NAMING LIKE A STATE There is a great variety of naming practices around the world, and a largish anthropological literature is dedicated to charting them. The authors of the first article want to bring the state into the discussion. They ask, What happens when the state, with its own way of seeing, wants to know peoplesÕ names?

State naming practices and local, customary naming practices are strikingly different. Each set of practices is designed to make the human and physical landscape legible, by sharply identifying a unique individual, a household, or a singular geographic feature. Yet they are each devised by very distinct agents for whom the purposes of identification are radically different. Purely local, customary practices, as we shall see, achieve a level of precision and clarity--often with impressive economy--perfectly suited to the needs of knowledgeable locals. State naming practices are, by contrast, constructed to guide an official ÔstrangerÕ in identifying unambiguously persons and places, not just in a single locality, but in many localities using standardized administrative techniques.

Do revolutions affect one another? Certainly, in light of the Òvelvet revolutionsÓ of the past decade, the contagious effect of revolutions cannot be denied. Less remembered is the wave of constitutional revolutions of the early twentieth century that swept across Russia (1905), Iran (1906), the Ottoman Empire (1908), Mexico (1910), and China (1911). This short-term wave was couched within a long-term one that began with the American, Polish, and French Revolutions and included such other exemplary cases as the European revolutions of 1848 and the Meiji Restoration of 1868. Both waves, long and short, ended with the Russian Revolution of 1917 that initiated a new and different model of revolution (Sohrabi 1995).

It has long been recognized that great social-political revolutions have tended to be marked by three common experiences: (1) the ironic completion of the state building project of the ancient régime through strengthening of the state and its bureaucracy; (2) external warfare; and (3) the deployment of revolutionary terror, often initially restricted to obvious enemies of the new order, then expanding to larger groups in society and eventually consuming much of the revolutionary elite itself. Through investigation into the Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries (1950-1953), this essay concentrates on the linkages between these three elements, focusing particularly on the complex interaction between state building, state sponsored terror, and state paternalism in the early consolidation of the PeopleÕs Republic of China.

While Alice brushed the White QueenÕs tousled hair, the monarch offered her employ as a ladyÕs maid for a salary of two pence a week, along with a regular ration of jam. As Lewis Carroll relates in Through the Looking Glass, Alice was disinclined to accept in any case. Nonetheless, she grew disturbed when the Queen informed her that the offered jam was only to be given Òevery other dayÓ--that is, only ÒyesterdayÓ and Òtomorrow,Ó but never Òtoday.Ó Alice immediately realized that she would never receive jam on the series of ÒtodaysÓ she worked, but could only enjoy the expectation of receiving it in the future, or perhaps the memory of having received it previously. In response to AliceÕs questions about the proposed arrangement, the Queen attributed her confusion to the Òeffect of living backwards,Ó a prospect that Òalways makes one a little giddy at first.Ó The Queen explained that Alice lived ÒforwardsÓ and was thus condemned to remember only Òbackwards.Ó The White Queen, on the other hand, lived ÒbackwardsÓ and could remember Òboth ways,Ó informed by a previous experience both of the future and of the past. The monarch was so confident of her faculties that she had the KingÕs Messenger sent to prison for punishment in advance of his trial and sentencing. ÒOf course,Ó the White Queen explained, Òthe crime comes last of all.ÓSee Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland (New York: Norton, 1971), 150-51.

According to Fatma Arığ, a fifty-one-year-old Turkish woman of Sabbatean heritage, her search for the past began with this shock she recalls experiencing as a child. Her quest was fulfilled by way of history, for lack of memory. Behind her story lies a little-known community, and its three hundred and fifty-year-old relationship with the state and the dominant society in Turkey.

This article seeks to place lament in the context of Asian modernities, theorize memory in relation to genres of performance, and introduce the notion of social technologies of forgetting. Evidence suggests that Bangladeshi culture is changing in ways congruent with some models of globalizing modernity. Indeed, my data indicate that displacing certain performance genres may be key to modernist transformation. Yet, several persons I describe here endured hardship over several years to continue performing genres their neighbors deemed dated or sacrilegious. This problematizes teleological visions of the progress of a monolithic modernity stamping out older expressive forms.

Questions of ontology are socially as consequential as gossip. In saying this, I do not mean to belittle them but, on the contrary, to emphasize their pervasive ubiquity and importance. Paradoxically, however, it is that ubiquity that all too often reduces them to a banal and unthinking obviousness: the relationship between experienced reality and the discourses that render it palpable have often--like gossip--escaped critical attention, filtered out of anthropologistsÕ awareness by the singularly unrewarding opposition between “symbolic” and “materialist” approaches to the study of culture and society.

:Power and Intimacy in the Christian Philippines, by Fenella Cannell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). @TX:Syncretism is a word with a history. Much like fetishism, its famously promiscuous cousin, it has been hurled as an accusation and deployed as a theoretical tool. One can try to neutralize this history by drawing a distinction between “processes of religious synthesis” and the “discourse of syncretism”--read condemnation and/or defense--but the word remains productively problematic (see Stewart and Shaw 1994). It not only conjures an orthodoxy against which deviations can be measured; it also tempts us to presume we can identify the ingredients in any particular mixture, and that we know in advance how and why synthesis occurs. At the heart of the concept lurk daunting questions. What do we mean by religion? How do ethnographers and the people they study produce this category, explicitly and tacitly, institutionally and informally, in texts and the practices of everyday life?

This is a provocative study of post-Communist politics in Slovakia. The author asks important questions and addresses significant approaches to the politics of transition. Her answers, however, will be looked upon skeptically by those who have studied politics, nationalism, and historical consciousness, whether in this region or elsewhere in democratizing nation-states. The author considers Slovakia an emblematic case, even though the particularities of Slovakian history may account for many of the points the author makes. The close analysis of certain politiciansÕ careers and important controversies in the post-communist period are valuable contributions; the broader interpretive framework, however, is flawed.

The papers in this volume were first presented at the third Center for Hellenic Studies colloquium, organized by the editors in June 1996. The colloquium brought together scholars from different branches of ancient history, archaeology, and anthropology with the goal of pushing warfare studies beyond mere narrative of wars and battles to an inquiry into the influence of military conflicts on their social, political, and economic contexts, and vice versa.

Scholarly debates concerning cities in the Islamic world have focused on whether there actually is an Islamic city, and have often been framed by the paradigms of nationalism and modernization. Declaring at the outset that they do not believe there is a typical Islamic city, the authors of this volume attempt to redirect scholarly discussion of cities in the Islamic world by presenting narratives of the socio-economic developments of early modern Ottoman Aleppo, Izmir, and Istanbul. They argue that the history of each city must be understood according to its internal dynamics. In so doing they aim to integrate Ottoman urban history into the study of world history and global cities, and demonstrate how fruitful comparative studies are for the field of Ottoman studies.

The editors of this volume aim to challenge the precepts of New Historicism (á la Foucault) as they bear upon historical change. If New Historicism had focussed on the ‘operation of power’ through time, with its implications for the periodized social construction of the individual, the editors assert that such radical discontinuity may in fact distort modern perceptions of Greek and Roman antiquity. The essays presented, beyond addressing continuity and change in the broadest sense, are not methodologically coherent, but rather give a sampling of contemporary approaches to periodization.

The practical problems involved in constructing a meaningful account of the lives of Muslim women during the Medieval period would seem to be considerable. Nevertheless, the project is an important one. Through the examination of court and estate records, art, coins, oral and written literature, and Western travelersÕ accounts, as well as contemporary chronicles, the contributors to Gavin R. G. HamblyÕs volume have assembled a diverse set of articles, alternately revealing, enticing, suggestive, and fragmentary.

This book is an anthropological study of managerial control and power structures in the Hong Kong subsidiary of a Japanese supermarket chain (here called Fumei). The study is the result of two years of primary data collection using traditional anthropological research methodsÑparticipant observation and intensive interviewing. The book is structured around an introduction, seven chapters, a conclusion, and an afterword. The introduction places great significance on how this study supposedly distinguishes itself from earlier literature on Japanese joint-stock companies (kaisha) and Japanese management practices. Previous anthropological work is criticized for not having provided comparative analyses of the subjects studied.