Ethnographies of Debt. Debts are social relations, as the first two essays remind us, whether between persons or countries. Debts that are not meant to be repaid serve to maintain dependency relations between persons; conversely, the way to resolve dependency between the states of North and South may be debt forgiveness.

In this analysis of monetary and debt practices among the Rejang from Lebong in Sumatra, Indonesia, I compare the results of my own research with examples of monetary practices from elsewhere in the Malay archipelago and from Kenya. Phenomena like “hot money,” “war-debts,” ethnically exclusive credit circles, and gender-specific monetary practices reveal an underlying differentiation in notions of debt. Not all kinds of debt are expected to be repaid in the same measure. These different debt practices correspond to different regimes of transaction and result in distinct kinds of social integration. I will argue that in Lebong, differences in monetary practices along gender and ethnic lines can be traced to the way Rejang men, as well as the state's power elite, refuse to make contracts the universally accepted basis of transactions.

Following the lacklustre performance of many developing countries over the last fifteen years, the problem of international debt is once again creeping back into the policy limelight. The achievements of structural adjustment and new lending programmes that have been at the heart of previous policy responses have been limited in terms of their ability to deliver new growth to debtor nations. Latin American countries are still heavily indebted to multilateral institutions with heavy debt burdens still threatening access to markets (World Bank 1995; Langfield 1995; and UNCTAD 1995). Similarly, some of the Asian “success stories” are once again becoming exposed to dangerously high levels of sovereign debt, especially to Japan (Ana and van Hees 1995). Such developments are naturally a renewed challenge to policy makers and to the accepted understandings of the causes of the crisis and its sustenance. It is postulated that analytical approaches that examine the issues surrounding new lending in the 1970s or, more commonly, the spate of defaults started by Mexico in 1982, are focusing attention on what is symptomatic, rather than on what is causal. By doing so, there is a danger that such analyses will provide a new inheritance of misinterpreted policy developments and limited future options.

In the 1950s, French political geographer and social critic André Siegfried denounced modern mass tourism as “tourism de série . . . organized, almost mechanized, collective, and above all democratic.” Echoing derisory discussions of mass culture and mass consumption, Siegfried criticized modern tourism as a degraded aspect of cultural and social democratization, best exemplified by banal American hotel chains. Siegfried complained that modern tourism had essentially destroyed older regimes of pleasure and substituted only amusements. Someone who yearned for the older “aristocratic” era wherein wealthy leisured elites sojourned in grand hotels, he believed that the only hope for the future was with “people of refined taste, knowing how to distinguish . . . between filth and beauty.”André Siegfried, Aspects du XXe Siàcle (Paris, 1955), 107, 123–25 and 148.

The contemporary occupation of portering in mountain regions has largely been structured through transcultural contact, contact between two groups historically symbolized by the oppressive dialectic of power relations: master/ servant, “sahib”/“coolie,” trekker/porter, “him who rides”/“him who carries.” The relative position of these groups within the power relations that characterize adventure tourism has altered through time. The oppression exercised by the superordinate group has likely lessened, while the status enjoyed by the subordinate group has likely increased.Here I refer to portering, the carrying of person or baggage for others, specifically as it relates to the adventure travel industry (trekking, mountaineering, and so forth). There are, of course, circumstances in which the lot of the porter has not increased significantly over the past two centuries. A case that springs immediately to mind is the use of forced labour in the construction of a physical infrastructure in the interior of Burma. Nonetheless, these two groups still operate within radically asymmetrical relations of power. Invariably, “the porter” occupies the lower position; “the employer,” the upper. In this essay, I investigate the historical constitution and evolution of these relations in a region of the Karakoram mountain range of what is now northern Pakistan.Many of the insights upon which this essay are based stem from time spent in villages of the upper Braldu valley of Baltistan. These villages, particularly that of Askole, are strategically situated in relation to the adventure tourism industry. Askole, for example, is the last permanently inhabited village on the trail to K2 (8,611 meters). Despite a recent expansion in tourism, many Baltis have long been familiar with the hardships of carrying the baggage of others along mountain trails.

The slave emancipation problem in colonial contexts, such as the Igbo case in Igboland, south-eastern Nigeria, deserves attention because there are too few relevant studies (Brown 1996; Nwaka 1985; Ohadike 1988). These studies spotlight wage labor above other aspects of the emancipation question. This approach is justified because the colonial anti-slavery policy there centred on the promotion and control of wage labour. The wage labour focus is useful in explaining what the colonial state did, although it does say little about what the state avoided, and why. There was much more to the emancipation question than labour formation and control. The control of land, a critical element of class formation and reproduction in a post-emancipation agrarian situation, was the fundamental arena of conflict in post-abolition colonial Africa (see Cooper 1980; Klein 1993c). In other words, while the most effective means to achieve emancipation was land tenure reform, the colonial state chose to pursue the proletarianization strategy. This essay will examine why this was so.

In 1919, when Carlos Gagini penned this two-sentence definition of hulero for a dictionary of “Costa Rican-isms,” he matter of factly specified murderousness, slaving, terrorism, and Nicaraguan nationality as intrinsic characteristics of rubber tappers. Few other entries in Gagini's compilation reveal so tellingly a key implicit objective of the country lexicons that Central American intellectuals (for example, Membreño 1982 [1895]) began to publish in the late nineteenth century: the specification, through Spanish dialectology, of a still emergent national identity vis-è-vis neighbors who—until recently—had not been clearly distinct Others but simply fellow subjects first of one or another province of the Spanish Captaincy General of Guatemala and later, briefly, of the Mexican Empire (1821–23) and the independent Central American Federation (1823–38). And none of the other generally concise entries in Gagini's dictionary hints so directly at the links between processes of commodity creation, physical and cultural death, and the construction of nations.

The nineteenth-century has been something of a vortex for Spanish American historians. From the collapse of the Empire in 1808 to 1810 until the consolidation of conservative agro-export regimes by the century's end, the dominant features of the region's historiographic landscape have been revolution, civil war, personalist “tyrants,” and bouts of ethnic uprising unmatched since the first century of Conquest. When Latin American historians, such as Lucás Alamán in Mexico or Bartolomé Mitre in Argentina, sat down at mid-century to write national narratives for their emerging republics, their histories were veiled stories of incompletion, failed promise, and unfinished aspirations.

In this collection of essays, readers can get a sense of the character and history of science policy, the organization of scientific communities, and relations between scientists and the state in nine countries. The volume's editor, Etel Solingen, provides an introduction to orient the discussions which follow. She defines the concern of the collection as “the impact of state structures and state involvement in the international political and economic systems on the domestic political economy of science” (p. 3). Solingen's essay draws on a wide range of literatures, including recent work on the political sociology of the state, research in institutional political economy, and—of course—on the history of science policy. Contributors to the book make an effort to work broadly within the framework which Solingen outlines, though clearly none feels bound by it.