Kudos

Is publication in CSSH its own reward? Yes. Is it honor enough? Not always. The essays that grace our pages win awards, are reprinted in readers and edited volumes, and evolve into books. Here we single out proud moments in the afterlife of recent essays. We encourage CSSH authors to keep us informed of where their work is going and the accolades its gathers along the way. If you don’t toot your own horn, we might have to toot it for you! We are delighted to report that …

A CSSH paper by Tom C. McCaskie, “‘As on a Darkling Plain’: Practitioners, Publics, Propagandists, and Ancient Historiography” (CSSH 54-1, January 2012) has inspired a series of seminars to be held at University College and The Institute of Classical Studies, both in London, for Summer term 2013:

Ancient History seminar, “Ancient History Observed” (organizers: Lindsay Allen, Hugh Bowden, Amelie Kuhrt and John North): This series of seminars is triggered by an article, written by a distinguished historian from SOAS who normally works on African, more particularly on Ghanaian History, Professor Tom McCaskie. He decided to start his retirement by looking at the current position of the history of a quite different period and place, which resulted in the article on ancient history from Comparative Studies in Society and History…. Three important linked themes are raised here: the overall relation of current political preoccupations with the writing of history; the recent transformation in thinking about the Achaemenid Empire; and the intellectual reputation of the ancient history-writing of today. The article has drawn strong reactions, some favourable, some hostile: May 2, John North (ICS) and Tom McCaskie (SOAS), “Contemporary political issues and the writing of history”; May 9, Wouter Henkelman (Amsterdam), “Cyrus and Beyond: Contextualising Persian Identity”; May 16, Hugh Bowden (KCL), “‘Where ignorant armies clash by night’: Alexander the Great in modern scholarship”; May 23, Eleanor Robson (Cambridge), “Publics, practitioners and politics: talking Babylonian history in southern Iraq”; May 30, Christopher Tuplin (Liverpool); “‘The Sea of Faith’: a Greek perspective on the sunny uplands of Achaemenid historiography”; June 6, Lindsay Allen (KCL), “Any more light on the Darkling Plain?”

Jordanna Bailkin (CSSH 48-2, “The Boot and the Spleen: When Was Murder Possible inBritish India?”) recently published The Afterlife of Empire (University of California Press, 2012).  The press describes the book like this:

The Afterlife of Empire investigates how decolonization transformed British society in the 1950s and 1960s. Although usually charted through its diplomatic details, the collapse of the British Empire was also a deeply personal process that altered everyday life, restructuring routines, individual relationships, and social interactions. The book traces a set of diverse yet interrelated and richly compelling stories: West Indian migrants repatriated for mental illness, young Britons volunteering in the former colonies, overseas students seeking higher education, polygamous husbands and wives facing invalidation of their marriages, West African children raised by white, working-class British families, and Irish deportees suspected of terrorism. Postwar welfare–from mental health to child care–was never simply a British story, but was shaped by global forces, from the experiences and expectations of individual migrants to the emergence of new legal regimes in Africa and Asia. The book thus recasts the genealogy and geography of welfare by charting its unseen dependence on the end of empire. Using a wealth of recently declassified files from the National Archives, oral histories, court cases, press reports, social science writings, and photographs, Jordanna Bailkin illuminates the relationship between the postwar and the postimperial.

Laleh Khalili (CSSH 49-2 “‘Standing with My Brother’: Hizbullah, Palestinians, and the Limits of Solidarity”) has just published Time in the Shadows: Confinement in Counterinsurgencies (Stanford University Press, 2013). Here is how the press describes the book:

Detention and confinement—of both combatants and large groups of civilians—have become fixtures of asymmetric wars over the course of the last century. Counterinsurgency theoreticians and practitioners explain this dizzying rise of detention camps, internment centers, and enclavisation by arguing that such actions “protect” populations. In this book, Laleh Khalili counters these arguments, telling the story of how this proliferation of concentration camps, strategic hamlets, “security walls,” and offshore prisons has come to be. Time in the Shadows investigates the two major liberal counterinsurgencies of our day: Israeli occupation of Palestine and the U.S. War on Terror. In rich detail, the book investigates Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo Bay, CIA black sites, the Khiam Prison, and Gaza, among others, and links them to a history of colonial counterinsurgencies from the Boer War and the U.S. Indian wars, to Vietnam, the British small wars in Malaya, Kenya, Aden and Cyprus, and the French pacification of Indochina and Algeria. Khalili deftly demonstrates that whatever the form of incarceration—visible or invisible, offshore or inland, containing combatants or civilians—liberal states have consistently acted illiberally in their counterinsurgency confinements. As our tactics of war have shifted beyond slaughter to elaborate systems of detention, liberal states have warmed to the pursuit of asymmetric wars. Ultimately, Khalili confirms that as tactics of counterinsurgency have been rendered more “humane,” they have also increasingly encouraged policymakers to willingly choose to wage wars.

Water on Sand: Environmental Histories of the Middle East and North Africa (Oxford University Press, 2012) is a new collection edited by Alan Mikhail (CSSH 54-4, “The Ottoman Empire and the Imperial Turn,” with Christine Philliou). Oxford summarizes the book on their webpage:

From Morocco to Iran and the Black Sea to the Red, Water on Sand rewrites the history of the Middle East and North Africa from the Little Ice Age to the Cold War era. As the first holistic environmental history of the region, it shows the intimate connections between peoples and environments and how these relationships shaped political, economic, and social history in startling and unforeseen ways. Nearly all political powers in the region based their rule on the management and control of natural resources, and nearly all individuals were in constant communion with the natural world. To grasp how these multiple histories were central to the pasts of the Middle East and North Africa, the chapters in this book evidence the power of environmental history to open up new avenues of scholarly inquiry.

Liliana Riga (CSSH 48-4, “Ethnonationalism, Assimilation, and the Social Worlds of the Jewish Bolsheviks in Fin de Siècle Tsarist Russia“) has just published The Bolsheviks and the Russian Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2012). Cambridge University Press describes the book as follows:

This comparative historical sociology of the Bolshevik revolutionaries offers a reinterpretation of political radicalization in the last years of the Russian Empire. Finding that two-thirds of the Bolshevik leadership were ethnic minorities – Ukrainians, Latvians, Georgians, Jews and others – this book examines the shared experiences of assimilation and socioethnic exclusion that underlay their class universalism. It suggests that imperial policies toward the Empire’s diversity radicalized class and ethnicity as intersectional experiences, creating an assimilated but excluded elite: lower-class Russians and middle-class minorities universalized particular exclusions as they disproportionately sustained the economic and political burdens of maintaining the multiethnic Russian Empire. The Bolsheviks’ social identities and routes to revolutionary radicalism show especially how a class-universalist politics was appealing to those seeking secularism in response to religious tensions, a universalist politics where ethnic and geopolitical insecurities were exclusionary, and a tolerant ‘imperial’ imaginary where Russification and illiberal repressions were most keenly felt.

Unmasking the State: Making Guinea Modern (University of Chicago Press, 2012), is a new book by Mike McGovern (CSSH 55-1, ““History is stubborn”: Talk about Truth, Justice, and National Reconciliation in the Republic of Guinea” [with Alexis Arieff]). Here is a summary of the book from the UCP website:

When the Republic of Guinea gained independence in 1958, one of the first policies of the new state was a village-to-village eradication of masks and other ritual objects it deemed “fetishes.” The Demystification Program, as it was called, was so urgent it even preceded the building of a national road system. In Unmasking the State, Mike McGovern attempts to understand why this program was so important to the emerging state and examines the complex role it had in creating a unified national identity. In doing so, he tells a dramatic story of cat and mouse where minority groups cling desperately to their important— and outlawed—customs. Primarily focused on the communities in the country’s southeastern rainforest region—people known as Forestiers—the Demystification Program operated via a paradox. At the same time it banned rituals from Forestiers’ day-to-day lives, it appropriated them into a state-sponsored program of folklorization. McGovern points to an important purpose for this: by objectifying this polytheistic group’s rituals, the state created a viable counterexample against which the Muslim majority could define proper modernity. Describing the intertwined relationship between national and local identity making, McGovern showcases the coercive power and the unintended consequences involved when states attempt to engineer culture.

Matt Tomlinson (CSSH 51-1, “Efficacy, Truth, and Silence: Language Ideologies in Fijian Christian Conversions“) is co-editor, with Debra McDougall, of the volume Christian Politics in Oceania (Berghahn Book, ASAO Studies in Pacific Anthropology, 2012). In addition to Matt, the book includes contributions from CSSH alumni Webb Keane, Joel Robbins, and Michael Scott. Berghahn describes the book for us:

The phrase “Christian politics” evokes two meanings: political relations between denominations in one direction, and the contributions of Christian churches to debates about the governing of society. The contributors to this volume address Christian politics in both senses and argue that Christianity is always and inevitably political in the Pacific Islands. Drawing on ethnographic and historical research in Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, and Fiji, the authors argue that Christianity and politics have redefined each other in much of Oceania in ways that make the two categories inseparable at any level of analysis. The individual chapters vividly illuminate the ways in which Christian politics operate across a wide scale, from interpersonal relations to national and global interconnections.

Former CSSH Editor Thomas R. Trautmann (CSSH 50-1, “Being Editor”; 54-1, “Does India Have History? Does History Have India?”) and Peter M. Whiteley are co-editors of a collection just published by University of Arizona Press, titled Crow-Omaha: New Light on a Classic Problem of Kinship Analysis (Amerind Studies in Anthropology, 2012). The press describes the book:

The “Crow-Omaha problem” has perplexed anthropologists since it was first described by Lewis Henry Morgan in 1871. During his worldwide survey of kinship systems, Morgan learned with astonishment that some Native American Societies call some relatives of different generations by the same terms. Why? Intergenerational “skewing” in what came to be named “Crow” and “Omaha” systems has provoked a wealth of anthropological arguments, from Rivers to Radcliffe-Brown, from Lowie to Lévi-Strauss, and many more. Crow-Omaha systems, it turns out, are both uncommon and yet found distributed around the world. For anthropologists, cracking the Crow-Omaha problem is critical to understanding how social systems transform from one type into another, both historically in particular settings and evolutionarily in the broader sweep of human relations. This volume examines the Crow-Omaha problem from a variety of perspectives—historical, linguistic, formalist, structuralist, culturalist, evolutionary, and phylogenetic. It focuses on the regions where Crow-Omaha systems occur: Native North America, Amazonia, West Africa, Northeast and East Africa, aboriginal Australia, northeast India, and the Tibeto-Burman area. The international roster of authors includes leading experts in their fields. The book offers a state-of-the-art assessment of Crow-Omaha kinship and carries forward the work of the landmark volume Transformations of Kinship, published in 1998. Intended for students and scholars alike, it is composed of brief, accessible chapters that respect the complexity of the ideas while presenting them clearly. The work serves as both a new benchmark in the explanation of kinship systems and an introduction to kinship studies for a new generation of students.

Selim Deringil (CSSH 45-2, “‘They Live in a State of Nomadism and Savagery’: The Late Ottoman Empire and the Post-Colonial Debate”; 51-2, “‘The Armenian Question Is Finally Closed’: Mass Conversions of Armenians in Anatolia during the Hamidian Massacres of 1895–1897″ ) has just published a new book: Conversion and Apostasy in the Late Ottoman Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2012). Here is a description of it:

In the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire traditional religious structures crumbled as the empire itself began to fall apart. The state’s answer to schism was regulation and control, administered in the form of a number of edicts in the early part of the century. It is against this background that different religious communities and individuals negotiated survival by converting to Islam when their political interests or their lives were at stake. As the century progressed, however, conversion was no longer sufficient to guarantee citizenship and property rights as the state became increasingly paranoid about its apostates and what it perceived as their ‘denationalization’. The book tells the story of the struggle between the Ottoman State, the Great Powers and a multitude of evangelical organizations, shedding light on current flash-points in the Arab world and the Balkans, offering alternative perspectives on national and religious identity and the interconnection between the two.

A book edited by Alessandro Stanziani (CSSH 51-4, “The Traveling Panopticon: Labor Institutions and Labor Practices in Russia and Britain in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries”) , titled Labour, Coercion, and Economic Growth in Eurasia, 17th-20th Centuries, has just been published by Brill (2012). The publisher summarizes the book:

The history of the forms of “free” labour is intimately linked to that of coerced labour. In this book, worldwide acknowledged specialists of Russia, China, Russia, Japan, India, the Indian Ocean, France and Britain show that between the seventeenth and the twentieth centuries, forms of labour and bondage were defined and practised in reference to each other. Labour relationships found their sources not only in the global circulation of models, peoples, goods and institutions, but also in market dynamics. Proto-industry, agriculture, trade and manufacturing experienced unprecedented growth throughout Eurasia. Mostly labour-intensive, this long-term growth put considerable pressure on labour resources and contributed to increased coercion and legal constraints on labour mobility in both Asia and Europe.

Rebecca J. Scott and Jean M. Hébrard have won two 2012 awards from the American Historical Association for their book Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation (Harvard University Press): the Albert J. Beveridge Award in American History, given “for a distinguished book on the history of the United States, Latin America, or Canada, from 1492 to the present,” and the James A. Rawley Prize in Atlantic History, awarded “for historical writing that explores the integration of Atlantic worlds before the 20th century.” Our original kudos announcement of their book’s publication can be found below.

E. Natalie Rothman’s Brokering Empire: Trans-Imperial Subjects between Venice and Istanbul (Cornell University Press) has won two awards.  From the American Historical Association, she earned The Herbert Baxter Adams Prize,  awarded “for a distinguished first book by a young scholar in the field of European history.” From the American Historical Association and The American Catholic Historical Association, Society for Italian Historical Studies, her book earned the Helen & Howard R. Marraro Prize, given for a book “which treats Italian history in any epoch, Italian cultural history, or Italian-American relations.”  We congratulate her. The orginal kudos announcement of Natalie’s book’s publication is below.

Jun Uchida’s book Brokers of Empire: Japanese Settler Colonialism in Korea, 1876-1945 (Harvard University Press) has won the American Historical Association’s John K. Fairbank Prize in East Asian History, “awarded for the best work on the history of China proper, Vietnam, Chinese Central Asia, Mongolia, Manchuria, Korea, or Japan since the year 1800.” A description of Jun’s book can be found in the original kudos announcement, below.

The American Historical Association has awarded the Martin A. Klein Prize in African History to Gabrielle Hecht (CSSH 51-4, “Africa and the Nuclear World: Labor, Occupational Health, and the Transnational Production of Uranium“) for her book Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade (MIT Press). The prize is given to “recognize the most distinguished work of scholarship on African history published in English during the previous calendar year.” The book is described on the MIT press website as follows:

Uranium from Africa has long been a major source of fuel for nuclear power and atomic weapons, including the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. In 2002, George W. Bush claimed that Saddam Hussein had “sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa” (later specified as the infamous “yellowcake from Niger”). Africa suddenly became notorious as a source of uranium, a component of nuclear weapons. But did that admit Niger, or any of Africa’s other uranium-producing countries, to the select society of nuclear states? Does uranium itself count as a nuclear thing? In this book, Gabrielle Hecht lucidly probes the question of what it means for something–a state, an object, an industry, a workplace–to be “nuclear.” Hecht shows that questions about being nuclear–a state that she calls “nuclearity”–lie at the heart of today’s global nuclear order and the relationships between “developing nations” (often former colonies) and “nuclear powers” (often former colonizers). Nuclearity, she says, is not a straightforward scientific classification but a contested technopolitical one. Hecht follows uranium’s path out of Africa and describes the invention of the global uranium market. She then enters African nuclear worlds, focusing on miners and the occupational hazard of radiation exposure. Could a mine be a nuclear workplace if (as in some South African mines) its radiation levels went undetected and unmeasured? With this book, Hecht is the first to put Africa in the nuclear world, and the nuclear world in Africa. Doing so, she remakes our understanding of the nuclear age.

Bhavani Raman (CSSH 54-2, “The Duplicity of Paper: Counterfeit, Discretion, and Bureaucratic Authority in Early Colonial Madras”) has just published Document Raj: Writing and Scribes in Early Colonial South India (University of Chicago Press, 2012). The press website provides this description of the book:

Historians of British colonial rule in India have noted both the place of military might and the imposition of new cultural categories in the making of Empire, but Bhavani Raman, in Document Raj, uncovers a lesser-known story of power: the power of bureaucracy. Drawing on extensive archival research in the files of the East India Company’s administrative offices in Madras, she tells the story of a bureaucracy gone awry in a fever of documentation practices that grew ever more abstract—and the power, both economic and cultural, this created. In order to assert its legitimacy and value within the British Empire, the East India Company was diligent about record keeping. Raman shows, however, that the sheer volume of their document production allowed colonial managers to subtly but substantively manipulate records for their own ends, increasingly drawing the real and the recorded further apart. While this administrative sleight of hand increased the company’s reach and power within the Empire, it also bolstered profoundly new orientations to language, writing, memory, and pedagogy for the officers and Indian subordinates involved. Immersed in a subterranean world of delinquent scribes, translators, village accountants, and entrepreneurial fixers, Document Raj maps the shifting boundaries of the legible and illegible, the legal and illegitimate, that would usher India into the modern world.

Mahmood Mamdani (CSSH 43-4, “Beyond Settler and Native as Political Identities: Overcoming the Political Legacy of Colonialism”) has just published Define and Rule: Native as Political Identity (Harvard University Press, 2012). Here is an overview of the book from the press website:

Define and Rule focuses on the turn in late nineteenth-century colonial statecraft when Britain abandoned the attempt to eradicate difference between conqueror and conquered and introduced a new idea of governance, as the definition and management of difference. Mamdani explores how lines were drawn between settler and native as distinct political identities, and between natives according to tribe. Out of that colonial experience issued a modern language of pluralism and difference. A mid-nineteenth-century crisis of empire attracted the attention of British intellectuals and led to a reconception of the colonial mission, and to reforms in India, British Malaya, and the Dutch East Indies. The new politics, inspired by Sir Henry Maine, established that natives were bound by geography and custom, rather than history and law, and made this the basis of administrative practice. Maine’s theories were later translated into “native administration” in the African colonies. Mamdani takes the case of Sudan to demonstrate how colonial law established tribal identity as the basis for determining access to land and political power, and follows this law’s legacy to contemporary Darfur. He considers the intellectual and political dimensions of African movements toward decolonization by focusing on two key figures: the Nigerian historian Yusuf Bala Usman, who argued for an alternative to colonial historiography, and Tanzania’s first president, Mwalimu Julius Nyerere, who realized that colonialism’s political logic was legal and administrative, not military, and could be dismantled through nonviolent reforms.

Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer (CSSH 54-4, “The Nature of Sleep”) has a new book, The Slumbering Masses: Sleep, Medicine, and Modern American Life (University of Minnesota Press, 2012) that extends his analysis of the topic of his CSSH paper. Here is how the press website summarizes the book:

Rebecca J. Scott (CSSH Editorial Committee; CSSH 44-4, “Property in Writing, Property on the Ground: Pigs, Horses, Land, and Citizenship in the Aftermath of Slavery, Cuba, 1880-1909″ [with Michael Zeuske]; CSSH 26-1, “Explaining Abolition: Contradiction, Adaptation, and Challenge in Cuban Slave Society, 1860–1886″) and Jean M. Hébrard (CSSH 44-2, “The Writings of Moïse (1898-1985): Birth, Life, and Death of a Narrative of the Great War”) have published Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation (Harvard University Press, 2012). The book is summarized as follows on the press website:

Around 1785, a woman was taken from her home in Senegambia and sent to Saint-Domingue in the Caribbean. Those who enslaved her there named her Rosalie. Her later efforts to escape slavery were the beginning of a family’s quest, across five generations and three continents, for lives of dignity and equality. Freedom Papers sets the saga of Rosalie and her descendants against the background of three great antiracist struggles of the nineteenth century: the Haitian Revolution, the French Revolution of 1848, and the Civil War and Reconstruction in the United States. Freed during the Haitian Revolution, Rosalie and her daughter Elisabeth fled to Cuba in 1803. A few years later, Elisabeth departed for New Orleans, where she married a carpenter, Jacques Tinchant. In the 1830s, with tension rising against free persons of color, they left for France. Subsequent generations of Tinchants fought in the Union Army, argued for equal rights at Louisiana’s state constitutional convention, and created a transatlantic tobacco network that turned their Creole past into a commercial asset. Yet the fragility of freedom and security became clear when, a century later, Rosalie’s great-great-granddaughter Marie-José was arrested by Nazi forces occupying Belgium. Freedom Papers follows the Tinchants as each generation tries to use the power and legitimacy of documents to help secure freedom and respect. The strategies they used to overcome the constraints of slavery, war, and colonialism suggest the contours of the lives of people of color across the Atlantic world during this turbulent epoch.

Former CSSH Editorial Assistant Daniel Bass, has a new book: Everyday Ethnicity in Sri Lanka: Up-country Tamil Identity Politics (Routledge Contemporary South Asia Series, 2012). Routledge describes the book as follows:

Focusing on notions of diaspora, identity and agency, this book examines ethnicity in war-torn Sri Lanka. It highlights the historical development and negotiation of a new identification of Up-country Tamil amidst Sri Lanka’s violent ethnic politics. Over the past thirty years, Up-country (Indian) Tamils generally have tried to secure their vision of living within a multi-ethnic Sri Lanka, not within Tamil Eelam, the separatist dream that ended with the civil war in 2009. Exploring Sri Lanka within the deep history of colonial-era South Asian plantation diasporas, the book argues Up-country Tamils form a “diaspora next-door” to their ancestral homeland. It moves beyond simplistic Sinhala-Tamil binaries and shows how Sri Lanka’s ethnic troubles actually have more in common with similar battles that diasporic Indians have faced in Fiji and Trinidad than with Hindu-Muslim communalism in neighboring India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Shedding new light on issues of agency, citizenship, displacement and re-placement within the formation of diasporic communities and identities, this book demonstrates the ways that culture workers, including politicians, trade union leaders, academics, and NGO workers, have facilitated the development of a new identity as Up-country Tamil. It is of interest to academics working in the fields of modern South Asia, diaspora, violence, post-conflict nations, religion, and ethnicity.

Khaled Furani (CSSH 52-3, “Said and the Religious Other”) has published a new book, Silencing the Sea: Secular Rhythms in Palestinian Poetry (Stanford University Press, 2012). Here is a summary of it:

Silencing the Sea follows Palestinian poets’ debates about their craft as they traverse multiple and competing realities of secularism and religion, expulsion and occupation, art, politics, immortality, death, fame, and obscurity. Khaled Furani takes his reader down ancient roads and across military checkpoints to join the poets’ worlds and engage with the rhythms of their lifelong journeys in Islamic and Arabic history, language, and verse. This excursion offers newfound understandings of how today’s secular age goes far beyond doctrine, to inhabit our very senses, imbuing all that we see, hear, feel, and say. Poetry, the traditional repository of Arab history, has become the preeminent medium of Palestinian memory in exile. In probing poets’ writings, this work investigates how struggles over poetic form can host larger struggles over authority, knowledge, language, and freedom. It reveals a very intimate and venerated world, entwining art, intellect, and politics, narrating previously untold stories of a highly stereotyped people.

Judith Scheele (CSSH 49-2, “Recycling Baraka: Knowledge, Politics, and Religion in Contemporary Algeria”; and CSSH 50-4, “A Taste for Law: Rule-Making in Kabylia (Algeria)”)  has a new book: Smugglers and Saints of the Sahara: Regional Connectivity in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2012):

Simon Harrison (CSSH 42-3, “From Prestige Goods to Legacies: Property and the Objectification of Culture in Melanesia”; and CSSH 45-2, “Cultural Difference as Denied Resemblance: Reconsidering Nationalism and Ethnicity ”) has published Dark Trophies: Hunting and the Enemy Body in Modern War (Berghahn, 2012):

Many anthropological accounts of warfare in indigenous societies have described the taking of heads or other body parts as trophies. But almost nothing is known of the prevalence of trophy-taking of this sort in the armed forces of contemporary nation-states. This book is a history of this type of misconduct among military personnel over the past two centuries, exploring its close connections with colonialism, scientific collecting and concepts of race, and how it is a model for violent power relationships between groups.

Alessandro Monsutti (CSSH 54-3, “Fuzzy Sovereignty: Rural Reconstruction in Afghanistan, between Democracy Promotion and Power Games”) recently gave the annual Elizabeth Colson Public Lecture at the Oxford Museum of Natural History. A podcast of the lecture, “States, Sovereignties and Refugees: A View from the Margins?” is available at this link. Here is a summary of the talk:

The lecture explored how refugees are defined as people who have lost the protection of their state origin and therefore fall under the responsibility of the international community, represented by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. They are situated at the interstice of national and international sovereignty. Building on the Afghan case, one of the most massive forced displacements of population since World War II, the lecture will examine the growth of a global bureaucracy linked to the action of international and non-governmental organizations, philanthropic foundations, think tanks, and even private security contractors. They promote new forms of transnational governmentality that involve benevolence and welfare programs but also coercion and repression; they may by turns support or challenge the more familiar territorialized expressions of state authority. Are we really, as is frequently announced, facing the ultimate crisis of the nation-state? Viewed from Afghanistan, the situation appears more complex and hardly novel. The state has probably never been the exclusive locus of legitimate power; a layered and divided national administration has always coexisted with alternative and segmented de facto sovereignties. But the general reinforcement of non-state forms of sovereignty does not prevent the pervasiveness of the state as the organizational entity of today’s international politics. Far from being situated at the margins of today’s world. Afghanistan may paradoxically appear as a laboratory to highlight social and political processes present in much of the colonial and postcolonial world, and increasingly in the West.

Naveeda Khan (CSSH 53-3, “The Acoustics of Muslim Striving: Loudspeaker Use in Ritual Practice in Pakistan”) has just published Muslim Becoming: Aspiration and Skepticism in Pakistan (Duke, 2012). The book is described as follows on the press website:

In Muslim Becoming, Naveeda Khan challenges the claim that Pakistan’s relation to Islam is fragmented and problematic. Offering a radically different interpretation, Khan contends that Pakistan inherited an aspirational, always-becoming Islam, one with an open future and a tendency toward experimentation. For the individual, this aspirational tendency manifests in a continual striving to be a better Muslim. It is grounded in the thought of Muhammad Iqbal (1877–1938), the poet, philosopher, and politician considered the spiritual founder of Pakistan. Khan finds that Iqbal provided the philosophical basis for recasting Islam as an open religion with possible futures as yet unrealized, which he did in part through his engagement with the French philosopher Henri Bergson. Drawing on ethnographic research in the neighborhoods and mosques of Lahore and on readings of theological polemics, legal history, and Urdu literature, Khan points to striving throughout Pakistani society: in prayers and theological debates and in the building of mosques, readings of the Qur’an, and the undertaking of religious pilgrimages. At the same time, she emphasizes the streak of skepticism toward the practices of others that accompanies aspiration. She asks us to consider what is involved in affirming aspiration while acknowledging its capacity for violence.

Nile Green (CSSH 53-3, “The Trans-Border Traffic of Afghan Modernism: Afghanistan and the Indian ‘Urdusphere’”) has two new books. One is Making Space: Sufis and Settlers in Early Modern India (Oxford University Press, 2012).

Nile’s second new book is Sufism: A Global History (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012).

Since their beginnings in the ninth century, the shrines, brotherhoods and doctrines of the Sufis held vast influence in almost every corner of the Muslim world. Offering the first truly global account of the history of Sufism, this illuminating book traces the gradual spread and influence of Sufi Islam through the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and ultimately into Europe and the United States.

A book that Nile published last year, Bombay Islam: The Religious Economy of the West Indian Ocean, 1840–1915 (Cambridge University Press, 2011), won the Albert Hourani Award of the Middle East Studies Association for 2011:

Hussein Ali Agrama (CSSH 52-3, “Secularism, Sovereignty, Indeterminacy: Is Egypt a Secular or a Religious State?”) has recently published Questioning Secularism: Islam, Sovereignty, and the Rule of Law in Modern Egypt (University of Chicago Press, 2012). Here is the press description of the book:

The central question of the Arab Spring—what democracies should look like in the deeply religious countries of the Middle East—has developed into a vigorous debate over these nations’ secular identities. But what, exactly, is secularism? What has the West’s long familiarity with it inevitably obscured? In Questioning Secularism, Hussein Ali Agrama tackles these questions. Focusing on the fatwa councils and family law courts of Egypt just prior to the revolution, he delves deeply into the meaning of secularism itself and the ambiguities that lie at its heart. Drawing on a precedent-setting case arising from the family law courts —the last courts in Egypt to use Shari‘a law—Agrama shows that secularism is a historical phenomenon that works through a series of paradoxes that it creates. Digging beneath the perceived differences between the West and Middle East, he highlights secularism’s dependence on the law and the problems that arise from it: the necessary involvement of state sovereign power in managing the private spiritual lives of citizens and the irreducible set of legal ambiguities such a relationship creates. Navigating a complex landscape between private and public domains, Questioning Secularism lays important groundwork for understanding the real meaning of secularism as it affects the real freedoms of a citizenry, an understanding of the utmost importance for so many countries that are now urgently facing new political possibilities.

Jun Uchida (CSSH, 51-1 , “’A Scramble for Freight’: The Politics of Collaboration along and across the Railway Tracks of Korea under Japanese Rule”) has published Brokers of Empire: Japanese Settler Colonialism in Korea, 1876-1945 (Harvard University Press, Harvard East Asian Monograph 337, 2011). The book is described as follows on the press website:

Between 1876 and 1945, thousands of Japanese civilians—merchants, traders, prostitutes, journalists, teachers, and adventurers—left their homeland for a new life on the Korean peninsula. Although most migrants were guided primarily by personal profit and only secondarily by national interest, their mundane lives and the state’s ambitions were inextricably entwined in the rise of imperial Japan. Despite having formed one of the largest colonial communities in the twentieth century, these settlers and their empire-building activities have all but vanished from the public memory of Japan’s presence in Korea. Drawing on previously unused materials in multi-language archives, Jun Uchida looks behind the official organs of state and military control to focus on the obscured history of these settlers, especially the first generation of “pioneers” between the 1910s and 1930s who actively mediated the colonial management of Korea as its grassroots movers and shakers. By uncovering the downplayed but dynamic role played by settler leaders who operated among multiple parties—between the settler community and the Government-General, Japanese colonizer and Korean colonized, and colony and metropole—this study examines how these “brokers of empire” advanced their commercial and political interests while contributing to the expansionist project of imperial Japan.

Alyosha Goldstein (CSSH 50-1, “On the Internal Border: Colonial Difference, the Cold War, and the Locations of ‘Underdevelopment’”) has a new book out: Poverty in Common: The Politics of Community Action during the American Century (Duke University Press, 2012):

In post–World War II America, the idea that local community action was indispensable for the alleviation of poverty was broadly embraced by policymakers, social scientists, international development specialists, and grassroots activists. Governmental efforts to mobilize community action in the name of democracy served as a volatile condition of possibility through which poor people and dispossessed groups negotiated the tension between calls for self-help and demands for self-determination in the context of the Cold War and global decolonization. Poverty in Common suggests new ways to think about the relationship between liberalism, government, and inequality with implications for popular debates over the “end of welfare” and neoliberalism in the United States. Drawing on oral histories, program records, community newspapers, policy documents, and records of public hearings, Alyosha Goldstein analyzes a compelling but often overlooked series of historical episodes: Progressive era reform as a precursor to community development during the Cold War; how the language of “underdevelopment” articulated ideas about poverty and foreignness; the use of poverty as a crucible of interest group politics; and how radical groups critically reframed the question of community action in anticolonial terms. He shows how approaches to poverty were linked to the racialized and gendered negotiation of boundaries—between foreign and domestic, empire and nation, violence and order, dependency and autonomy—in the mid-twentieth-century United States.

We congratulate Paul K. Eiss (CSSH 44-1, “Redemption’s Archive: Remembering the Future in a Revolutionary Past”) for winning the 2011 Mexican History Book Prize of the Conference on Latin American History, and also a book prize from the Mexico Section of the Latin American Studies association, for his book In the Name of El Pueblo: Place, Community, and the Politics of History in Yucatán (Duke University Press, 2010). Duke describes the book as follows:

The term “el pueblo” is used throughout Latin America, referring alternately to small towns, to community, or to “the people” as a political entity. In this vivid anthropological and historical analysis of Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula, Paul K. Eiss explores the multiple meanings of el pueblo and the power of the concept to unite the diverse claims made in its name. Eiss focuses on working-class indigenous and mestizo populations, examining how those groups negotiated the meaning of el pueblo among themselves and in their interactions with outsiders, including landowners, activists, and government officials. Combining extensive archival and ethnographic research, he describes how residents of the region have laid claim to el pueblo in varied ways, as exemplified in communal narratives recorded in archival documents, in the performance of plays and religious processions, and in struggles over land, politics, and the built environment. Eiss demonstrates that while el pueblo is used throughout the hemisphere, the term is given meaning and power through the ways it is imagined and constructed in local contexts. Moreover, he reveals el pueblo to be a concept that is as historical as it is political. It is in the name of el pueblo—rather than class, race, or nation—that inhabitants of northwestern Yucatán stake their deepest claims not only to social or political rights, but over history itself.

Thomas R. Trautmann (former CSSH Editor; CSSH 54-2, “Does India Have History? Does History Have India?”) has just published Arthashastra: The Science of Wealth (Allen Lane and Penguin Books India, 2012). Here is a summary of the book from the Allen Lane website:

Ascribed to Kautilya (commonly identified as the prime minister of Chandragupta Maurya) and dating back more than 2,000 years, the Arthashastra is the world’s first manual in political economy. It has a pre-eminence in Indian thought that is akin to that of Machiavelli’s The Prince in Europe. Arthashastra (literally, ‘the science of wealth’) is a study of economic enterprise; specifically, Kautilya’s treatise advises the king on the business of creating prosperity. This ancient text provides a fascinating window into the social and economic structures of the time, and into the intricacies of statecraft—for the Arthashastra also addresses the question: what makes a good leader? This book is intended to be an introduction to the economic philosophy of the Arthashastra. Its goal is to analyse the relevance of this classic text in its own time—in a world in which kings were regulators of economic activities of their subjects, but also entrepreneurs themselves—in the conviction that it has much to teach us that has value in our own age. “

Damani J. Partridge (CSSH 52-4, “Holocaust Mahnmal (Memorial): Monumental Memory amidst Contemporary Race”) has just published Hypersexuality and Headscarves: Race, Sex, and Citizenship in the New Germany (New Anthropologies of Europe, 2012):

In this compelling study, Partridge explores citizenship and exclusion in Germany since the fall of the Berlin Wall. That event seemed to usher in a new era of universal freedom, but post-reunification transformations of German society have produced noncitizens: non-white and “foreign” Germans who are simultaneously portrayed as part of the nation and excluded from full citizenship. Partridge considers the situation of Vietnamese guest workers “left behind” in the former East Germany; images of hypersexualized black bodies reproduced in popular culture and intimate relationships; and debates about the use of the headscarf by Muslim students and teachers. Through these and other cases, which regularly provoke violence against those perceived to be different, he shows that German national and European projects are complicit in the production of distinctly European noncitizens.

We are pleased to congratulate Farina Mir (CSSH 48-3, “Genre and Devotion in Punjabi Popular Narratives: Rethinking Cultural and Religious Syncretism”), whose book The Social Space of Language: Vernacular Culture in British Colonial Punjab (University of California Press, 2010)  has been awarded the Association for Asian Studies SAC Bernard S. Cohn Book Prize. The prize ”honors outstanding and innovative scholarship across discipline and country of specialization for a first book on South Asia, published during the preceding year.” Last year the American Historical Association awarded this book their John F. Richards Prize in South Asian History (see below).

Julian Go (CSSH 49-1, “The Provinciality of American Empire: ‘Liberal Exceptionalism’ and U.S. Colonial Rule, 1898–1912″) has a new book out: Patterns of Empire: The British and American Empires, 1688 to the Present (Cambridge University Press, 2011). The following is from the CUP website:

Patterns of Empire comprehensively examines the two most powerful empires in modern history: the United States and Britain. Challenging the popular theory that the American empire is unique, Patterns of Empire shows how the policies, practices, forms and historical dynamics of the American empire repeat those of the British, leading up to the present climate of economic decline, treacherous intervention in the Middle East and overextended imperial confidence. A critical exercise in revisionist history and comparative social science, this book also offers a challenging theory of empire that recognizes the agency of non-Western peoples, the impact of global fields and the limits of imperial power.

James McDougall (CSSH 53-3, “The Secular State’s Islamic Empire: Muslim Spaces and Subjects of Jurisdiction in Paris and Algiers, 1905–1957″) and Judith Scheele (CSSH 49-2, “Recycling Baraka: Knowledge, Politics, and Religion in Contemporary Algeria”; and CSSH 50-4, “A Taste for Law: Rule-Making in Kabylia (Algeria)”) have published a co-edited volume Saharan Frontiers: Space and Mobility in Northwest Africa (Indiana University Press, 2012). The book’s blurb describes it as follows:

The Sahara has long been portrayed as a barrier that divides the Mediterranean world from Africa proper and isolates the countries of the Maghrib from their southern and eastern neighbors. Rather than viewing the desert as an isolating barrier, this volume takes up historian Fernand Braudel’s description of the Sahara as “the second face of the Mediterranean.” The essays recast the history of the region with the Sahara at its center, uncovering a story of densely interdependent networks that span the desert’s vast expanse. They explore the relationship between the desert’s “islands” and “shores” and the connections and commonalities that unite the region. Contributors draw on extensive ethnographic and historical research to address topics such as trade and migration; local notions of place, territoriality, and movement; Saharan cities; and the links among ecological, regional, and world-historical approaches to understanding the Sahara.

E. Natalie Rothman (CSSH 51-4, “Interpreting Dragomans: Boundaries and Crossings in the Early Modern Mediterranean”)  has just published Brokering Empire: Trans-Imperial Subjects between Venice and Istambul (Cornell University Press, 2011). The book is summarized on the press website:

In Brokering Empire, E. Natalie Rothman explores the intersecting worlds of those who regularly traversed the early modern Venetian-Ottoman frontier, including colonial migrants, redeemed slaves, merchants, commercial brokers, religious converts, and diplomatic interpreters. In their sustained interactions across linguistic, religious, and political lines these trans-imperial subjects helped to shape shifting imperial and cultural boundaries, including the emerging distinction between Europe and the Levant. Rothman argues that the period from 1570 to 1670 witnessed a gradual transformation in how Ottoman difference was conceived within Venetian institutions. Thanks in part to the activities of trans-imperial subjects, an early emphasis on juridical and commercial criteria gave way to conceptions of difference based on religion and language. Rothman begins her story in Venice’s bustling marketplaces, where commercial brokers often defied the state’s efforts both to tax foreign merchants and define Venetian citizenship. The story continues in a Venetian charitable institution where converts from Islam and Judaism and their Catholic Venetian patrons negotiated their mutual transformation. The story ends with Venice’s diplomatic interpreters, the dragomans, who not only produced and disseminated knowledge about the Ottomans but also created dense networks of kinship and patronage across imperial boundaries. Rothman’s new conceptual and empirical framework sheds light on institutional practices for managing juridical, religious, and ethnolinguistic difference in the Mediterranean and beyond.

Former CSSH Editorial Assistant Genese Marie Sodikoff has published Forest and Labor in Madagascar: From Colonial Concession to Global Biosphere (Indiana University Press, 2012). It is described as follows by the press:

Protecting the unique plants and animals that live on Madagascar while fueling economic growth has been a priority for the Malagasy state, international donors, and conservation NGOs since the late 1980s. Forest and Labor in Madagascar shows how poor rural workers who must make a living from the forest balance their needs with the desire of the state to earn foreign revenue from ecotourism and forest-based enterprises. Genese Marie Sodikoff examines how the appreciation and protection of Madagascar’s biodiversity depend on manual labor. She exposes the moral dilemmas workers face as both conservation representatives and peasant farmers by pointing to the hidden costs of ecological conservation.

Wilson Chacko Jacob (CSSH 49-3, “Eventful Transformations: Al-Futuwwa between History and the Everyday”) has published a new book,  Working Out Egypt: Effendi Masculinity and Subject Formation in Colonial Modernity, 1870–1940 (Duke University Press, 2011). The press website describes the book as follows:

Working Out Egypt is both a rich cultural history of the formation of an Egyptian national subject in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth and a compelling critique of modern Middle Eastern historiography. Wilson Chacko Jacob describes how Egyptian men of a class akin to the cultural bourgeoisie (the effendiyya) struggled to escape from the long shadow cast by colonial depictions of the East as degenerate, feminine, and temporally behind an active and virile Europe. He argues that during British colonial rule (1882–1936), attempts to create a distinctively modern and Egyptian self free from the colonial gaze led to the formation of an ambivalent, performative subjectivity that he calls “effendi masculinity.” Jacob traces effendi masculinity as it took hold during the interwar years, in realms from scouting and competitive sports to sex talk and fashion, considering its gendered performativity in relation to a late-nineteenth-century British discourse on masculinity and empire and an explicitly nationalist discourse on Egyptian masculinity. He contends that as an assemblage of colonial modernity, effendi masculinity was simultaneously local and global, national and international, and particular and universal. Until recently, modern Egyptian history has not allowed for such paradoxes; instead, Egyptian modernity has been narrated in the temporal and spatial terms of a separate Western modernity.

Erik Mueggler (CSSH 53-1, “Bodies Real and Virtual: Joseph Rock and Enrico Caruso in the Sino-Tibetan Borderlands”; CSSH Editorial Committee) has just published The Paper Road: Archive and Experience in the Botanical Exploration of West China and Tibet (University of California Press, 2011).  As described on the UC Press website:

This exhilarating book interweaves the stories of two early twentieth-century botanists to explore the collaborative relationships each formed with Yunnan villagers in gathering botanical specimens from the borderlands between China, Tibet, and Burma. Erik Mueggler introduces Scottish botanist George Forrest, who employed Naxi adventurers in his fieldwork from 1906 until his death in 1932. We also meet American Joseph Francis Charles Rock, who, in 1924, undertook a dangerous expedition to Gansu and Tibet with the sons and nephews of Forrest’s workers. Mueggler describes how the Naxi workers and their Western employers rendered the earth into specimens, notes, maps, diaries, letters, books, photographs, and ritual manuscripts. Drawing on an ancient metaphor of the earth as a book, Mueggler provides a sustained meditation on what can be copied, translated, and revised and what can be folded back into the earth.

We were pleased to hear that the recent book by Farina Mir (CSSH 48-3, “Genre and Devotion in Punjabi Popular Narratives: Rethinking Cultural and Religious Syncretism”), titled The Social Space of Language: Vernacular Culture in British Colonial Punjab (University of California Press, 2010; see below for details),  is the first winner of The American Historical Association’s John F. Richards Prize in South Asian History, which  ”recognizes the most distinguished work of scholarship on South Asian  history published in English during the previous calendar year.”

We congratulate Nicolas Argenti, whose 2010 CSSH paper, “Things that Don`t Come by the Road: Folktales, Fosterage, and Memories of Slavery in the Cameroon Grassfields” (52-2), has won  the American Society for Ethnohistory (ASE) 2010 Robert F. Heizer Article Award.  The Heizer award began in 1980 to honor noted ethnohistorian and archaeologist Dr. Robert F. Heizer and is given yearly in recognition of the best article in the field of ethnohistory.

Andrew Bickford (CSSH 51-2, “Soldiers, Citizens, and the State: East German Army Officers in Post-Unification Germany”) has published Fallen Elites: The Military Other in Post-Unification Germany (Stanford University Press, 2011). The press describes the book as follows:

Military officers are often the first to be considered politically dangerous when a state loses its authority. Overnight, actions once considered courageous are deemed criminal, and men once praised as heroes are redefined as villains. In Fallen Elites, Andrew Bickford examines how states make soldiers and what happens to fallen military elites when they no longer fit into the political spectrum. Gaining unprecedented entry into the lives of former East German officers in unified Germany, Bickford relates how these men and their families have come to terms with the shock of unification, capitalism, and citizenship since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Often caricatured as unrepentant, hard-line communists, former officers recount how they have struggled with their identities and much-diminished roles. Their disillusionment speaks to global questions about the contentious relationship between the military, citizenship, masculinity, and state formation today. Casting a critical eye on Western triumphalism, they provide a new perspective on our own deep-seated assumptions about “soldier making,” both at home and abroad.

Warwick Anderson (CSSH 54-1, “Scientific Patriotism: Medical Science and National Self-Fashioning in Southeast Asia”) has just co-edited (with Deborah Jenson and Richard C. Keller) Unconscious Dominions: Psychoanalysis, Colonial Trauma, and Global Sovereignties (Duke University Press, 2011). Contributors include Warwick’s CSSH co-author Hans Pols, as well as Anderson, Alice Bullard, John Cash, Joy Damousi, Didier Fassin, Christiane Hartnack, Deborah Jenson, Richard C. Keller, Ranjana Khanna, and Mariano Plotkin. As described on the press website:

By the 1920s, psychoanalysis was a technology of both the late-colonial state and anti-imperialism. Insights from psychoanalysis shaped European and North American ideas about the colonial world and the character and potential of native cultures. Psychoanalytic discourse, from Freud’s description of female sexuality as a “dark continent” to his conceptualization of primitive societies and the origins of civilization, became inextricable from the ideologies underlying European expansionism. But as it was adapted in the colonies and then the postcolonies, psychoanalysis proved surprisingly useful for theorizing anticolonialism and postcolonial trauma. Our understandings of culture, citizenship, and self have a history that is colonial and psychoanalytic, but, until now, this intersection has scarcely been explored, much less examined in comparative perspective. Taking on that project, Unconscious Dominions assembles essays based on research in Australia, Brazil, France, Haiti, and Indonesia, as well as India, North Africa, and West Africa. Even as they reveal the modern psychoanalytic subject as constitutively colonial, they shed new light on how that subject went global: how people around the world came to recognize the hybrid configuration of unconscious, ego, and superego in themselves and others.

Columbus and the Quest for Jerusalem (Free Press, 2011) is the title of a new book by Carol Delaney (CSSH 48-2: “Columbus’s Ultimate Goal: Jerusalem”). The following is extracted from a description on the press website:

Five hundred years after he set sail, the dominant understanding of Christopher Columbus holds him responsible for almost everything that went wrong in the New World. Here, finally, is a book that will radically change our interpretation of the man and his mission. Scholar Carol Delaney claims that the true motivation for Columbus’ voyages is very different from what is commonly accepted. She argues that he was inspired to find a western route to the Orient not only to obtain vast sums of gold for the Spanish Crown but primarily to help fund a new crusade to take Jerusalem from the Muslims—a goal that sustained him until the day he died. Rather than an avaricious glory hunter, Delaney reveals Columbus as a man of deep passion, patience, and religious conviction.

Graham M. Jones (CSSH 52-1: “Modern Magic and the War on Miracles in French Colonial Culture”) has just published Trade of the Tricks: Inside the Magician’s Craft (University of California Press, 2011):

From risqué cabaret performances to engrossing after-hours shop talk, Trade of the Tricks offers an unprecedented look inside the secretive subculture of modern magicians. Entering the flourishing Paris magic scene as an apprentice, Graham M. Jones gives a firsthand account of how magicians learn to perform their astonishing deceptions. He follows the day-to-day lives of some of France’s most renowned performers, revealing not only how secrets are created and shared, but also how they are stolen and destroyed. In a book brimming with humor and surprise, Jones shows how today’s magicians marshal creativity and passion in striving to elevate their amazing skill into high art. The book’s lively cast of characters includes female and queer performers whose work is changing the face of a historically masculine genre.

Arab Detroit 9/11: Life in the Terror Decade, edited by Nabeel Abraham, Sally Howell, and Andrew Shryock (CSSH Editor), was published in September (Wayne State University Press, 2011):

Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Detroit’s large and nationally prominent Arab and Muslim communities have faced heightened prejudice, government surveillance, and political scapegoating, yet they have also enjoyed unexpected gains in economic, political, and cultural influence. Museums, festivals, and cultural events flourish alongside the construction of new mosques and churches, and more Arabs are being elected and appointed to public office. Detroit’s Arab population is growing even as the city’s non-Arab sectors, and the state of Michigan as a whole, have steadily lost population. This collection, a follow-up to their volume Arab Detroit: From Margin to Mainstream (Wayne State University Press, 2000), presents accounts of how life in post-9/11 Detroit has changed over the last ten years…. Readers interested in Arab studies, Detroit culture and history, transnational politics, and the changing dynamics of race and ethnicity in America will enjoy the personal reflection and analytical insight of Arab Detroit 9/11.” Contributors: Nabeel Abraham, Kristine J. Ajrouch, Khadigah Alasry, Hayan Charara, Yasmeen Hanoosh, Sally Howell, Amaney Jamal, Lawrence Joseph, Kim Schopmeyer, Mujan Seif, Andrew Shryock, Abdulkader H. Sinno, Matthew W. Stiffler, Eren Tatari, Rachel Yezbick, William Youmans.

A new collection includes contributions by several CSSH authors. Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present (University of California, 2011) is edited by Andrew Shryock (CSSH Editor) and Daniel Lord Smail (CSSH 54-1: “Violence and Predation in Late Medieval Mediterranean Europe”). Other Contributors are Gillian Feeley-Harnik (CSSH Editorial Committee), Felipe Fernández-Armesto (CSSH 51-1, “History beyond History: New Adventurers on the Frontiers of Traditional Historiography. A Review Essay”), Clive Gamble, April McMahon, John C. Mitani, Hendrik Poinar, Mary C. Stiner, and Thomas R. Trautmann (former CSSH Editor, and CSSH 54-1: “Does India Have History? Does History Have India?”).

Humans have always been interested in their origins, but historians have been reluctant to write about the long stretches of time before the invention of writing. In fact, the deep past was left out of most historical writing almost as soon as it was discovered. This breakthrough book, as important for readers interested in the present as in the past, brings science into history to offer a dazzling new vision of humanity across time. Team-written by leading experts in a variety of fields, it maps events, cultures, and eras across millions of years to present a new scale for understanding the human body, energy and ecosystems, language, food, kinship, migration, and more. Combining cutting-edge social and evolutionary theory with the latest discoveries about human genes, brains, and material culture, Deep History invites scholars and general readers alike to explore the dynamic of connectedness that spans all of human history.

Stanford University Press has just published a book by Tijana Krstić (CSSH 51-1: “Illuminated by the Light of Islam and the Glory of the Ottoman Sultanate: Self-Narratives of Conversion to Islam in the Age of Confessionalization”), titled, Contested Conversions to Islam Narratives of Religious Change in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire (Stanford University Press, 2011):

This book explores how Ottoman Muslims and Christians understood the phenomenon of conversion to Islam from the 15th to the 17th centuries, when the Ottoman Empire was at the height of its power and conversions to Islam peaked. Because the Ottomans ruled over a large non-Muslim population and extended greater opportunities to converts than to native-born Muslims, conversion to Islam was a contentious subject for all communities, especially Muslims themselves. By producing narratives about conversion, Ottoman Muslim and Christian authors sought to define the boundaries and membership of their communities while promoting their own religious and political agendas. Krstic argues that the production and circulation of narratives about conversion to Islam was central to the articulation of Ottoman imperial identity and Sunni Muslim “orthodoxy” in the long 16th century. Placing the evolution of Ottoman attitudes toward conversion and converts in the broader context of Mediterranean-wide religious trends and the Ottoman rivalry with the Habsburgs and Safavids, Contested Conversions to Islam also introduces new sources, such as first-person conversion narratives and Orthodox Christian neomartyologies, to reveal the interplay of individual, (inter)communal, local, and imperial initiatives that influenced the process of conversion.

Andrew Zimmerman (CSSH 48-2: “’What Do You Really Want in German East Africa, Herr Professor?’ Counterinsurgency and the Science Effect in Colonial Tanzania)  recently published Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South (Princeton University Press, 2009):

In 1901, the Tuskegee Institute, founded by Booker T. Washington, sent an expedition to the German colony of Togo in West Africa, with the purpose of transforming the region into a cotton economy similar to that of the post-Reconstruction American South. Alabama in Africa explores the politics of labor, sexuality, and race behind this endeavor, and the economic, political, and intellectual links connecting Germany, Africa, and the southern United States. The cross-fertilization of histories and practices led to the emergence of a global South, reproduced social inequities on both sides of the Atlantic, and pushed the American South and the German Empire to the forefront of modern colonialism. Zimmerman shows how the people of Togo, rather than serving as a blank slate for American and German ideologies, helped shape their region’s place in the global South. He looks at the forms of resistance pioneered by African American freedpeople, Polish migrant laborers, African cotton cultivators, and other groups exploited by, but never passive victims of, the growing colonial political economy. Zimmerman reconstructs the social science of the global South formulated by such thinkers as Max Weber and W.E.B. Du Bois, and reveals how their theories continue to define contemporary race, class, and culture. Tracking the intertwined histories of Europe, Africa, and the Americas at the turn of the century, Alabama in Africa shows how the politics and economics of the segregated American South significantly reshaped other areas of the world.

A book by Douglas Rogers (CSSH 48-4: “How to Be a Khoziain in a Transforming State: State Formation and the Ethics of Governance in Post-Soviet Russia”; and 53-3 , “Fixers in Motion: A Conversation”), titled The Old Faith and the Russian Land: A Historical Ethnography of Ethics in the Urals (Cornell University Press, 2009), which includes a chapter originally published in CSSH, won Honorable Mention for the 2010 Clifford Geertz Prize in the Anthropology of Religion given by the Society for the Anthropology of Religion, and also for the 2010 Davis Center Prize in Social and Political Studies awarded by the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies.  The press describes the book as follows:

The Old Faith and the Russian Land is a historical ethnography that charts the ebbs and flows of ethical practice in a small Russian town over three centuries. The town of Sepych was settled in the late seventeenth century by religious dissenters who fled to the forests of the Urals to escape a world they believed to be in the clutches of the Antichrist. Factions of Old Believers, as these dissenters later came to be known, have maintained a presence in the town ever since. The townspeople of Sepych have also been serfs, free peasants, collective farmers, and, now, shareholders in a post-Soviet cooperative. Douglas Rogers traces connections between the town and some of the major transformations of Russian history, showing how townspeople have responded to a long series of attempts to change them and their communities: tsarist-era efforts to regulate family life and stamp out Old Belief on the Stroganov estates, Soviet collectivization drives and antireligious campaigns, and the marketization, religious revival, and ongoing political transformations of post-Soviet times. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork and extensive archival and manuscript sources, Rogers argues that religious, political, and economic practice are overlapping arenas in which the people of Sepych have striven to be ethical—in relation to labor and money, food and drink, prayers and rituals, religious books and manuscripts, and the surrounding material landscape. He tracks the ways in which ethical sensibilities—about work and prayer, hierarchy and inequality, gender and generation—have shifted and recombined over time. Rogers concludes that certain expectations about how to be an ethical person have continued to orient townspeople in Sepych over the course of nearly three centuries for specific, identifiable, and often unexpected reasons. Throughout, he demonstrates what a historical and ethnographic study of ethics might look like and uses this approach to ask new questions of Russian, Soviet, and post-Soviet history.

A 2009 book by Bruce Grant (CSSH  53-3, “Shrines and Sovereigns: Life, Death, and Religion in Rural Azerbaijan”), titled The Captive and the Gift: Cultural Histories of Sovereignty in Russia and the Caucasus (Cornell University Press) won Honorable Mention for the 2010 Davis Center Prize in Social and Political Studies awarded by the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies.  The announcement said the book is a “highly original case study, drawn from multi-media and interview sources and embedded in a rich intellectual discussion. It is a marvelously written and lyrical book.” The press website describes the book as follows:

The Caucasus region of Eurasia, wedged in between the Black and Caspian Seas, encompasses the modern territories of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, as well as the troubled republic of Chechnya in southern Russia. A site of invasion, conquest, and resistance since the onset of historical record, it has earned a reputation for fearsome violence and isolated mountain redoubts closed to outsiders. Over extended efforts to control the Caucasus area, Russians have long mythologized stories of their countrymen taken captive by bands of mountain brigands. In The Captive and the Gift, the anthropologist Bruce Grant explores the long relationship between Russia and the Caucasus and the means by which sovereignty has been exercised in this contested area. Taking his lead from Aleksandr Pushkin’s 1822 poem “Prisoner of the Caucasus,” Grant explores the extraordinary resonances of the themes of violence, captivity, and empire in the Caucasus through mythology, poetry, short stories, ballet, opera, and film.  Grant argues that while the recurring Russian captivity narrative reflected a wide range of political positions, it most often and compellingly suggested a vision of Caucasus peoples as thankless, lawless subjects of empire who were unwilling to acknowledge and accept the gifts of civilization and protection extended by Russian leaders. Drawing on years of field and archival research, Grant moves beyond myth and mass culture to suggest how real-life Caucasus practices of exchange, by contrast, aimed to control and diminish rather than unleash and increase violence. The result is a historical anthropology of sovereign forms that underscores how enduring popular narratives and close readings of ritual practices can shed light on the management of pluralism in long-fraught world areas.

Christine M. Philliou (CSSH 51-1: “Communities on the Verge: Unraveling the Phanariot Ascendancy in Ottoman Governance”; and 53-3 , “Fixers in Motion: A Conversation”) has just published Biography of an Empire: Governing Ottomans in an Age of Revolution (University of California Press, 2011).

This vividly detailed revisionist history opens a new vista on the great Ottoman Empire in the early nineteenth century, a key period often seen as the eve of Tanzimat westernizing reforms and the beginning of three distinct histories—ethnic nationalism in the Balkans, imperial modernization from Istanbul, and European colonialism in the Middle East. Christine Philliou brilliantly shines a new light on imperial crisis and change in the 1820s and 1830s by unearthing the life of one man. Stephanos Vogorides (1780–1859) was part of a network of Christian elites known phanariots, institutionally excluded from power yet intimately bound up with Ottoman governance. By tracing the contours of the wide-ranging networks—crossing ethnic, religious, and institutional boundaries—in which the phanariots moved, Philliou provides a unique view of Ottoman power and, ultimately, of the Ottoman legacies in the Middle East and Balkans today. What emerges is a wide-angled analysis of governance as a lived experience at a moment in which there was no clear blueprint for power.

Niels Brimnes (CSSH 52-1: “Medical Modernization and Medical Nationalism: Resistance to Mass Tuberculosis Vaccination in Postcolonial India, 1948–1955,” with Christian W. McMillen) has co-edited a collection (with Christina Folke Ax, Niklas Thode Jensen, and Karen Oslund) titled Cultivating the Colonies: Colonial States and Their Environmental Legacies (Ohio University Press, Research in International Studies: Global and Comparative Studies No. 12, 2011).

The essays … demonstrate how the relationship between colonial power and nature reveals the nature of power. Each essay explores how colonial governments translated ideas about the management of exotic nature and foreign people into practice, and how they literally “got their hands dirty” in the business of empire…. The eleven essays include studies of animal husbandry in the Philippines, farming in Indochina, and indigenous medicine in India. They are global in scope, ranging from the Russian North to Mozambique, examining the consequences of colonialism on nature, including its impact on animals, fisheries, farmlands, medical practices, and even the diets of indigenous people.

Craig Jeffrey (CSSH  51-1: “Fixing Futures: Educated Unemployment through a North Indian Lens”; and 53-3 , “Fixers in Motion: A Conversation”) has published Timepass: Youth, Class, and the Politics of Waiting in India (Stanford University Press, 2010).

Social and economic changes around the globe have propelled increasing numbers of people into situations of chronic waiting, where promised access to political freedoms, social goods, or economic resources is delayed, often indefinitely. But there have been few efforts to reflect on the significance of “waiting” in the contemporary world. Timepass fills this gap by offering a captivating ethnography of the student politics and youth activism that lower middle class young men in India have undertaken in response to pervasive underemployment. It highlights the importance of waiting as a social experience and basis for political mobilization, the micro-politics of class power in north India, and the socio-economic strategies of lower middle classes. The book also explores how this north Indian story relates to practices of waiting occurring in multiple other contexts, making the book of interest to scholars and students of globalization, youth studies, and class across the social sciences.”

CSSH Editor Andrew Shryock recently published an edited volume, Islamophobia/ Islamophilia: Beyond the Politics of Enemy and Friend (Indiana University Press, 2010), which includes contributions by himself and four other CSSH authors: Lara Deeb (CSSH 50-2), Esra Özyürek (51-1), Mucahit Bilici (53-3), and Muhammad Qasim Zaman (41-2), along with Tomaž Mastnak, Naamah Paley, Moustafa Bayoumi, Paul Silverstein, and Sally Howell.

“Islamophobia” is a term that has been widely applied to anti-Muslim ideas and actions, especially since 9/11. The contributors to this provocative volume explore and critique the usefulness of the concept for understanding contexts ranging from the Middle Ages to the modern day. Moving beyond familiar explanations such as good Muslim/bad Muslim stereotypes or the “clash of civilizations,” they describe Islamophobia’s counterpart, Islamophilia, which deploys similar oppositions in the interest of fostering public acceptance of Islam. Contributors address topics such as conflicts over Islam outside and within Muslim communities in North America, Europe, the Middle East, and South Asia; the cultural politics of literature, humor, and urban renewal; and religious conversion to Islam.

Farina Mir (CSSH 48-3, “Genre and Devotion in Punjabi Popular Narratives: Rethinking Cultural and Religious Syncretism”) recently published The Social Space of Language: Vernacular Culture in British Colonial Punjab (University of California Press, 2010). [This book has since this posting been awarded The American Historical Association's John F. Richards Prize in South Asian History; and the Association for Asian Studies SAC Bernard S. Cohn Book Prize (see above)].

This rich cultural history set in Punjab examines a little-studied body of popular literature to illustrate both the durability of a vernacular literary tradition and the limits of colonial dominance in British India. Farina Mir asks how qisse, a vibrant genre of epics and romances, flourished in colonial Punjab despite British efforts to marginalize the Punjabi language. She explores topics including Punjabi linguistic practices, print and performance, and the symbolic content of qisse. She finds that although the British denied Punjabi language and literature almost all forms of state patronage, the resilience of this popular genre came from its old but dynamic corpus of stories, their representations of place, and the moral sensibility that suffused them. Her multidisciplinary study reframes inquiry into cultural formations in late-colonial north India away from a focus on religious communal identities and nationalist politics and toward a widespread, ecumenical, and place-centered poetics of belonging in the region.

Carole McGranahan (CSSH 52-4, “Narrative Dispossession: Tibet and the Gendered Logics of Historical Possibility”) recently published Arrested Histories: Tibet, the CIA, and Memories of a Forgotten War (Duke University Press, 2010):

In the 1950s, thousands of ordinary Tibetans rose up to defend their country and religion against Chinese troops. Five decades later, their story is only beginning to be told and has not yet entered the annals of Tibetan national history. In Arrested Histories, the anthropologist and historian Carole McGranahan asks how and why histories of this citizens’ resistance army were “arrested” and what the ensuing repercussions are for the Tibetan refugee community. Drawing on rich ethnographic and historic research, McGranahan tells the story of the Tibetan resistance and the still unfolding social processes through which their history is made and unmade, lived and forgotten in the present. The resistance army fought through 1974 with covert support from the Tibetan exile government, the governments of India and Nepal, and the U.S. government including the CIA. Veterans’ desires for historical recognition hinge on the Dalai Lama and historical arrest, a practice in which the telling of certain pasts is prohibited until an undetermined time in the future. In this analysis, Tibetan cultural politics, regional identities, and religious commitments cannot be disentangled from imperial histories, contemporary geopolitics, and romanticized representations of Tibet and vice versa. Moving deftly from the military battlefield to nonviolent hunger strikes, from diplomatic offices to refugee camps, Arrested Histories provides powerful insights into the cultural contradictions of everyday life including struggles over history as one of the pains of belonging.

Katherine E. Hoffman (CSSH 52-4, “Berber Law by French Means: Customary Courts in the Moroccan Hinterlands, 1930–1956”) and Susan Gilson Miller recently published the edited volume Berbers and Others: Beyond Tribe and Nation in the Maghrib (Indiana University Press, 2010):

Berbers and Others offers fresh perspectives on new forms of social and political activism in today’s Maghrib. In recent years, the Amazigh (Berber) movement has become a focus of widespread political, social, and cultural attention in North Africa, Europe, and the United States. Berber groups have peacefully yet persistently laid claim to ownership over broad areas of creativity in the arts, politics, literature, education, and national memory. The contributors to this volume present some of the best new thinking in the emerging field of Berber studies, offering insight into historical antecedents, language usage, land rights, household economies, artistic production, and human rights. The scope, depth, and multidisciplinary approach will engage specialists on the Maghrib as well as students of ethnicity, social and political change, and cultural innovation.

Steffen Hertog (CSSH 52-2, “The Sociology of the Gulf Rentier Systems: Societies of Intermediaries”) is the author of Princes, Brokers, and Bureaucrats: Oil and the State in Saudi Arabia (Cornell University Press, 2010). The press website describes the book as,

the most thorough treatment of the political economy of Saudi Arabia to date, Steffen Hertog uncovers an untold history of how the elite rivalries and whims of half a century ago have shaped today’s Saudi state and are reflected in its policies. Starting in the late 1990s, Saudi Arabia embarked on an ambitious reform campaign to remedy its long-term economic stagnation. The results have been puzzling for both area specialists and political economists: Saudi institutions have not failed across the board, as theorists of the ‘rentier state’ would predict, nor have they achieved the all-encompassing modernization the regime has touted. Instead, the kingdom has witnessed a bewildering mélange of thorough failures and surprising successes. Hertog argues that it is traits peculiar to the Saudi state that make sense of its uneven capacities. Oil rents since World War II have shaped Saudi state institutions in ways that are far from uniform. Oil money has given regime elites unusual leeway for various institutional experiments in different parts of the state: in some cases creating massive rent-seeking networks deeply interwoven with local society; in others large but passive bureaucracies; in yet others insulated islands of remarkable efficiency. This process has fragmented the Saudi state into an uncoordinated set of vertically divided fiefdoms. Case studies of foreign investment reform, labor market nationalization and WTO accession reveal how this oil-funded apparatus enables swift and successful policy-making in some policy areas, but produces coordination and regulation failures in others.

Susanne E. Freidberg has won the 2008 Berkshire Article Prize for “The Triumph of the Egg,” (CSSH 50-2). The selection committee had this to say about Freidberg’s essay:

What is a “fresh” egg and how did Americans’ imaginings of what constituted a “naturally” fresh egg change over the twentieth century? Reminding us that eggs were once a seasonal crop available primarily in the spring from local family farmers, Susanne Freidberg historicizes the concept of freshness through a focus on changes in the production and marketing of eggs. From early twentieth-century cold storage techniques which allowed eggs to be sold as “fresh” months after they were laid to New Deal era electrification projects which modernized hen houses, altering the birds’ life cycles, Freidberg traces the efforts of producers and marketers to have a year round supply of eggs, and of consumers to ensure fair prices and healthier standards. Engineering “seasonless freshness,” Freidberg argues, increasingly came to depend not so much on manipulating the egg after it left the hen house and more on manipulating the hens who produced them. Tracing the technological changes that eventually made hens “full-time, year-round workers” and egg production big business, pushing out many small farmers, Freidberg deftly pulls together histories of food production, food commerce, food consumption, civic activism, and regulatory change. Freidberg tells a story of the chicken and the egg which entwines what is happening in hen houses and in family kitchens with developments in research labs, warehouses and retail markets, and legislative chambers. The result is both a history of scientific changes and a fine social and cultural analysis which encourages us to wonder about our own conceptions of freshness in the contemporary global food market and provides a model of history study both methodologically sophisticated and marvelously engaging.

Paul Gootenberg’s article, “A Forgotten Case of ‘Scientific Excellence on the Periphery’: The Nationalist Cocaine Science of Alfredo Bignon, 1884–1887″ (CSSH 49-1), was awarded the 2008 Best Article Prize of the New England Council of Latin American Studies. Paul has since published a book that expands on material in his CSSH paper: Andean Cocaine: The Making of a Global Drug (University of North Carolina Press, 2009), which UNC Press described as follows:

Illuminating a hidden and fascinating chapter in the history of globalization, Paul Gootenberg chronicles the rise of one of the most spectacular and now illegal Latin American exports: cocaine. Gootenberg traces cocaine’s history from its origins as a medical commodity in the nineteenth century to its repression during the early twentieth century and its dramatic reemergence as an illicit good after World War II. Connecting the story of the drug’s transformations is a host of people, products, and processes: Sigmund Freud, Coca-Cola, and Pablo Escobar all make appearances, exemplifying the global influences that have shaped the history of cocaine. But Gootenberg decenters the familiar story to uncover the roles played by hitherto obscure but vital Andean actors as well—for example, the Peruvian pharmacist who developed the techniques for refining cocaine on an industrial scale and the creators of the original drug-smuggling networks that decades later would be taken over by Colombian traffickers. Andean Cocaine proves indispensable to understanding one of the most vexing social dilemmas of the late twentieth-century Americas: the American cocaine epidemic of the 1980s and, in its wake, the seemingly endless U.S. drug war in the Andes.

Andean Cocaine was designated a Choice “Outstanding Academic Title” for 2009. The book is reviewed by Mac Marshall in CSSH 51-4. In 2010, Paul published an expanded and revised Spanish-language edition of his CSSH essay as a small book, including an appendix of primary documents, entitled, La Invención de la cocaína: la historia de Alfredo Bignon y la ciencia nacional peruanua (1884–1890). It was published by the Instituto de Estudios Peruanos in Lima, Peru’s leading social science press, and was translated by Magally Alegre-Henderson. Paul has also recently co-edited a volume with Luis Reygadas, titled Indelible Inequalities in Latin America: Insights from History, Politics, and Culture (Duke University Press, 2010):

Since the earliest years of European colonialism, Latin America has been a region of seemingly intractable inequalities, marked by a stark divide between the haves and the have-nots. This collection illuminates the diverse processes that have combined to produce and reproduce inequalities in Latin America, as well as some of the implications of those processes for North Americans. Anthropologists, cultural critics, historians, and political scientists from North and South America offer new and varied perspectives, building on the sociologist Charles Tilly’s relational framework for understanding enduring inequalities. While one essay is a broad yet nuanced analysis of Latin American inequality and its persistence, another is a fine-grained ethnographic view of everyday life and aspirations among shantytown residents living on the outskirts of Lima. Other essays address topics such as the initial bifurcation of Peru’s healthcare system into one for urban workers and another for the rural poor, the asymmetrical distribution of political information in Brazil, and an evolving Cuban “aesthetics of inequality,” which incorporates hip-hop and other transnational cultural currents. Exploring the dilemmas of Latin American inequalities as they are playing out in the United States, a contributor looks at new immigrant Mexican farmworkers in upstate New York to show how undocumented workers become a vulnerable rural underclass. Taken together, the essays extend social inequality critiques in important new directions. Contributors: Jeanine Anderson, Javier Auyero, Odette Casamayor, Christina Ewig, Paul Gootenberg, Margaret Gray, Eric Hershberg, Lucio Renno, Luis Reygadas.

Sheilagh Ogilvie’s article, “‘So that Every Subject Knows How to Behave’: Social Disciplining in Early Modern Bohemia” (CSSH 48-1), has been awarded the 2008 Stanely Z. Pech Prize by the Czechoslovak Studies Association. The judges present a summary of Ogilvie’s argument on the Association’s webpage:  They conclude with the comments:

This brief summary can hardly do justice to the subtlety of her arguments and her thoughtful, creative analysis of an impressive cache of research materials. Her conclusions promise to generate vibrant debate and her approach has the potential to transform the discussion of social disciplining, compelling it to become more grounded in enforcement data and thus better contextualized. She shows how scholars in our field can remain sensitive to the peculiarities of our region while engaging with larger, European issues and debates.

Two CSSH authors, Ussama Makdisi and Marc David Baer, shared the 2008 Albert Hourani Book Award of the Middle East Studies Association. More information about their books, and further discussion of themes they have explored on the pages of CSSH and elsewhere, are available in the following exchange: “Tolerance and Conversion in the Ottoman Empire: A Conversation,” with Marc Baer, Ussama Makdisi, and Andrew Shryock (CSSH 51-4).