One morning in the middle of May 1558, the chief constable of the Governor of Rome led a detachment of his police to Monte Rotondo, a rural town some twenty miles north of the capital. There was nothing unusual in his mission, which was to capture two outlaws, who, though banished from the papal states for homicide, had returned to live under the shelter of the local lords. Nor was there anything extraordinary in the first response of the villagers, who, caught between their signori on the one hand and the state on the other, did their best to lend the police a very feeble hand. What was more unusual was what happened next, when, half by design and half by mischance, the village rose up in arms against the police and, for much of the day, held them hostage. In this essay, we will study the tangled events of that day, not so much as an example of a rural insurrection as, rather, a handsome illustration of a particular style of negotiation. Thus, settlement as much interests us here as does conflict, for it illustrates well the dense interplay of liberty and constraint. The burden of our exposition is that, to extricate themselves from a perilous impasse, the villagers, their magistrates, and the city's police could all bargain cannily with all sorts of risks, not only their adversaries', but also their own. Not only did they threaten one another, but, to their own profit, they pointed out external dangers and cited the perils they themselves faced.

In March 1871 the young slave woman Honorata went to police in the Rio de Janeiro parish of Sacramento to complain formally that her mistress had forced her into prostitution from the age 12. She testified that she was sent on various occasions to houses of known ill-repute “to be at the window receiving visitors.” At other times her mistress arranged the assignations herself, instructing Honorata to dress and go with a client. Between these stints at brothels, and sometimes at the same time, she was hired out as a domestic, usually as laundress or cook. The court record described Honorata as nineteen years old, black, a Creole born in the province of Bahia, and brought to Rio de Janeiro by her mistress some years earlier, unmarried and a domestic servant.

How do we conceive of law if litigation does not aim to settle conflict, if it is a means to perpetuate and obscure rather than resolve disputes? In this essay, I shall demonstrate the power of an unsettling norm: The Brazilian legal system aims neither to solve land conflicts justly nor to decide their legal merits through adjudication. My argument stresses intention and norm because land law in Brazil is so confusing, indecisive, and dysfunctional in its own terms that one suspects that the cause of these characteristics is not incompetence or corruption alone but rather the force of a set of intentions concerning its construction and application different from those aimed at resolution. Thus, I argue that Brazilian law regularly produces unresolvable procedural and substantive complexity in land conflicts; that this jural-bureaucratic irresolution dependably initiates extrajudicial solutions; and that these political impositions inevitably legalize usurpations of one sort or another. In short, land law in Brazil promotes conflict, not resolution, because it sets the terms through which encroachments are reliably legalized. It is thus an instrument of calculated disorder by means of which illegal practices produce law and extralegal solutions are smuggled into the judicial process. In this paradoxical context, law itself is a means of manipulation, complication, stratagem, and violence by which all parties—public and private, dominant and subaltern—further their interests. It therefore defines an arena of conflict in which distinctions between legal and illegal are temporary and their relations unstable.

The shiny, black stone statue of Shri Nathji that today resides in the busy pilgrimage town of Nathdvara (Rajasthan, India) is the preeminent image of the Vaisnava sect of the Vallabha Sampradaya. Like all statues in the sect, the image is an anthropomorphic manifestation of Krishna, the sect's paramount deity (see Plate 1). More than simply representing Krishna, Vallabhite statues are believed to contain this deity's ‘immanent presence’ and to possess (and emanate) his mystical powers. In order to partake of these powers, the worship of images is a regular feature of Vallabhite religious practice, and pilgrimage to important temples, such as the Shri Nathji Temple, is a cherished goal of all members of the sect. This article examines how the Hindu rajas of western India attempted to bind these mystical powers to the service of their rule and what consequences this had both for royal action and for the maintenance and perpetuation of the divine powers of the statues themselves.

The relationship of religion and politics is continuously fascinating and elusive, not least because it is rarely posed in a direct way. In stable democracies, incidents which are rather out of the ordinary, such as publishing the Satanic Verses in the United Kingdom or sporting the Islamic headscarf in a French state school, might push the issue temporarily to the centre of the political arena until the categories of normal politics, such as class, region, language or ethnicity, incorporate it or contrive to edge it beyond public visibility. In developing countries, one is accustomed to the more salient presence of religion in the public sphere: for example, the broad sweep of an Islamic revolution in Iran, popular jihad in the Middle East, the militant Sikhs in the Punjab, or the battle for the birthplace of Rama in North India. However, the intelligentsia in these countries who speak with the authority of modern science and the modern state see these events, important as they are, as the expression of primordial sentiments, and indicative of the underdeveloped nature of the people concerned, rather than as the political expression of unresolved issues, ill concealed by the fabric of normal politics and not articulated by political institutions.