RELIGIONS AND NATIONS Three essays examine the vexed relations of religions and nations in the modern era, when the people becomes an electorate and the nation becomes foundational for the state. Religions, once so powerful in forming communities and underwriting the authority of states, have different, more troubled histories within nation-states. (See also, “The State and religion,” the subject of a pair of articles by Joseph R. Strayer and Rushton Coulborn in the very first issue of CSSH, 1:1 [1958], 38–57.)

ECONOMIES AND STATES The two strong forces that regulate the modern world are in tension with one another: The nation-state divides the world into a couple hundred units, comparable and different; while the economy integrates the world into a single system of exchange and, in doing so, penetrates and overwhelms national boundaries. Can the nation survive the economy, we wonder? The first pair of essays probe the uneasy relations of economies and states in the last two centuries.

The Grew Years. It is astonishing that CSSH, now entering its fortieth year, has had only two editors in its entire existence till now, our founder Sylvia Thrupp and Raymond Grew (with an assist from Eric Wolf for one year). Ray Grew's editorship was the longer, having begun with volume 16 in 1974. As he steps down and returns to the bosom of the Editorial Board against all entreaties to continue in the role he has performed so intelligently and with such grace for twenty-four years, we salute his editorship by dedicating this volume to him.

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.

Unlike in Europe and the United States, where the writing of family history has become a growth industry over the past thirty years, only recently have historians of Greater Syria during the Ottoman period (1516–1917) started investigating this topic.Also referred to as the Levant, or Bilad al-Sham, Greater Syria for the purposes of this article is today's Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Palestine-Israel. As of yet, there is not a single published monograph in the English language on this topic. Two useful overviews are Haim Gerber, “Anthropology and Family History: The Ottoman and Turkish Families,” Journal of Family History, 14:4 (1989), 409–21; and Judith Tucker, “The Arab Family in History,” in Arab Women: Old Boundaries, New Frontiers, Judith Tucker, ed. (Washington, D.C.: Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, 1993), 195–207. For monographs related to family history in Greater Syria, see Linda Schatkowski-Schilcher, Families in Politics: Damascene Factions and Estates in the 18th and 19th Centuries (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag Wiesbaden GMBH, 1985); and Annelies Moors, Women, Property and Islam: Palestinian Experiences: 1920–1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Almost two years ago, Margaret L. Meriwether kindly shared with me the rough draft of her book manuscript, The Kin Who Count: Family and Society in Ottoman Aleppo, 1770–1840 (forthcoming, University of Texas Press), which promises to be a pioneering contribution to this topic. Two important studies on family history in the Middle East outside Greater Syria—the first following the demographic approach of the Cambridge School and the second much more in the tradition of historical anthropology—are Alan Duben and Cem Behar, Istanbul Households: Marriage, Family and Fertility, 1880–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); and Martha Mundy, Domestic Government: Kinship, Community and Policy in North Yemen (London: I. B. Tauris, 1995). Of course, Jack Goody has written extensively on family history in the Middle East from a comparative perspective. See, for example, chapters one and two of his book, The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Finally, some of the issues raised in this article were subjected to careful scrutiny by Vanessa Maher, Women and Property in Morocco: Their Changing Role in Relation to the Process of Social Stratification (Cambridge, 1974). Not surprisingly, this uncharted landscape is covered by a thick fog of generalizations about the “traditional Arab family.”It is perhaps not a coincidence that the equally glaring absence of family history in the field of South Asian Studies is also combined with ubiquitous generalizations about the “traditional Hindu joint family.” Indeed, Indian society, like Arab society, is said to begin with the family; but the Indian family, like the Arab family, is central to novels not to histories. Nor is it surprising that while the number of articles on the Arab and Indian families in the last twenty-odd volumes of the Journal of Family History are in the single digits, there is a plethora of studies on women's history. Perhaps, as Louise Tilly suggests, this is due to the fact that women's history is, in many ways, a movement history; while the family has long been viewed as the fundamental site of male oppression (“Women's History and Family History: Fruitful Collaboration or Missed Connection?,” Journal of Family History, 12:1–3 [1987], 303–15). That I make these comparative assertions with some confidence is due to the insightful and thorough bibliographical research of Ian Petrie, a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, on the Indian family. Usually defined as a patrilineal, patrilocal, extended social unit, this family type is assumed to have remained the norm well into the twentieth century.Raphael Patai's definition is the one cited most often (Society, Culture, and Change in the Middle East, 3rd ed. [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971], 21). For critiques of this view, see Mundy's erudite analysis in Domestic Governments, 89–92. See also the articles by Gerber and Tucker cited in note 1.

In 1940, Muhammad ‘Ali Jinnah, the leader of the Muslim League, first suggested that the Muslims of India were not simply a religious community but a nation. But it was only after the triumph of the Muslim League in winning the overwhelming majority of Muslim seats in the 1946 Indian provincial elections, particularly in the two largest Muslim-majority provinces, Bengal and Punjab, that Jinnah could argue convincingly to others that he, and the Muslim League, represented the voice of that nation. In critical ways, the elections of 1946 thus laid the foundations for the emergence of Pakistan. For a good discussion of the 1946 elections in the Punjab, see I. A. Talbot, “The 1946 Punjab Elections,” Modern Asian Studies, 14:1 (1980), 65–91. A state predicated on the existence of a Muslim nation, Pakistan occupies a position of unusual importance in the history of the Muslim world and of colonial nationalism, for it represents the first post-colonial nation created on the basis of a self-consciously Muslim nationalist program.

Are democracies more likely to pursue free trade than autocracies? Turn-of-the-last-century liberals believed that democracies were more likely to engage in trade than absolutist monarchies (Doyle 1986:1161; Thomson 1966:462). “The majority consists of bread eaters,” wrote the French economist Frédéric Bastiat (1862: 102–3). The argument according to which democracy is less bellicose than autocracy does sometimes rest on the assumption that democracy is more prone to commercial intercourse than autocracy. For a criticism of this line of argument, see Gowa (1995: 519). The electioneering work of the Anti-Corn Law League in Britain in the 1840s confirmed English radicals' belief that the franchise would mitigate corruption and rent seeking. However, subsequent history falsified these expectations. The simultaneous moves of autocratic France toward free trade and of democratic United States toward protection confounded any simple association between regime type and trade policy. No one has found a straightforward relation between democracy and trade. With one recent exception. Geoffrey Garrett and Peter Lange (1995) argue that democracies are quicker to adjust to changes in their economic environment than autocracies because of the popular constraint. The present essay revisits the liberals' insight.

In recent years, approaches to legal pluralism have shifted dramatically. One shift comes from within a school of fieldwork-oriented anthropologists, historians, and sociologists known as the law-and-society movement.The Law and Society Review, and to a lesser extent, Law and Social Inquiry, are the main outlets of the movement. Studies of legal pluralism are published in these journals and increasingly so, since its founding in 1981, in the Journal of Legal Pluralism. Before the turn, law-and-society scholars viewed local, national, and transnational legal systems as coexisting but essentially separate. Criticisms of the inherent stasis of this formulation and its failure to explore interactions between the systems or power inequalities among them motivated the shift (Griffiths 1986; Starr and Collier 1994; Merry 1988, 1992). The new legal pluralism, as it is called, now includes an expanded range of normative ordering systems, often labeled private governance, found in all societies, not only those with colonial histories but also those produced by transnational processes (Galanter 1981; Merry 1992). It addresses the dialectic, mutually constitutive relations of these systems rather than their separateness (Arthurs 1985; Benda-Beckman andStrijbosch 1986; Fitzpatrick 1983; Henry 1985; Vanderlinden 1989).

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.

Our present historical moment is marked by a complex interlocking between processes of globalization and the proliferation of nationalisms. Contemporary processes of globalization have attenuated the institutional capacities of nation-states to regulate their national economies See Harvey (1989), Held (1990, 1995), Hirsch (1995), Sassen (1991, 1996). and challenged the spatial correspondence between nation, state, economy, culture, and people that has long defined the nation-state. See Agnew (1994), Appadurai (1996, 1997), Gupta and Ferguson (1992), Malkii (1992), Robertson (1992). The inherited hyphenization of nation and state, forged during the late-nineteenth century, now appears “less as an icon of conjuncture than an index of disjuncture.” Appadurai (1996:39). The increasing visibility of the strains in the union between nation and state has been matched by a remarkable burst in analyses of nationalism and the nation-state. In particular, the territorial bases of nationhood has emerged as a major theme in studies of nationalism. This essay seeks to extend and broaden this line of enquiry through an analysis of the historical production of a national space and economy in late nineteenth century colonial India. My discussion of the nationalization of conceptions of economy and territory at once engages with and departs from received approaches to national territory.

Edward Said's Orientalism has received both praise and criticism. Among the criticisms leveled is the charge that Said's neglect of German scholarship misses an important part of Orientalism in the West. Robert Irwin, for example, notes that German Biblical scholarship was critically influential as a “motivating force for the study of Islam” and that the “German form-critical techniques” developed to study the Old Testament influence on the way “Western scholars interpret[ed] the Koran and the early Islamic community.” Bernard Lewis claims that Said's neglect of German scholarship calls into question his entire project and likens it to writing a history of European music without a discussion of the German contribution. See Robert Erwin, “Writing about Islam and the Arabs,” Ideology and Consciousness, 9 (1981–82), 108–9; Bernard Lewis, Islam and the West (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 108. More generally, critics have noted that the presence of an influential Orientalist scholarship in Germany, as well as the absence of any significant Germany colonies in the Orient, calls into question Said's claim that there is a confluence between scholarship and political power in Orientalist discourse. Neither critics nor supporters, on the other hand, have given much attention to Said's claim that there is a similarity between Orientalism and anti-Semitism. Said states this in his introduction, where he notes that in “addition and by an almost inescapable logic, I have found myself writing the history of a strange secret sharer of Western anti-Semitism. That anti-Semitism, and as I have discussed it in its Islamic branch Orientalism resemble each other is a historical, cultural, and political truth that needs only be mentioned to an Arab Palestinian for its irony to be perfectly understood” (1978:27–28). Elsewhere, Said has faulted critics of his work on Orientalism for seeing “in the critique of Orientalism an opportunity for them to defend Zionism . . . and launch attacks on Palestinian nationalism,” instead of giving attention to the similarity “between Islamophobia and anti-Semitism” (1985:9).

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.

Elias Canetti, in a brief passage of his Crowds and Power (first published in German in 1960), argued that neither language, nor territory or history are at the heart of what today we would call national identity. What nations can not do without, however, and what has contributed most to turning different individuals into conscious members of a particular nation, is a national “crowd symbol.” Canetti then went on to show that most European nations possessed one such symbol around which a popular feeling of national belonging could be generated and sustained. In the case of England, he maintained, it was the sea that took this function; while for the Germans it was the forest. In France, on the other hand, it was the Revolution that came to play this very role. And in Switzerland—the case Canetti probably knew best from his own experience—it was the mountains (see Canetti 1960:191–203).

On the evening of March 17, 1940, about 600 workers gathered together inside the Marievale Consolidated Compound on the far southeastern tip of the Witwatersrand goldmining crescent (see Figure 1). The workers demanded that the gates of the compound be opened, as they intended to march the forty miles to Johannesburg to present their grievances to Henry Taberer at KwaMzilikazi, the headquarters of the Native Recruiting Corporation. At about 8 pm, thirty-five policemen arrived from the nearby towns of Nigel, Springs, and Brakpan and demanded to know what was troubling the workers. After considerable discussion, the policemen discovered that the Marievale mine had run out of the regulation shift tickets normally used to record the labor of African workers and that older tickets were being used in their place. These tickets were printed with the higher wage rates received by workers during the early development of the mine: The mine officials had simply crossed out the 2 shillings and 6-pence rates and stamped the standard minimum of 2 shillings onto each slip of paper. The workers were suspicious about this conspicuous reduction of wage rates, arguing that they were due the original rate established by the Native Recruiting Corporation.

In imperial Germany, Catholics and Jews were two religious minorities in the midst of an intolerant majority society. Although there were considerable differences in size (Catholics were about 35 percent of the German population and Jews about 1 percent), their positions as minorities vis-è-vis the Protestant majority had clear similarities. While they were officially free to integrate themselves into the Protestant society surrounding them, they were nevertheless targets of religious persecution and of social and cultural discrimination. They were perceived by wide sectors of the German society as “a state within a state,” “a knife in the nation's back,” and as a group of “betrayers” of the German national policy. Even Germans who did not use such expressions, considered these minorities “marginal groups” inasmuch as their religious principles or their cultural heritages seemed outdated and unimportant and thus easily cast off in the name of assimilation.

The colonisation of the tropical lowlands of South America was until fairly recently often portrayed by historians as a straightforward catalogue of genocide, epidemics, and forced catechisation.See, for example, the work of John Hemming: Red Gold (London: Macmillan, 1978), Amazon Frontier (London: Macmillan, 1983), “Indians and the Frontier” in L. Bethell, ed., Colonial Brazil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 145–89. In its emphasis on the undeniable fact of the violent subjection of much of Amerindia, this orthodoxy obscured the vital detail of the varieties of historical experience in the Amazon and Orinoco basins and the Guianas, projecting an illusion of uniformity and direction to historical processes which were in fact much more complicated and open-ended.N. Whitehead, “Ethnic Transformation and Historical Discontinuity in Native Amazonia and Guayana, 1500–1900,” L'Homme, 126–8, 13:4 (avril–décembre 1993), 285–305. A particularly good example of the complexity of “conquest” from the Indian perspective in the period immediately prior to the Cabanagem is N. Farage, As Muralhas dos Sertões: Os Povos Indígenas no Rio Branco e a Colonização (Rio: Paz e Terra, 1991). Historians, anthropologists, and archaeologists have more recently emphasised the historically contingent nature of ethnic identity and traced out its empirical consequence, the interweaving of identity construction and ethnicity with colonialism, economic expansion and state formation from the sixteenth century onwards.General volumes covering all or most of the tropical lowlands are A. Roosevelt, ed., Amazonian Indians from Prehistory to the Present (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1994); E.V. de Castro and M.C. da Cunha, eds., Amazônia: Etnologia e História Indígena (São Paulo: FAPESP, 1993); M.C. da Cunha, ed., História dos Índios no Brasil (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras 1992) and G. Urban and J. Sherzer, eds., Nation States and Indians in Latin America (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991). For the Orinoco and Guianas, see chapters by Whitehead and Arvelo-Jímenez and Biord in Roosevelt, Amazonian Indians; Dreyfus, in Castro and da Cunha, Amazonia; and N. Whitehead, Lords of the Tiger Spirit: A History of the Caribs in Colonial Venezuela and Guayana, 1498–1820 (Dordrecht and Providence: Foris Publications, 1988). Price's trilogy on the Saramaka Maroons of Surinam, First Time (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), To Slay the Hydra (Ann Arbor: Karoma Publishers, 1983), and Alabi's World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1990) is an example of a similar approach to an Afro-American ethnic formation. As a result, in certain parts of the tropical lowlands—notably the Guianas—it has been possible to produce a much more sophisticated reading of regional history, a “thick description” which can relate the fluidity and specificity of local circumstances to wider historical processes and can thus serve as the basis for a properly comparative mapping of the past.

The following anecdote was related to me during my field work in Syria a few days after the event allegedly took place:

One day a high-ranking officer visiting the regiment ordered the soldiers to recount their dreams of the night before. A soldier stepped forward and announced: “I saw the image of the leader in the sky, and we mounted ladders of fire to kiss it.” A second soldier followed suit: “I saw the leader holding the sun in his hands, and he squeezed it, crushing it until it crumbled. Darkness blanketed the face of the earth. And then his face illuminated the sky, spreading light and warmth in all directions.” Soldier followed soldier, each extolling the leader's greatness. When M's turn came, he stepped forward, saluted the visiting officer, and said: “I saw that my mother is a prostitute in your bedroom.” The beating and discharge followed. Commenting retrospectively on his act, M explained that he had “meant that his country is a whore.”M's story was told to me by a close friend of M's, one of my most reliable sources for information about Syrian politics, during the course of what would become two and one-half years of field research in Syria. In 1985, while studying Arabic, I lived with a Lebanese family in Abu Rummaneh, an affluent neighborhood of Damascus. In 1988–89, under the auspices of an IIE-Fulbright grant, I lived in the women's dormitories at the University of Damascus, in the Palestinian refugee camps, and in a rented apartment in Salahiyya, a middle-class neighborhood near the center of town. In 1992, I rented an apartment on the border of the middle-class, conservative neighborhood of Muhajirin during a year-long stay supported by a Fulbright-Hays doctoral dissertation fellowship. And in 1996, funded by a grant from Wesleyan University, I returned for the summer and lived in the Institut Français d'Études Arabes de Damas. During the course of my research, I conducted open-ended interviews with over 100 people from diverse generational, religious, sectarian, and class backgrounds. Interview subjects included prominent government officials, leaders and rank-and-file members of the “popular” organizations, peasants, sports coaches, school teachers, principals, entrepreneurs, artists, poets, film directors, economists, historians, and political dissidents.

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.

Perhaps the most vexing problem in philosophy and social theory concerns the relative importance of material and ideal factors for social action. Karl Marx, for instance, with his notion of base and superstructure and his materialistic interpretation of the dialectic process, made a clean break from the idealism of his Hegelian heritage (McLellan 1977:390; Swingewood 1991:62–63). Nevertheless, idealism proved resilient and later came to inform the thinking of both actor-oriented (that is, phenomenologist, ethnomethodologist, symbolic interactionist) and structure-oriented (that is Functionalist, Structuralist) theorists.