and Rhythms in Early Sedentary Societies of the Near East Comparative Studies in Society and History (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-04-01 Rémi Hadad
Revivals of public interest in the Neolithic Near East have generally coincided with the emergence of powerful imagery, such as the discovery of Çatalhöyük’s striking wall paintings in the 1960s. Now, sixty years later, the sculptures of Göbekli Tepe are ensuring the period’s widespread appeal. The capacity of these well-preserved buildings to carry such imagery until today has made them, in turn,
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Towards an Energetics of Class: Comparing Energy Protests in India and the United States Comparative Studies in Society and History (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-04-01 Elizabeth Chatterjee
From Iran and Mozambique to France’s Gilets jaunes, consumer energy protests are ubiquitous today. Little historical scholarship has so far explored such “fuel riots,” the problematic moniker bestowed by contemporary policy scholars. This article argues for disaggregating the homogenous crowd of so-called rioters, instead analyzing why particular socioeconomic groups persistently take to the streets
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A Discipline Like No Other: Marginalized Autonomy and Institutional Anchors in French Public Psychiatry (1945–2016) Comparative Studies in Society and History (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-03-27 Alex V. Barnard
Research on psychiatry in the United States has shown how, since the 1980s, the discipline has sought to increase its prestige and preserve its jurisdiction by embracing biomedical models of treatment and arguing it is a medical specialty like any other. While this strategy is consistent with what the literature on professions would expect, this paper analyzes an alternative case: French public psychiatry
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The Subterranean Unsettling of Science, Race, and Religion: Obeah, Petroleum Geology, and Risk in Trinidad Comparative Studies in Society and History (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-03-27 J. Brent Crosson
When scholars have compared “African traditional religion” and “Western science,” they have often treated the terms of this comparison as racialized unitary entities, which are either radically different or somewhat similar (even as Western categories of rationality or nature remain the basis for these comparisons). This essay unsettles these assumptions by focusing on practices that are called “science”
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The Earth Is Sweet. On Cottica Ndyuka (De)compositions Comparative Studies in Society and History (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-02-05 Olívia Maria Gomes da Cunha
How can we remain attentive to the scale of the environmental damage caused in traditional Maroon territories by the effects of the Plantationocene and the material vestiges of colonial and racial violence left by capitalism? Dwelling on conversations held with Maroon Cottica Ndyuka women living in Moengo, a small town established on the Cottica River in Eastern Suriname to support a bauxite industrial
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Indigenous Knowledge and Ontological Difference? Ontological Pluralism, Secular Public Reason, and Knowledge between Indigenous Amazonia and the West Comparative Studies in Society and History (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-02-02 Christian Tym
Real knowledge emerges from “impossible” worldviews. Or, put differently, it is possible to accept knowledge that is produced by people whose ontological presuppositions–their baseline assumptions about the nature of reality–one entirely rejects. How can this fact be accommodated, not by advancing a wishful post-dualism, dangerous post-secularism, or implausible ontological relativism, but by working
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The Architecture of Politics and the Politics of Architecture: A Comparative Approach to Parish Church Building and Civic Government in Late-Medieval Europe Comparative Studies in Society and History (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-01-11 Gabriel Byng
Church construction was one of the most challenging, and most political, tasks undertaken by medieval cities. Comparing examples from across Europe reveals profound differences, however, in both the architecture of politics and the politics of architecture; that is, how building projects were administered and how their administration shaped their socio-political significance. Although ranging across
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A Country of White Lilies: Inter-Imperial Nation-Making and Development from the Russian Empire’s Periphery to Post-Ottoman Turkey Comparative Studies in Society and History (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-01-11 N. Yasemin Bavbek, Juho Topias Korhonen
In this article, we investigate the reasons behind the puzzling enthusiastic reception of a book about Finland’s national development by Turkish nationalist intellectuals in the early Republic of Turkey. Published in Turkish in 1928, the developmental model laid out in Petrov’s The Country of White Lilies resonated with the Turkish intelligentsia and has remained a popular book in Turkey throughout
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Empires, Languages, and Scripts in the Perso-Indian World Comparative Studies in Society and History (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-01-11 Sumit Guha
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
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The Suffering Subject: Colonial Flogging in Northern Nigeria and a Humanitarian Public, 1904–1933 Comparative Studies in Society and History (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-01-11 Steven Pierce
Shortly after the start of colonial rule in Northern Nigeria, a series of scandals over flogging brought international attention. A network of newspapers reported on flogging cases, particularly those involving women and educated, often Christian, Africans from outside the north. International attention focused on these cases as humanitarian outrages. The Nigerian administration and the Colonial Office
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Navigating “Race” at Tahiti: Polynesian and European Encounters Comparative Studies in Society and History (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2023-12-22 Deborah Elliston
In this article I analyze stories about the negotiation of European racialization ideologies in the Society Islands (Tahiti and its Islands) in the late eighteenth century. My focus is the disjunctures between European understandings of their encounters at Tahiti, and what Pacific scholars have come to understand of Polynesian understandings of themselves and various foreigners in that early period
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Cartwheel or Ladder? Reconsidering Sinhala Caste Comparative Studies in Society and History (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2023-11-06 Deborah Winslow
Is Sinhala caste simply a weak regional variant of Hindu caste or is it something else entirely? This essay argues that Sinhala caste as found in the territory of the former Kandyan Kingdom has had a distinctive ontology and retains its unique character. The essay begins with an overview of textual, genetic, and archaeological evidence for the origins of caste on the subcontinent. It then turns to
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Between Global History and Microhistory: Rethinking Histories of “Small Spaces” and Cities Comparative Studies in Society and History (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2023-11-03 Gaurav C. Garg
How can historians of “small spaces” and cities focus on local events and issues and at the same time carry on conversations with peers in a disciplinary mode marked by the spatial expansiveness of global history, on one hand, and a focus on objects and individuals of microhistory on the other? At stake here are key questions connected with the intellectual value of place-based knowledge and detailed
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The Political Force of Memory: The Making and Unmaking of Brexit as an Event Comparative Studies in Society and History (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2023-10-25 Félix Krawatzek, Friedemann Pestel
What qualifies as a political event is a core question for social and historical research. This article argues that the use of temporal structures in narratives of political and social developments contributes significantly to the making and unmaking of events. We show how arguments that draw upon history play a particularly important role in transforming the everyday unfolding of politics into discernable
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Worldmaking in the Hijaz: Muslims between South Asian and Soviet Visions of Managing Difference, 1919–1926 Comparative Studies in Society and History (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2023-10-25 Roy Bar Sadeh
Between the end of World War I and the Mecca World Muslim Congress of 1926, Soviet officials and Indian Muslim thinkers imagined the possibilities of a post-imperial world through the Hijaz. The All-India Khilafat Committee (AIKC; established 1919), an organization led by prominent Indian Muslim thinkers, and the Soviet Union promoted competing projects to protect the Hijaz, home to some of Islam’s
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The “Is” at Home, the “Ought” Abroad: Self-Comparison as Self-Criticism and the Transylvanian Model in Early Twentieth-Century Romania Comparative Studies in Society and History (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2023-10-24 Andrei Sorescu
What happens when nation-builders in an independent state imagine themselves to have fallen behind kinfolk living under imperial oppression, and how does this affect their vision of a future of national unity? This paper explores the shapes that critical self-comparison could take among Romanians in the Kingdom of Romania around the turn of the twentieth century by considering three interconnected
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Praise the Gardeners, Dun the Hunters: Alaska Natives, Taxation, and Settler Colonialism Comparative Studies in Society and History (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2023-07-11 Maximilien Zahnd
This article explores the relationship between tax law and settler colonialism by looking at the ways in which taxes can be part of the “civilizing” process of Indigenous peoples. In 1921, the Territory of Alaska enacted a “license tax on the business of fur-farming, trapping and trading in pelts and skins of fur-bearing animals.” Since most trappers were Natives, the “fur tax” de facto targeted them
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German Lessons: Comparative Constitutionalism, States’ Rights, and Federalist Imaginaries in Interwar India Comparative Studies in Society and History (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2023-07-04 Sarath Pillai
This article reveals the hold that German history and constitutionalism had on Indian federalists in the interwar period. A range of federalists from Indian princely states and British provinces, eager to see India become a federation rather than a unitary state fashioned on the English model, looked to Imperial Germany for constitutional lessons. They saw in German history and constitutionalism a
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Runes and Rye: Administration in Denmark and the Emergence of the Younger Futhark, 500–800 Comparative Studies in Society and History (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2023-06-30 Richard Cole
In this article, I take up the case of runic writing to reflect upon James Scott’s view of the nexus between writing and various forms of domination in early states, especially the use of literacy for taxation in cereal-growing societies. Scott’s theses provide interesting matter “to think with,” even when his grasp of historical detail has been found wanting. It is not controversial to grant Scott
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Language at the Limits of the Human: Deceit, Invention, and the Specter of the Unshared Symbol Comparative Studies in Society and History (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2023-06-29 Courtney Handman
Both the theories coming out of the linguistic turn and those running away from it have placed special emphasis on human language (or human symbolic thinking) as a matter of convention and shared meanings. Yet there are other histories that link language and humanness through invention, deceit, and secrecy rather than through convention and publicness. These alternate models have been used as diagnostic
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The Owl and the Occult: Popular Politics and Social Liminality in Early Modern South Asia Comparative Studies in Society and History (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2023-06-29 Divya Cherian
Historians of Islamic occult science and post-Mongol Persianate kingship in the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal Empires have in recent years made clear just how central this body of knowledge was to the exercise of imperial power. Alongside, scholarship on tantra has pointed to its diffuse persistence in the early modern period. But what dynamics beyond courts and elite initiates did these investments
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Balancing Hope and Fear: Muslim Modernists, Democracy, and the Tyranny of the Majority Comparative Studies in Society and History (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2023-04-25 Megan Brankley Abbas
During the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, many Muslim modernists exhibited mixed records regarding democracy. On the one hand, they articulated cogent arguments that Islam was, at its heart, democratic in nature and worked to counter Islamist claims to the contrary. Some crafted robust visions for Islamic democratic governance. On the other hand, many of the same modernists forged political
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Slavery, Freedom Suits, and Legal Praxis in the Ottoman Empire, ca. 1590–1710 Comparative Studies in Society and History (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2023-04-21 Joshua M. White
Beginning with the story of the Muslim youth Mehmed bin Abdülcelil of Tunis, this article examines the plight of Ottoman subjects abducted and sold into slavery within the Ottoman Empire and their efforts to regain freedom through Ottoman courts. Freedom suits (hürriyet davaları) were common in the seventeenth-century Ottoman Empire, so much so that contemporary legal praxis manuals (sukuk) always
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Tensions of Modernity: Privilege, Precarity, and Colonial Nostalgia among European Security Contractors in East Africa Comparative Studies in Society and History (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2023-04-20 Jethro Norman
Private security work can be a brutal world of short-term contracts, exploitation, and under-regulation, where the imperative of profit is expected to trump collective notions of military brotherhood. Why then do so many demobilized soldiers turn to it as a vocation? While a rich body of work has revealed the vulnerabilities of demobilized military life, ethnographic investigations into how contractors
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Antislavery, “Native Labour,” and the Turn to Indenture in British Colonial Natal, 1842–1860 Comparative Studies in Society and History (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2023-04-19 Jonathan Connolly
This article presents an expansive history of a seemingly discrete event: the decision to extend an indentured labor system created in the Caribbean and Indian Ocean to the British colony of Natal, in South Africa, in 1860. Most work on indenture in Natal takes 1860 as a starting point and treats the migration of Indian workers under indenture in relative isolation. By contrast, this article focuses
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Class Trips beyond Borders: Reimagining the Nation through State-Sponsored Heritage Tourism Comparative Studies in Society and History (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2023-04-19 Virág Molnár
The article explores how cross-border heritage tourism is promoted in public schools to reimagine Hungary as an ethnically homogeneous nation by incorporating ethnic kin communities that live in neighboring countries. Cross-border heritage tourism has long served to establish strong ties to ethnic diaspora communities that live beyond the territorial borders of the nation-state. National borders in
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Opera as Critical “Synthesis”: Theorizing the Interface between Cosmopolitanism and Orientalism Comparative Studies in Society and History (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2023-04-18 Aeron O’Connor
For centuries, European operas have portrayed dramatic, exotic Others on stage. However, as opera is increasingly adopted around the world, including by those “Eastern” Others it orientalized, its Othering tendencies serve new, more critical purposes. Post-colonial studies of knowledge and cultural production have shown how relations between centers and peripheries, knowledge and power are integral
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Reassessing Reification: Ethnicity amidst “Failed” Governmentality in Burma and India Comparative Studies in Society and History (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2023-04-18 Elliott Prasse-Freeman
In part because a single colonial project eventually formally incorporated Burma as an appendage to British colonial rule of India, Burma scholars persistently draw on historiography and anthropology of India to assert that ethnic categories in Burma were “reified” and hierarchized by colonial governmentality and ensuing postcolonial statecraft. This article disputes such assumed equivalences, re-theorizing
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Spiritual Pawning: “Mad Slaves” and Mental Healing in Atlantic-Era West Africa Comparative Studies in Society and History (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2023-04-18 Nana Osei Quarshie
When enslaved people became “mad,” they lost exchange value as labor capital on the Atlantic market, as neither African nor European merchants considered the mentally distressed to be valuable bondsmen. Historians of slavery in the Americas have drawn on accounts of “mad slaves” to understand how labor value was generated, and disrupted, through the transport and sale of captive Africans. But historians
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Branded Bodies: Judicial Torture, Punishment, and Infamy in Nineteenth-Century Iran Comparative Studies in Society and History (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2023-01-20 Farzin Vejdani
Forced branding, tattooing, and bodily inscriptions were linked to a complex intersection of meanings and uses in nineteenth-century Iran. Drawing on insights from studies of bodily inscriptions in other world historical contexts, this paper discusses branding as a marker of ownership, both of human slaves and of animals; Islamic attitudes toward bodily inscription and its symbolic significance in
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The Environmental Transformation of “Empty Space”: From Desert to Forest in the Landes of Southwestern France Comparative Studies in Society and History (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2023-01-20 Caroline Ford
This article explores the environmental transformation of the moorland (landes) of southwestern France from a much maligned “wilderness” or “empty space” to a forested landscape coveted for its productive potential as well as its aesthetic beauty. This occurred in two stages from the eighteenth century to the present and was effected by the French state and local landowners. It bears resemblance to
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Hamlet after Genocide: The Haunting of Soghomon Tehlirian and Empirical Fabulation Comparative Studies in Society and History (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2023-01-20 Ayşe Parla
Soghomon Tehlirian was acquitted in Berlin in 1921 for the killing of Talat Paşa, Ottoman minister and architect of the Armenian Genocide. Complicating clear-cut distinctions between truth and fabulation, and personal revenge and legal justice, this paper examines the 1921 trial in light of Tehlirian’s 1953 memoir, to show the legal, moral, and epistemological work done by the ghost of Tehlirian’s
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Hindu: A History Comparative Studies in Society and History (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2023-01-20 Audrey Truschke
This article provides a textured history of the multivalent term “hindu” over 2,500 years, with the goal of productively unsettling what we think we know. “Hindu” is a ubiquitous word in modern times, used by scholars and practitioners in dozens of languages to denote members of a religious tradition. But the religious meaning of “hindu” and its common use are quite new. Here I trace the layered history
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Pilot Programs and Postcolonial Pivots: Pioneering “DNA Fingerprinting” on Britain’s Borders Comparative Studies in Society and History (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2023-01-19 Roberta Bivins
Developed in Britain and the United States in the 1980s, genetic profiling has since become a global technology. Today, it is widely regarded as the evidentiary “gold standard” in individual and forensic identification. However, its origins as a technology of post-empire at Britain’s externalized borders in South Asia have remained unexamined. This article will argue that the first state-sanctioned
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Prison of the Womb: Gender, Incarceration, and Capitalism on the Gold Coast of West Africa, c. 1500–1957 Comparative Studies in Society and History (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2023-01-19 Sarah Balakrishnan
To date, studies of imprisonment and incarceration have focused on the growth of male-gendered penal institutions. This essay offers a provocative addition to the global study of the prison by tracing the emergence of a carceral system in West Africa in the nineteenth century that was organized around the female body. By examining archival testimonies of female prisoners held in what were called “native
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Religious Authority beyond Domination and Discipline: Epistemic Authority and Its Vernacular Uses in the Shi‘i Diaspora Comparative Studies in Society and History (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2023-01-19 Ali-Reza Bhojani, Morgan Clarke
“Religious authority” remains a ubiquitous but controversial term of comparative analysis. In Islamic studies, authority is generally personified in the form of the ulama and most often viewed through Weber’s lens of charismatic, legal-rational, and traditional types of legitimate domination. Our particular interest, Twelver Shi‘i Islam, seems a paradigmatic case, where the relationship between “the
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Uhuru Sasa! Federal Futures and Liminal Sovereignty in Decolonizing East Africa Comparative Studies in Society and History (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2023-01-19 Kevin P. Donovan
Decolonization in East Africa was a regional affair that required the remaking of temporal orders. The staggered independence timelines of Tanganyika, Uganda, and Kenya caused considerable consternation due to transnational solidarities and visions for East African Federation. The interminable delays of Kenyan decolonization also threatened the linked economy of the region and diluted the sovereignty
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Mapping Oysters and Making Oceans in the Northern Indian Ocean, 1880–1906 Comparative Studies in Society and History (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2022-11-23 Tamara Fernando
At the turn of the twentieth century, most of the world’s pearls were extracted from rich oyster and coral reefs on the northern Indian Ocean rim. This paper returns to the sites of extraction, studying imperial maps made from 1889–1925 to delineate oyster reefs on the seafloor. Building from the submarine up, I draw on environmental, animal, and history of science studies to explore the work of mapping
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Peaceful Wars and Unlikely Unions: The Azhar Strike of 1909 and the Politics of Comparison in Egypt Comparative Studies in Society and History (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2022-11-09 Aaron G. Jakes
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
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Defining Victimhood: The Political Construction of a “Victim” Category in Colombia’s Congress, 2007–2011 Comparative Studies in Society and History (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2022-11-08 Kristin Foringer
Scholars of state classification practices have long interrogated how official legal categories are constructed. This paper analyzes the construction of “victimhood” in Colombia as a feat that required negotiation among international human rights organizations, local civil society actors, and politicians across the partisan spectrum. The Victims’ Law of 2011, which sought to provide widespread reparations
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Global Territorialization and Mining Frontiers in Nineteenth-Century Brazil: Capitalist Anxieties and the Circulation of Knowledge between British and Habsburgian Imperial Spaces, ca. 1820–1850 Comparative Studies in Society and History (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2022-10-28 Tomás Bartoletti
The rumors of Brazil’s mineral riches reaching London and Vienna in the first half of the nineteenth century, started by enslaved Africans mining clandestinely in unexplored regions and later through geological surveys by mining engineers from the Habsburg Empire, prompted aspirations to wealth which circulated fluidly in the transatlantic context. This article examines the distinct but convergent
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Palimpsests of Violence: Ruination and the Afterlives of Genocide in Anatolia Comparative Studies in Society and History (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2022-10-28 Anoush Tamar Suni
Before the 1915 Genocide of Ottoman Armenians, the region of Van, in contemporary southeastern Turkey, held hundreds of active Armenian churches and monasteries. After the destruction of the Armenian community, these ruined structures took on new afterlives as they became part of the evolving environments and communities around them. These ruined spaces play a role in the everyday lives of the people
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“Why don’t I forgive? They didn’t ask for forgiveness!”: Manich Msamah and Tunisia’s Politics of Unforgiveness Comparative Studies in Society and History (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2022-10-28 Joshua E. Rigg
Recent transitional justice scholarship has explored the role of emotions during periods of political transition. Scholars have taken negative emotions as both legitimate responses to past crimes and as supports to the pursuit of justice in the present. This paper argues that feelings circulate across a wide array of individuals, things, and processes that often sit apart from the formal, judicial
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The Iconic Paths of La Verge de Montserrat in Catalonia and Beyond: A Comparative Approach from History and Anthropology Comparative Studies in Society and History (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2022-09-02 Roger Canals, Celeste Muñoz
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
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Sovereignty as Care: Acquaintances, Mutuality, and Scale in the Wa State of Myanmar Comparative Studies in Society and History (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2022-09-02 Hans Steinmüller
Sovereignty always relies on a double movement of violence and care. It requires the power to exercise violence as well as the capacity to care, to protect, and to nourish. In the footsteps of Foucault and Agamben, numerous scholars have rediscovered the same paradox in philosophical and legal texts. Anthropologists writing about informal and practical sovereignty pay attention to violence, but sometimes
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A Sovereign and Virtuous Body: The Competent Muslim Woman’s Guide to Health in Thanawi’s Bihishtī Zēwar (1905) Comparative Studies in Society and History (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2022-08-30 Barbara D. Metcalf
Maulana Ashraf `Ali Thanawi, a reformist Islamic scholar, was very much part of his times in his urgent concern with women’s potential role in individual and societal “improvement,” the goal of the enormously successful encyclopedic work that included the chapter considered here. Thanawi’s teachings included generic elite male “best practices” on health and ethics, undergirded by Greco-Arabic humoral
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The Rise of Islamic Society: Social Change, State Power, and Historical Imagination Comparative Studies in Society and History (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2022-08-15 Aaron Rock-Singer
This article explores the history of “Islamic Society” (al-Mujtamaʿ al-Islāmī), a concept whose widespread usage is paralleled by shallow understandings of its origins. Scholars of premodern Islamic history often use this term to describe the ideas and practices of Muslim communities under Islamic political rule, while historians of the Muslim Brotherhood highlight this leading Islamist movement’s
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Erosion by Design: Rethinking Innovation, Sea Defense, and Credibility in Guyana Comparative Studies in Society and History (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2022-08-05 Sarah E. Vaughn
This essay explores the intersecting socio-material and ethical demands that engineers confront in adapting sea defenses to climate change in Guyana. It focuses on the tensions in climate adaptation that create the possibilities for theorizing innovation as a key theme of counter-modernities in the Anthropocene. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, oral histories, and archival research, I show that engineers’
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Cultivating “Care”: Colonial Botany and the Moral Lives of Oil Palm at the Twentieth Century’s Turn Comparative Studies in Society and History (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2022-08-04 Alice Rudge
This paper draws on archival research to trace the techniques used by scientists and government officials involved with palm oil at the turn of the twentieth century. For them, mundane practices of “carefulness” were paramount as they worked on collecting, identifying, marketing, and improving the oil palm. But they also applied this so-called care to people: care of the oil palm was thought to presuppose
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The Ottoman Model: Basra and the Making of Qajar Reform, 1881–1889 Comparative Studies in Society and History (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2022-08-04 Camille Lyans Cole
In the nineteenth century, Qajar Iran was beset by both internal and external threats to its cohesion. In considering Qajar responses to this condition of threat, scholars have largely emphasized the rise of nationalism and a traumatic encounter with Europe. In this article, instead, I use the two Khuzestan travel narratives of royal engineer Najm al-Molk to draw out an alternative thread of reform
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Reading Rostow in a Rhodesian Prison: Anticolonialism and the Reinvention of Modernization in British Central Africa Comparative Studies in Society and History (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2022-08-04 Geoffrey Traugh
This article examines how and why anti-colonial activists in Nyasaland, now Malawi, seized on modernization theory to make their case for national independence in the early 1960s. As far as British officials were concerned, Nyasaland’s small size, large population, and agrarian character meant that it stood little chance of joining the modern, industrialized world. The Malawi Congress Party, however
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Botánica Sephardica Comparative Studies in Society and History (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2022-05-18 Sarah Abrevaya Stein
This article traces the genealogy of a Jewish-owned botánica located in East Harlem in the 1930s and 1940s. Botánicas are understood to manifest an intricate, transatlantic religious, spiritual, and healing world, offering herbal products, sacramental goods, ritual implements, and counseling to Italian, Latinx, Black, and Caribbean practitioners of folk Catholicism, herbalism, hoodoo, Vodou, Santería