Plus, there might be a big fat cathedral anthem in it for us as well. For those of us not laboring under a millennia of an oppressive class system, what’s not to like?

Chapter 1 almost achieves both, but I wouldn’t call it a complete success. It has a clever general structure and a lot of great detail (perhaps too much, indulging in places in obviously interesting but marginally relevant details of things like witchcraft or the rhetorical stylings of incompetent lesser headmen). There are two ways into the chapter, at least. One is through the author’s own “ethnographic emplacement” — the fact that as an anthropologist he had to find a (good) place to live, secure permission to live there, build his own hut and then, at the end of it all, found himself threatened with expulsion from that hut by the District Administrator — which in turn is the second way in, through the event of the District Administrator’s letter threatening residents with expulsion from Nyamatsupa if they do not conform to the plans for “villagization.” These two entry points–the author’s own experience with wattle, and the event of the DA’s disciplining letter–are explored in great detail, and are used to great effect as occasions to start laying out the complexity ethnographically. They do not explain, but they do start to map out settings, characters, events in history, and other crucial components of the story. Yet to emerge is a sense of how inquiry into this story has proceeded (what problems animate Moore’s search, other than his threatened hut) and a conceptual clarity (of the sort we hope will be provided via articulated assemblages and sovereignty-discipline-government).

I think this is one of the best ways to draw the reader into the ethnography–the same way the anthropologist was drawn in. As an ethnographic technique it is without peer, it sets up the tension which the author will resolve for the reader. However, as an analytic introduction, it doesn’t always help. One might wonder why this tiny event–significant to the victims to be sure, but seemingly insignificant beyond that–needs explaining, or where in our overcrowded, youtube-addled brains we are going to store it. Will we be needing all this detail? The Tsanga valley, the Dazi and Nyamatsupa regions, Nyanga (thanks to Strong for finding us a visual!). The overlapping powers of chief and headman, raimakers and DA, histories of the colonial and post-colonial regimes.

I’ll be interested to hear what readers got from the first chapter. Does the story of the meeting between DA and chief make sense, and does it motivate the kinds of questions raised in the intro? Is the detail overwhelming or helpful and where? I have to admit that I’m still fuzzy on a few of the characters and their roles, and if asked to display my knowledge of the various parts of Kaerezi or its inhabitants, I would dissemble. But it seems to be mostly all there in chapter 1, and so I can consult…

I wrote a long section about assemblages, but I think our server ate it because it Internal Server Errored on me. I will try to return to the issue in the next post…

P.S. Mobility continues to be present throughout, though not yet quite a theme: Trucks open the chapter– movement through the territory. the issue of mobility on foot emerges repeatedly, 1 hour walks, jogging behind oxen for 3K, security routes constantly improved by trucks and graders. Cattle allow people greater mobility than agriculture. since fixing capital in place was risky given the history of evictions. Indeed, the nature of mobility in this place is quite obviously tied to the constant evictions, resettlements and displacements, making the very idea of a permanent home risky, if not seemingly impossible.

P.P.S. There is a another subtheme here: ecological farming. The Kaerezi ecological approach to farming (mentioned briefly on p.50, reappearing in chapter 2) reminded me of Michael Pollan’s story of Polyface farms in Swope Virginia in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, wherein he describes the practices of rotation of crop, grazing and fertilizing animals, the arrangement of forest field, stream and home, and the fact that all of this is information-intesive (the farmer even insists that it is something like a post-information technology approach to farmin’). The point being that ecological arrangements are not natural, nor primitive as figured by the planners or to some extent hippies and conservationists–rather that it is a kind of post-human rationality of planning a farm. Naturally, it is easy to see the failures created by the simplistic, ad hoc and frankly retro planning techniques of the Mugabe government when they demand that land be disciplined into urban/rural grids and used according to function instead of managed ecologically. The fact is, however, that the option is not between planning and no planning or between discipline from above and government from below, but between competing rationalities of planning and care. This is something I don’t yet see in Moore. Sensitive as he is to avoiding claims of natural agricultural practices, there is still, to me, a sense that this is about planning all the way down, so to speak, which may also be why the sovereignty-discipline-government triad in motion doesn’t seem sufficiently precise to some readers.

But the more one reads the more Cassidy draws you in to the world of Newmarket and the interlocking systems of class and breeding that unite its two main species. Cassidy’s tone might strike American readers as a bit empyrean (or perhaps just stiff) at first, but this soon turns into an understated and dry charm as Cassidy describes the vagaries of life amongst punters and jockies. Indeed, Cassidy successfully writes an ethnography that is in some ways an ‘expose’ of the racing industry and that is much more even-handed that it could have been, and her authorial distance is one of the means by which she pulls this off.

That said, there is no sense that there was anything empyrean about how Cassidy did fieldwork. Her ability to connect with her informants despite the anti-intellectualism of the racing scene peeks out from behind her main narrative. Her occasional droll asides about her nicknames (“I became a regular at two betting shops in Newmarket, where I enjoyed the nickname of ‘Flaps’ based (so I was told) on my arm movements during a race.”) their fascinated horror at her vegetarianism and proclivity to read books (” , and above all their belief that she must understand horses because of ‘her Irish blood’ all helps us locate her in the ethnography. And her description of first riding a thoroughbred is a unique passage in the ethnographies I’ve read — half phenomenology, half novelistic reportage, it captures perfectly an experience which most readers will never have, and which is nevertheless at the dead center of the entire social system she describes.

Cassidy’s fieldwork as a ‘lad’ mucking out stables as well as a visitor to the more rarefied realms of elite racing circles have allowed her to write an extremely detailed ethnography that immerses one in the jargon of horse racing and the multitude of details that surround it. This is combined with a sharp eye for fashion and class — we learn why goretex jackets and comfortable jeans are a must for owners, and why seafood and champagne are _de rigeur_ for them when they go to the race track.

The final chapter, “Blood Will Tell” covers local theories of breeding and blood in horses and was, for me, the most interesting part of the book. It provides an interesting counterpoint to American theories of race and biological determination here in the US. It is sort of Emily Martin meets The Horse Whisperer. If you can read backwards to authors such as Strathern and Carsten then it’s really a very nice bit of work.

So, if you are an Anglophile, the kind of person who will pick up a readable ethnography for pleasure every once in a while, or if you are looking for an ethnography to give middle to upper level students on class, breeding, gambling, or the ethnography of Europe, I’d recommend you give _Sport of Kings_ a look.

Clothing is easy. Here’s another easy one: pharmaceuticals. It’s not that hard to find examples of cultural projects that re-create materially what we human beings are. Pharmaceutical projects and products redefine the horizons of possible human being. Docility in body, docility in mind: fascinating new work is uncovering means through which mood is medicalized and controlled in consequential ways. And the corporate appetite for research subjects demands careful tracking and attention even as we read today that in the U.S. a federal panel is recommending a relaxation of regulations concerning the use of prisoners in pharmaceutical testing.

Accounts of the intermediation of the material and the symbolic or the corporeal and the social can include the lighthearted (tracking the category of ‘formal shorts’ over time) or something a bit more serious (noting disparities in access to life-changing drugs whilst criticizing a medical model that would reduce people to their molecular components). Current critical attention to ‘biopolitics,’ to the social processes and effects of science, to emergent digital worlds, and the like is exploding. We’ve grown accustomed to the claim that ‘nature’ has been superceded as either a symbolic construct grounding human affairs or the ‘world’ in itself ‘before’ our activity on it. Again, these notions can be given robust philosophical genealogies, or they can be illustrated with the rather obvious. Global warming grabs the headlines, but it’s worth remembering that the entire biosphere was also transformed by the atomic testing programs of states like the U.S. over the course of the twentieth century.

After all, we all inhabit worlds that contain and evince the traces of human activity in the past. And I don’t just mean the accumulated junk in my apartment. A visitor to highland New Guinea might be chagrined to learn that the grasslands of its valleys are largely anthropogenic. But once you realize that those valleys also contain traces of the radioactive activity of states on the other side of the planet, scaled observation (my apartment, a valley in New Guinea, the whole atmosphere) is rendered almost irrelevant because nature/culture encompasses all of them. Even Peter Day’s Global Business program today reflects on how people are nothing if not creatures who remake themselves via ‘the tool’ — whether the tool is a grass fire to clear land for gardening or a personal fabrication device.

There are things that I find curious about the article — the assumption that ‘marriage’ and ‘reproduction’ are the same thing and that ethnic identity is always corelated with a genetic marker for instance — but there doesn’t seem to be very much to be ‘racial’ to me. The fact that the word doesn’t appear in the article being the main reason. But even if you are suspicious of euphemisms such as ” ‘Anglo-Saxon’ Ethnic Group” there are more sophisticated critiques of this method than ask if it’s racist. The fact that the topic is a large migration of conquerors into a new land helps this article out of a lot of potential problems because it is in fact talking about a situation with a large migration of conquering people and the clear ethnic differences them and the locals on the receiving end. If the paper was about how the biogenetic substance of Anglo-Saxon conquerors somehow helped them in their conquest, or that they remain a separate ‘race’ today (rather than having pretty quickly blended in with everyone else, as the paper argues) then that would be something else again.

If you’re interested in learning more you can check out the webpage of “The Center for Genetic Anthropology”:http://www.ucl.ac.uk/tcga/index.html at University College London, which is also “Ruth Mace land”:http://www.ucl.ac.uk/anthropology/bioanth/staff_member_mace.htm or, if you prefer “Fiona”:http://www.ucl.ac.uk/anthropology/bioanth/res-students_jordan.htm “Jordan”:http://evolutionaryanthropology.wordpress.com/ land. The center also has some “popular”:http://www.ucl.ac.uk/tcga/ScienceSpectra-pages/SciSpect-14-98.html “summaries”:http://www.ucl.ac.uk/tcga/ns/nsbg.html of what it is up to, although I have a soft spot in my heart for Seth Sanders’s take on one study on “race and religion in Africa”:http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/transition/v010/10.1sanders.html one member of the center co-authored.

By coincidence I am visiting my parents right now, when the Danish minority has its annual meeting (in Danish: “Årsmøde”). It lasted for three days, and I was back in Oslo the last day, so I decided to take my sister and shoot a little video of one of the celebrations in a tiny little village called “Ascheffel” (just far enough away for me not to run into old teachers from kindergarten, etc.).

I’m glad to see anthropologists video blogging like this. While such raw reports from the field are bound to be less polished than what we are used to seeing on television, I enjoyed watching it and I think our readers will too.

In 1704, Psalmanazar published a book An Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa, an Island subject to the Emperor of Japan which revealed a number of strange habits. Formosa was a prosperous country of wealth with capital city called Xternetsa. Men walked naked except for a gold or silver plate to cover their privates. Their main food was a serpent that they hunt with branches. Formosans were polygamous and the husband had a right to eat their wives for infidelity. They executed murderers by hanging them upside down and shooting them full of arrows. Annually they sacrificed the hearts of 18,000 young boys to gods and priest ate the bodies. They also used horses and camels for mass transportation. The book also described the Formosan alphabet.

Of course, it was all a hoax. In fact, I came across it via this Ishbaddidle post linking to the 10 Greatest Impostors in History.

Not everyone was fooled by George Psalmanazar. William Innes, a Scottish army chaplain was one of the first to see through his ruse. But rather than exposing him, Innes helped him refine his story. Originally Psalmanazer (his real name is unknown) claimed to be Japanese, and it was Innes’ idea that he claim to be Formosan:

In 1702 Psalmanazar had a fateful encounter with William Innes, chaplain to a Scottish regiment then stationed in Holland. It was perhaps a case of requiring one con artist to recognize another: the chaplain smelt a rat and invited the “Japanese pagan” to his house. Innes asked Psalmanazar to write a passage of his language, then pretending to have lost the piece had him rewrite it. The Scotsman presented his guest with the two different copies thereby forcing Psalmanazar to admit he was an impostor. Rather than condemn the fraud, Innes saw a chance of fame and money, and decided instead to elaborate the hoax; he had Psalmanazar baptized publicly as a Christian, named him George, and changed his supposed origin from Japan to Formosa as so little was then known about the island. Henceforth Psalmanazar’s story was that he had been abducted from Formosa by Jesuits and carried off to France, and although he had been threatened with the tortures of the Inquisition, he had bravely refused to become a Roman Catholic.

Jack Lynch, in his talk “Orientalism as Performance Art: The Strange Case of George Psalamanazar” writes:

This marks an interesting episode in what we might call the prehistory of Said’s Orientalism. For him, real Orientalism requires that the West have a stake in the East. Britain soon had such a stake, having established enough connections with the Near, Middle, and even Far East that a Formosan imposture of this sort could not have succeeded much later. Empirical data were plentiful, and would conspire to expose the deception. He arrived right on time, and timing, as I said, is everything. But even though this strange case lacks many of the qualities of Orientalism proper, or “mature” Orientalism, it has one of them in spades. It shows the susceptibility of the Orient to be written upon by others, a characteristic it has never entirely shaken off. For Psalmanazar takes advantage of the fact that Oriental consciousness was entirely unavailable to Europeans.

But I wonder if early Europeans were any more susceptible … after all, we do have other examples of such Orientalist hoaxes from later in history: such as the Princess Caraboo from the island of Javasu (aka Mary Baker) in 1817, or even Virginia Woolf who participated in the famed Dreadnought hoax of 1910. There are even examples from the colonies, such as the Kumar of Bhawal (1909) about whom Partha Chatterjee has written. I might even add Ahmed Chalabi to the list, even though his case is more that of a conning a nation into war than faking his identity, but I still see a certain continuity…

For those interested in reading more about George Psalmanazar there is an extensive online bibliography (last updated in 1999) which lists several books about him. A more recent book, not listed there, is The Pretended Asian (2004) by Michael Keevak. A Google search will also turn up about a half dozen other web pages summarizing the life of George Psalmanazar.

And anyone wanting to know about the real original inhabitants of Formosa, I suggest reading the Wikipedia entry on Taiwanese Aborigines…

Anthropologists had little to say on these subjects for two reasons in Fassins view:

(1) Very few anthropologists were working on the banlieues, on immigration or inequality: This relates to the history of the discipline in France and its predominant epistemological position. Anthropology in France is above all the study of the present of remote societies. Even when French anthropologists became interested in their own society, they tended to analyse its traditional aspects:

…

(2) Many anthropologists found their beliefs and the ideals of the French society uncomfortably challenged: Isn’t France a secular and colorblind society?

There is an equally interesting commentary on this article by Keith Hart, which I have read as it is freely available on the web. Hart attempts a sociological analysis of the failures of French anthropology:

The French profession is divided: the Association pour la recherche en anthropologie sociale (APRAS) is the keeper of the exotic flame, while the Association française des anthropologues (AFA) is more explicitly engaged with contemporary society, but lacks the other’s institutional influence. Finally, anthropologists share with other French academics the entrenched inequality privileging Parisian researchers (CNRS, École des hautes études en sciences sociales) above those who teach in the provincial universities. The present government has tried to do something to reduce this gap, but has met with the organized resistance of scholars whose conditions of employment are the envy of academics everywhere.

French anthropology’s weak engagement with racial inequality thus mirrors the general divisions and elitism characteristic of higher education there, with the added problem that it lacks the established position of history, philosophy or sociology. The concentration of institutional power in Paris both deters public criticism by academics who are ultimately dependent on it and ensures that their voices are largely excluded from policy-making circles and the media.

He also looks at the state of other national anthropologies:

If French anthropology seems to be beleaguered these days, Brazilian anthropology, having once been confined largely to Amazonia, is now booming as a source of investigation and commentary on mainstream urban society. Scandinavian anthropology offers a flourishing model of public engagement. Anthropology is a major operation in India and Nigeria today, being mainly concerned with ‘tribal’ populations and internal cultural diversity. Anthropologists in the USA and Britain have organized themselves quite effectively as professional guilds, but there is little public knowledge there of what they do (try using ‘anthropology’ as a keyword for email alerts from the New York Times); and the discipline’s relationship to the universities is precarious.

Compared with every other country in the world, America does immigration superbly. Do we really want to junk that for the French approach?

The only criticism I’ve seen of Zakaria is that he conflates German guest workers with second or third generation France citizens of foreign descent. (See Moorish Girl for more on “immigrants” vs. “citizens.”) But I think there is a deeper problem here. The reason immigrants tend to do well in America is not because America is a more welcoming society, but because we already have a permanent racial underclass in our African American population! (And, to some extent, Latinos and Native Americans as well.)

America’s recent immigrants serve a useful purpose, deflecting attention away from one of the core conflicts in our society. American immigration policy in recent years has favored middle class Asian immigrants. Their arrival conflates the black/white dichotomy that led to so much social unrest in the 1960s. This can be seen in the area of Affirmative Action policies where it has been widely remarked that those who would benefit most from their termination would not be White Americans, but the children of Asian immigrants!

Popular in Marxist academic circles, the concept of Asian immigrants to the US acting as a “buffer race” has never made it to the mainstream. I would argue that part of the reason for this lies in the intrenched logic of American “multiculturalism.” According to the dominant narrative, America is a “salad” (no longer a “melting pot”) in which each culture adds its own unique flavor to the mix. This narrative hides the very different histories of America’s various ethnic minorities.

In their celebrated essay, “Black students and the burden of ‘acting White.’” (1986, Urban Review 18(3), 176-203) Ogbu and Fordham suggest a tripartite classification for thinking about America’s ethnic minorities:

In order to account for this variability, we have suggtsted that minority groups should be classified into three types: autonomous minorities, who are minorities primarily in a numerical sense; immigrant minorities, who came to America more or less voluntarily with the expectation of improving their economic, political, and social status; and subordinate or castelike minorities, who were involuntarily and permanently incorporated into American society through slavery or conquest. Black Americans are an example par excellence of castelike minorities because they were brought to America as slaves and after’ emancipation were relegated to menial status’ through legal and extralegal devices… American Indians, Mexican Americans, and Native Hawaiians share, to some extent, features of castelike minorities.

What it means to be a “castlike minority” can be understood by looking at our prison population (more here):

Since 1989 and for the first time in national history, African Americans make up a majority of those entering prison each year. Indeed, in four short decades, the ethnic composition of the U.S. inmate population has reversed, turning over from 70 percent white at mid-century to nearly 70 percent black and Latino today, although ethnic patterns of criminal activity have not fundamentally changed during that period.

While South Asian immigrants may never become white in the same way that Jewish and Irish immigrants did (Fareed Zakaria has commented that TV ratings drop whenever he appears on a talk show), I would argue that the reason immigration has “worked so well” in America is that immigrants usefully distract us from the real racial issues in this country, while for many European countries, immigrants are the racial underclass.

The impact of Muslim science and culture, and especially of the Al-Andalusian culture that dominated the Iberian peninsula between the 8th and 12th centuries, on the development of Western culture is little known and even less talked about. The treatment of Muslim Spain in Western Civ books tends to consist solely of the Song of Roland and, centuries later, the defeat of Granada and subsequent expulsion of Muslims (and Jews) from Spain. In between, a mighty civilization emerged, flourished, and ultimately declined — one that I am beginning to think contributed more to “Western culture” than the Romans ever did. Besides creating a stewpot of cultural and scholastic achievement in its own right, Muslim Spain served as a conduit for the teachings of the Muslim world at a time when Muslim learning was at its peak. For instance, the Catholic Church was utterly transformed by the study of Aristotle in Arabic translation; likewise, the introduction of double-entry bookkeeping by Fra Luca Bartolomeo de Pacioli relied on the introduction of negative numbers by Muslims (who themselves had learned from Hindu mathematicians centuries earlier) and the al-jabr (“algebra”) of Al-Khwarizmi (from whose name we also get the word “algorithm”). The work of Ibn Rashid (Averroës) — who also gave us Aristotle — and Ibn Sina (Avicenna) form the foundation of Western medical knowledge; the poetry and dialogues of and about Muslim philosophers and warriors (and non-Muslims deeply embedded in Andalusian culture, such as El Cid, from the Arabic el Sayyid, “leader” or “chief”) laid the groundwork for the birth of the novel (in Spain, of course!); and the pointed arch essential to Gothic monumental architecture was adopted from Muslim architects.

These and other contributions of the Muslim world are detailed in an exhibition currently touring Britain, 1001 Inventions. The Independent has drawn up a list of their “Top 20″ most influential Muslim inventions and discoveries (paid access only; full text available here), including Ibn al-Haitham’s discovery of the workings of the eye (and subsequent invention of the Camera Obscura; the word “camera” derives from the arabic qamara, “a dark or private room”); the perfection of soap (and their not-so-subtle suggestion that non-bathing Europeans look into it, for which we can all be thankful); Jabir ibn Hayyan’s invention of distillation, which helped transform alchemy into chemistry (and wine into liquor); and the development of Chinese ornamental flashpowder into weapons-grade gunpowder (always with the weapons of mass destruction, the Muslims, eh? I’ll leave as an open question why they didn’t put their guns, germs, and steel to better use over the last half of the second millenium).

We tend to think about the history of “the West” as a singular thing, a tree with one root (ancient Greece, or maybe ancient Mesopotamia, before it went all goofy with the Islam) and one trunk (the Catholic Church) and only a couple of branches (the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, the French and American Revolutions). Anything outside of this singular narrative is thought of as outside of European history — discoveries and inventions to be assimilated by the West, outside influences “brought in”. So, for instance, after 2,000 years of shared history, Marx could still describe Jews as living in the interstices of European society, rather than as an integral part of it. Likewise for our Muslim heritage; the scholarship on the West’s Muslim past treats it as a marginal history, something that Christendom suddenly encountered with the Crusades. Yet from Charlemagne on, a constant flow of Christians, Jews, and Muslims moved between Andalusian Spain and the rest of Europe, and Christian Spain’s later political dominance in Europe was grounded in its Muslim past.

What would it mean to re-think Western culture as encompassing the Muslim world? To think of Western history as taking place in Hindu India, Umayyad Damascus, Abassid Baghdad, Fatimid North Africa, and the Ottoman Empire in addition to Renaissance Italy, the Holy Roman Empire, and Tudor England? To think of colonialism, at least in North Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia, not so much as the imposition of the West on non-Westerners but as an internal shift of political and economic power — more Reconstruction-era South than Conquest of America? And, finally, to think of the current waves of Muslim immigrants in Western Europe not as the invasion of the West by cultural Others but as the return of “cultural cousins” after a long absence?

Dear All,
I thought you might be interested to know that Anthropology currently has a hard lif in France. Indeed, since end of last year, the CNRS [National Center For Scientific Research], our major research institution employing nation-wide about 150 anthropologists (about 50% of all institutionally employed anthropologists in France) is considering eliminating the discipline from its research topics. The strategy is to incorporate anthropologists within the history section in a first step, where they will become a minority, and where, in a second step, they will progressively disappear from the scene.

Pushed by stereotypical views of anthropology as being only “contemporary history”, neglecting our theoretical apparatus and what makes us particularly different – long term fieldwork – anthropology is seen as having no proper object of research anymore (everything is globalised, they tend to say, forgetting local persisting or emergent identities), and as being too much divided among its own “troops”.

As you can imagine, there is strong resistance to this movement in France, and many institutions, such as the EHESS where I am employed, have not yet taken up these points of view (and will hopefully not in the near future). But in the long run, if the CNRS simply deletes an entire discipline from its scope, other institutions will follow.

We are asking social scientists to participate as widely as possible in our protest movement. I have therefore enclosed a petition that circulates in France and now internationally. We would greatly appreciate if you would consider filling the petition and sending it back as quickly as possible.

Perry’s book shows that Austen lived at a time when women’s status was shifting. While it had previously been defined by blood relations, making a woman’s relationship with her parents and siblings more important than who she married, by the end of the eighteenth century women’s status was increasingly defined entirely by the family she married into. This has important implications for literary studies, since sibling relationships are often overlooked in readings of Austen’s novels:

In Perry’s view, previous definitions of the family have been based on incorrect inferences from statistical norms and prescriptive conduct manuals. Statistics taken from public records of marriages and births ignore “many of the other filaments in the web of kinship that located people psychologically in the period,” because there are no published records of such filaments—a maiden aunt, like Austen living with the family, for example, would not appear in any record. And where modern readers assume that a novel will contain a love story, the main story the author had in mind might in fact be about a bad or good brother, a long-lost relative, fathers separated from daughters, a devoted aunt, or some other aspect of the birth family (with mothers often missing or unimportant, as in Austen). Such elements were more important than love stories in the novels Austen read, like Tristram Shandy or The Castle of Otronto.

… This loss of female authority was accompanied or explained by other social factors that were not in women’s interest: the growing “dispersion of communities, and the growing power of individualism,” and changes in property laws and marriage settlements that left sisters and daughters less well provided for than they had been, and with little legal leverage. Inheritance issues drive most of Jane Austen’s plots and subplots; and because she was on the cusp of changes that would increasingly commodify women and virginity for the marriage market, trends masked by conventions of romantic love, she came to seem to some later readers as somewhat hardhearted in the practicality of her views, for instance (in Perry’s example) her implicit mockery in Sense and Sensibility of Marianne Dashwood’s “ardent belief in a first and only love,” a belief that would have made no sense in an earlier period, when a third of all marriages were second marriages, after the death of a spouse, but was fashionably new in Marianne’s day.

Perry’s elucidation of the plots of eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century novels in the light of these broad social changes goes a long way toward explaining why many of them do not move us today; the reunion of long-lost fathers and daughters, for instance, or the intense relation of brother and sister no longer seem especially affecting. The long-lost relative plot simply had more emotional force when the “consanguinal” family rather than the “affinal” family was the principle focus of emotional life (though, thinking of The Mill on the Floss or Silas Marner we can see that such consanguinal plots appear at least as late as George Eliot). It may be that the marriage plot itself has seen its day, and in these times of redefined families, plots will change—there is already a spate of family novels and novels about friendship that do not resolve in marriage.

This makes me think about the differences between Hollywood and Bollywood films. In the latter (although it is changing now) familial relations between siblings and between children and their parents are far more important than romantic relations between unmarried men and women. In fact, the main emotional relationship in many Hindi movies is between the male lead and his mother, not between him and the woman he is to marry at the end of the film. I wonder if this (even more than colonial history) explains the love so many Indian’s have of classic English literature?

only at the beginning of creation, as some extraordinary, prophetic act. After that, it seems Muslims just conformed to culture. According to some, our culture seems to have no history, no politics, and no debates, so that all Muslims are just plain bad. According to others, there is a history, a politics, even debates, and there are good Muslims and bad Muslims. In both versions, history seems to have petrified into a lifeless custom of an antique people who inhabit antique lands. Or could it be that culture here stands for habit, for some kind of instinctive activity with rules that are inscribed in early founding texts, usually religious, and mummified in early artifacts?

There are two versions of Culture Talk: the crude view that Islam as the enemy civilization, and a more subtle view of Islam as divided within itself (although this division is seen as unchanging over the course of Muslim history since the middle ages). Mamdani ascribes the first view to Samuel Huntington, whose 1993 article, “The Clash of Civilizations,” is widely cited by proponents of this view. However, Mamdani argues that Huntington’s article was little more than a caricature of Bernard Lewis’s 1990 “The Roots of Muslim Rage.” This earlier article forms the basis of the more nuanced version of Culture Talk.

Lewis both gestures towards history and acknowledges a clash within civilizations. … But Lewis writes of Islamic civilization as if it were a veneer with its essence an unchanging doctrine in which Muslims are said to take refuge in times of crisis.

Lewis ignores the important political and historical contexts of fourteen hundred years of history when he writes:

The struggle between these rival systems has now lasted for some fourteen centuries. It began with the advent of Islam, in the seventh century, and has continued virtually to the present day. It has consisted of a long series of attacks and counterattacks, jihads and crusades, conquests and reconquests.

Once the world is divided into good and bad Muslims, the label most commonly applied to most bad Muslims is that of “fundamentalism.” Mamdani also attacks this concept. First, he points out that the term arose in the 1920s and was first used to describe American Protestants. (See here for a full excerpt of this discussion.) Then he distinguishes between the political and religious aspects of the phenomenon generally discussed as “fundamentalism.” Arguing that terrorism should be seen primarily as a political phenomenon, Mamdani prefers to use the term “political Islam.”

Can we so easily reduce terrorism to a purely political phenomena? This is not what Mamdani intends to do. He writes

My aim is to question the widely held presumption – even among critics of Culture Talk – that extremist religious tendencies can be equated with political terrorism. Terrorism is not a necessary effect of religious tendencies, whether fundamentalist or secular. Rather, terrorism is born of a political encounter.

It isn’t that ideology isn’t important, but that ideology alone cannot explain why religion becomes linked to political violence. Mamdani argues that the link between religion and political violence a product of the Cold War. Here is an excerpt from a (believe it or not) New York Times article about Mamdani’s book (they hid it in the “Arts” section).

The real culprit of 9/11, in other words, is not Islam but rather non-state violence in general, during the final stages of the stand-off with the Soviet Union. Using third and fourth parties, the C.I.A. supported terrorist and proto-terrorist movements in Indochina, Latin America, Africa and, of course, Afghanistan…

“The real damage the C.I.A. did was not the providing of arms and money,” he writes, ” but the privatization of information about how to produce and spread violence — the formation of private militias — capable of creating terror.” The best-known C.I.A.-trained terrorist, he notes dryly, is Osama bin Laden.

Mamdani is particularly persuasive when he discusses the case of Africa.

Mr. Mamdani asserts, for example, that the United States policy of constructive engagement with apartheid in South Africa helped sustain two proto-terrorist organizations — Unita, the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola, and Renamo, the Mozambican National Resistance — that were armed and trained by the South African Defense Force. Renamo became what Mr. Mamdani calls Africa’s “first genuine terrorist movement,” a privatized outfit that unleashed random violence against civilians without any serious pretension to national power.

Although it doesn’t detract from his main argument, I was quite disappointed with Mamdani’s discussion of Afghanistan, where he downplays the role of the Soviet Union in engineering the initial coup, and the subsequent policy of genocide waged against the Afghan people. At times, Mamdani leaves one with the impression that the United States was the only side fighting in the Cold War.

There is no doubt that Mamdani has done a great service by recovering this neglected history of terrorism during the Cold War, but is politics alone are sufficient to explain the rise of terrorism?

Recently blogger Kevin Drum pointed to some fairly convincing evidence that Mamdani is not far off. University of Chicago professor Robert Pape has collected some valuable empirical data, constructing a database of every suicide terrorist attack since 1980. In his book Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, Pape concludes that “the data show there is little connection between suicide terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism, or any of the world’s religions.” In Anti-War.com’s Michael Scheuer’s review, he quotes Pape as saying:

what nearly all suicide terrorist attacks have in common is a specific secular and strategic goal: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from the territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland. Religion is rarely the root cause, although it is often used as a tool by terrorist organizations in recruiting and in other efforts in service of the broader strategic objective.

While this is all quite convincing, it still seems to fall short of explaining the recent London bombings, which were executed by second-generation immigrants. This was the point of a recent New York Times op-ed by Olivier Roy. Roy points out that

What was true for the first generation of Al Qaeda is also relevant for the present generation: even if these young men are from Middle Eastern or South Asian families, they are for the most part Westernized Muslims living or even born in Europe who turn to radical Islam. Moreover, converts are to be found in almost every Qaeda cell: they did not turn fundamentalist because of Iraq, but because they felt excluded from Western society (this is especially true of the many converts from the Caribbean islands, both in Britain and France). “Born again” or converts, they are rebels looking for a cause. They find it in the dream of a virtual, universal ummah, the same way the ultraleftists of the 1970′s (the Baader-Meinhof Gang, the Italian Red Brigades) cast their terrorist actions in the name of the “world proletariat” and “Revolution” without really caring about what would happen after.

Earlier this year Mamdani reviewed Roy’s book, Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah for Foreign Affairs. He was fairly favorable towards the book. After all, they both share a view of political Islam as a product of modernity, rather than simply a reaction to it. Roy also sees jihad as a primarily European, and secular phenomenon.

For Roy, neofundamentalist Islam is “born-again Islam” and strictly a product of the diaspora. Islamic religious debate is no longer monopolized by the learned ulema (teachers); as they have turned to the Internet, the neofundamentalists have also become tulaab (students). As a result, “religion has been secularized, not in the sense that it is under the scrutiny of modern sciences, but to the extent that it is debated outside any specific institutions or corporations.” With the traditional ethnic community left behind, “the disappearance of traditional values … [has laid] the groundwork for re-Islamisation,” which has largely become an individual project. “Islamic revivalism goes hand in hand” with a modern trend: the “culture of the self.”

The growing individualization of religious practices has prompted believers to create a new community that transcends strict geography. The consequences of these changes have been contradictory. Those who have succeeded in reconciling the self with religion have tended to embrace a “liberal” or “ethical” version of Islam; those who have not have been prone to embrace “neofundamentalist Salafism.” Meanwhile, the quest “to build a universal religious identity, de-linked from any specific culture,” has come at a price, because such an Islam is “by definition an Islam oblivious to its own history.” As a result, “the quest for a pure Islam [has] entail[ed] also an impoverishment of its content,” Roy writes, and the ironic consequence of this quest is “secularization, but in the name of fundamentalism.”

He points out that since 1996 violence related to Islam has been decreasing in the Middle East, even as it is on the rise in the West. However, Mamdani faults Roy for using different standards in analyzing Middle Eastern and European Islam:

Curiously, although Roy traces the transformation of Islamist parties in Muslim-majority Middle Eastern countries to political rather than sociological conditions, he attributes the rise of jihadist Islam in the Muslim diaspora in the West only to sociological causes. Ultimately, Roy’s argument cannot explain why jihadist Islam, an ideology of marginal political significance in the late 1970s, has come to dominate Islamist politics…

But can any purely political explanation answer this question? Mamdani believes so. His answer is that the “The influence of the Afghan jihad cannot be overstated.”

In the 1980s, the Reagan administration declared the Soviet Union an “evil empire” and set aside the then-common secular model of national liberation in favor of an international Islamic jihad. Thanks to that approach the Afghan rebels used charities to recruit tens of thousands of volunteers and created the militarized madrassas (Islamic schools) that turned these volunteers into cadres. Without the rallying cause of the jihad, the Afghan mujahideen would have had neither the numbers, the training, the organization, nor the coherence or sense of mission that has since turned jihadist Islam into a global political force.

This point is missed by Roy in his recent op-ed. He writes:

if the conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine are at the core of the radicalization, why are there virtually no Afghans, Iraqis or Palestinians among the terrorists? Rather, the bombers are mostly from the Arabian Peninsula, North Africa, Egypt and Pakistan – or they are Western-born converts to Islam. Why would a Pakistani or a Spaniard be more angry than an Afghan about American troops in Afghanistan? It is precisely because they do not care about Afghanistan as such, but see the United States involvement there as part of a global phenomenon of cultural domination.

The argument isn’t simply that they are responding to attacks on those countries, but that a policy of promoting globalized political Islam as opposed to secular anti-imperialism, together with the building of an institutional apparatus of training and recruitment for terror, both sponsored by the United States, where the conditions which precipitated the spread of global jihad.

There is also the question of whom we are talking about when we refer to Muslim terrorists. In our typically Eurocentric fashion, we may be over-emphasizing the attacks on New York, Madrid, and London (does anyone remember Bali?), ignoring the fact that, as Pape has show, most suicide bombers have been involved in regional battles over control of territory, such as the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka.

If all of this is fairly convincing, and I think it is, does that mean that there is no place for understanding Islam in ideological terms? Is Islam, as a system of religious beliefs, purely incidental to an anthropological explanation of jihad? Of course not. Political Islam is necessarily different from Political Christianity, or Political Judaism. (Here, for instance, is an interesting Weberian take by my former sociology professor, Mark Gould, on the role of Jihad in Islam.) However, there is nothing in Islam itself that can explain the rise of terrorism as a political strategy. As Mamdani says in his book:

The question we face today is not just why a radical state-centered train of thought emerged in political Islam but how this thought was able to leap from the word to the deed, thereby moving from the intellectual fringe to the mainstream of politics in large parts of the Islamic world.