Social change and sexual mores: a comparison between pre‐20th‐century Norway and 20th‐century Botswana

This article compares pre‐20th‐century Norway and 20th‐century Botswana—two settings separated by time and space but sharing a sharp rise in non‐nuptial births. The comparison seeks to create a synergetic analytical effect by combining firsthand, experience‐near field data from Botswana with solid historical analyses of bastardy in Europe. This radical comparison provides a perspective that highlights the importance of treating “culture” not as a residual category, but as an integral part of everything social. This implies that there is a need not only for a proper sociocultural contextualization of localities, but also for an analysis of extra‐local power structures as fundamentally cultural, reflecting not only bureaucratic and political concerns but also values and existential perspectives.     

Fixity and fluidity: chiefly authority and settlement movement in colonial Botswana

This article proposes that anthropologists and historians of colonialism, landscape and the colonial construction of chieftaincy in Africa should examine particular case studies in more detail to elicit the complex social and material processes implicit in such notions. In particular it focuses upon the colonial conflation of the notions of settlement nucleation and sedentism in the period of the Bechuanaland Protectorate in Botswana (1885–1966), processes of material change, and the position of Tswana chiefs with regard to settlement and authority. The perceived “failure” of the Tawana chiefs in Ngamiland District to exert settlement control over the dispersed population is analyzed through detailed colonial records of conflict to argue that what failed was the colonial construction of chieftaincy itself, as well as the colonial imagination of landscape in Africa. The article’s emphasis upon the materiality of dwelling in the landscape also seeks to convince historians and anthropologists alike of the vast research potential of material culture in the analysis of colonial histories, social and cultural change, and indigenous notions of modernity.     

A study of social‐market interventions in the shaping of the field of cultural production

A social analysis based on extensive evaluation of the Dance and Drama Awards programme reveals the social‐market political paradigm underpinning the formation of cultural policy in the UK underthe New Labour government. This specific intervention in the field of cultural production is placed in the context of broader government interventions in the cultural domain that seek to give respect to undervalued social and cultural groups. There is a political analysis of the characteristics of the social‐market political formation that underpin New Labour’s “affirmative” actions, and the political strategies informing the government’s “access” and “inclusion” agendas and their impact on the cultural and creative industries. The authors argue that the construction of a “social‐market” position in New Labour’s cultural policy represents an attempt to bridge or “hyphenate” the contradictory claims of social democracy, on the one hand, and economic fatalism, on the other. Despite the rhetoric of social and cultural “transformation”, the authors argue that a “faith” in the market prevents New Labour from transforming the political‐economic and cultural structures that generate economic and cultural injustices.     

Palimpsests of Progress: Erasing the Past and Rewriting the Future in Developing Societies—Case Studies of Singapore and Jakarta

The former colonial port cities of Southeast Asia are complex in both their landscapes and their collective memories. Centuries of European imperial domination have left a mark on their townscapes and, more so in some cases than in others, on their contemporary political and social cultures. During the colonial period, the integration of these port cities into global trade networks also fostered inter‐ and intra‐regional migration and, thus, the development of complex cultural mixes in their demographic composition. In recent decades, and following the attainment of political independence, this region has experienced spectacular economic growth and the development of a range of nationalisms, both of which have had a considerable impact on the recent transformation of their (capital) cityscapes. Singapore and Jakarta are presented here as case studies of the ways in which economic, political and cultural forces have interacted to produce cityscapes in which elements of the past are variously eliminated, hidden, privileged, integrated and/or reinvented.     

“Don’t call me a Cajun!”: race and representation in Louisiana’s Acadiana region

In southwestern Louisiana, the public sphere is dominated by the image of the Cajuns, presented as a hardy, likable people who have overcome significant obstacles since their arrival as Acadians in the late eighteenth century. Across the cultural region designated “Acadiana,” which comprises 22 counties, nearly 30% of the population is black (or Creole, mixed-race peoples generally identifying as black). Contributions of non-whites to the region’s history are usually not incorporated into the public historical narrative, and the erasure of these groups’ influences on the state’s cultural “gumbo” has profound symbolic and material consequences. Black/Creole residents note that much of their culture – primarily music and foodways – has been repackaged as Cajun or subsumed under the Cajun label and that they are unable to take advantage of the benefits that Creole-oriented tourism could bring to a region in which half of the counties are designated “black high poverty parishes.” Using mixed methods, including interviews, archival analysis, and census data, this paper explores the social, political, and economic consequences of the domination of Cajuns in the south Louisiana memorial and representational landscape and argues that commemorative silences in what Alderman et al. have called the “memorial arena” perpetuate a hegemonic social order.     

“Mycenaean” political domination of Knossos following the Late Minoan IB destructions on Crete: negative evidence from strontium isotope ratio analysis (Sr/Sr)

Strontium isotope ratio analysis of human dental enamel and bone is applied to investigate a highly debated question of population movement and cultural discontinuity in Prehistoric Aegean Archaeology. The Late Minoan IB (ca. 1490/1470 BC) destructions on Crete are succeeded by cultural upheaval. The novel cultural features that appear at Knossos (Crete) in this period have forerunners in the Mainland. In Cretan context, the Linear B writing system, the funerary architecture and burial practices of the Mainland style are interpreted as evidence of an actual “Mycenaean” long-term settlement and political domination of Knossos. Human skeletal material from tombs that are associated with non-locals from the Mainland based upon the material culture is analysed to measure ⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr. The results of the analysis show that all the examined individuals from the Knossos tombs were born locally.     

The local articulation of central power in the north of the Iberian Peninsula (500–1000)

Envisaging political power as dynamic allows the historian to deal with its structures with some sophistication. This paper approaches political power, not as a circumscribed block of bureaucratic elements, but as a complex phenomenon rooted in social reality. The authors explore the dialogue between local and central power, understanding 'dialogue' in its widest sense. Thus the relationships (both amicable and hostile) between local and central spheres of influence are studied. The authors propose a new analytical framework for the study of the configuration of political power in the northern zone of the Iberian peninsula, over a long period of time, which takes in both the post-Roman world and the political structures of the early Middle Ages.     

The “State Idea” in Theory and Practice

Recent anthropology of the state is influenced by sociology's cultural turn—taking up “the state idea” as situated meaning. The works reviewed here pursue the state's idea of itself—in two cases through state projects of extreme social and cultural engineering, in two as a comparative problem. Notwithstanding differences of purpose and approach, the authors evince tacit points of convergence around the state as a form of modernism, as a function of elite interests, and as a localized process of depoliticization, associating dissent with cultural authenticity. The essay relates these points to western state nationalism and current ethnographies of political subjectivity.     

Politicians,Parties, and the Persistence of Weak States: Lessons from the Philippines

Under what conditions will politicians strengthen state capabilities through bureaucratic reform? This article presents a principal–agent model of state capacity that shows that unless competition to influence policy is largely confined to a single dimension, politicians have no incentive or ‘political will’ to adopt bureaucratic reform. The validity of this model is tested using the experience of the Philippines in the period 1946–72. It is found that politically relevant groups in the Philippines were competing to influence policy over issues of social welfare, economic nationalism and control over public spending, and that groups' demands over these issues failed to align along a single dominant dimension. Consistent with expectations derived from the principal–agent model, there were numerous calls for and attempts to improve bureaucratic performance, but the calls went unheeded and the attempts failed miserably. The study highlights a lesson of potential use to countries currently undergoing democratization. It argues that state capacity is not a function of insulating the state from societal forces, but rather of clarifying lines of authority and accountability in the hierarchy of principal–agent relationships between society, politicians and bureaucrats.     

Fragmented Forests,Fractured Lives: Ethno-territorial Struggles and Development in the Pacific Lowlands of Colombia

The culturally and ecologically diverse Pacific lowlands of Colombia are both the locus and product of key political economic and cultural political conjunctures. Twenty-five years after they emerged in their current form, Afro-Colombian ethnic and territorial struggles have become important icons of resistance to development and struggles for social change. But in Colombia as in other parts of the world, the rapid and violent expansion of capitalist accumulation and state power have had devastating consequences for the region's forests and communities—literally and epistemically fragmenting both. Based on long-term fieldwork, this paper examines the ongoing and contentious co-production of the Colombian Pacific region amidst the increasingly violent forces of neoliberal governmentality in the 21^st century. It shows that the Pacific lowlands are an example of “political forests” in the sense that they are a contested site and product of Afro-Colombian cultural politics and state territorialisation.     

Some Recent Trends in the Archaeology of Predynastic Egypt

The traditional explanation of the origin of Egypt credits the legendary Menes with founding the state through the conquest of the Delta region, but this is more of a political legend than explanation. Anthropological archaeologists and Egyptologists are bringing new methods and questions to their search for an adequate explanation for the development of one of the world's first territorial states. Early investigations of cemetery sites in Upper Egypt and settlements in the Delta have been supplemented by the excavation of more Upper Egyptian settlement sites, while cemeteries and other important settlements are now being uncovered in the Delta. Three trends are particularly important for the development of social complexity in ancient Egypt: (1) a growing appreciation of regional differences in Predynastic culture; (2) chronological refinements; and (3) an emphasis on group social and political developments, and trade. A consensus appears to be developing that stresses the gradual development of complex society in Egypt, in which a number of small polities coalesced into three or four larger entities during the late Predynastic, followed by the assimilation of the northwestern Delta by the Thinite rulers. The effort to control trade with the southern Levant and Mesopotamia seems to have encouraged expansion of Upper Egyptian cultural and political influence northward.     

Law,arbitrariness and the power of the lords of North Lebanon

The paper focuses on the role of arbitrariness and violence and their relation to law‐in‐practice. The locus is the semi‐feudal society of North Lebanon and more widely the Lebanon as a whole. Weber and others have suggested that the arbitrary is an important element in the characterisation of specific political types of domination such as patrimonialism. There are ambiguities in this kind of treatment which are explored for the case of the beys of the Akkar region of the north. A system of status honour, founded originally on military control and taxation, identified personal might and personal right Modern social changes in the Ottoman and French Mandate periods and up to the present have combined to produce a social world in which violence has become more systematically important in local power. A fragmented and weak state formation has reinforced such processes and the use of law as a visible instrument of individual and group domination enshrining arbitrariness at the heart of society.     

从突破部族社会桎梏的意义去认识周初变革——兼谈五种社会形态问题

周初的政治变革,打破了殷商时期以血缘纽带为依托的族邦方国结构,使中国历史从此走上了一条崭新的发展道路。它使生活于广大地域的人们开始突破狭小的、具有极强稳定性的族邦结构社会的桎梏,而形成了一种以语言文字、道德伦理和风俗习惯等文化认同为纽带的、强固紧密的精神凝聚力量,从而具有了不断向更高社会阶段发展的现实基础。     

Institutionalization and change in cultural policy: CONACULTA and cultural policy in Mexico (1988–2006)

This paper analyses the process of institutionalization of Mexican cultural policy and its evolution after the political alternation of 2000. It demonstrates that since its institutionalization with the creation of the National Council for Culture and Arts in 1988, the objectives, definitions and bureaucratic organization of the cultural policy have not known important changes in the period studied (1988–2006). The inertia observed in Mexican cultural policy can be explained by the institutional structures’ constraints inherited from the Partido de la Revolución Institucional (The Party of the Institutionalized Revolution) and by the actors’ resistance to change.     

New World States and Empires: Politics, Religion, and Urbanism

The past decade has seen a veritable explosion in archaeological research on complex societies in Latin America. In 1993, Smith published an overview of research to that date; this article is one of two bringing that summary up to the present. Our first article, New World states and empires: Economic and social organization (Smith and Schreiber, 2005), dealt with issues regarding economic and social organization. The present article tackles political organization and dynamics, religion, urbanism, and settlement patterns. We also review recent research in the context of various theoretical perspectives, some traditional, some more contemporary, including approaches to history and process, cultural evolution, agency-based models, linguistic prehistory, migration theory, and the relationship between environmental change and cultural events. Our discussion blends empirical findings, methodological advances, and theoretical perspectives.     

State Making and the Politics of the Frontier in Central Benin

Kopytoff's model of the African frontier has opened room for renewed approaches to settlement history, politics, ethnicity and cultural reproduction in pre‐colonial Africa. This interpretative framework applies well to central Benin (Ouessè). Over the long term, mobility has been a structural feature of the regional social history, from pre‐colonial times onwards. Movements of people, resources, norms and values have been crucial in the production and reproduction of the social and political order. The colonial intrusion and its post‐colonial avatars gave way to renewed relations between mobility and locality, in particular in the form of a complex articulation between control over labour force, access to land and natural resources, and out‐ and in‐migrations. This article argues that the political frontier metaphor provides a useful heuristic device to capture the logic of state making, as the changing outcome of organizing practices taking place inside and outside state and non‐state organizations and arenas. Governmentality in post‐colonial central Benin thus results from the complex interplay of mobility, control over resources and state‐led forms of ‘villagization’.     

Rethinking State-Society Relations in Vietnam: The Case of Business Associations in Ho Chi Minh City

The growing private sector in the post-reform Vietnamese economy and its new forms of mobilisation have led to newly emergent social forces that have shaped internal state agendas and political deliberations. With a view to exploring the nature of institutional change in Vietnam, I argue that business associations have played a crucial intermediary role between the state and the private sector over past decades. These associations and the spaces of governance that they constitute are neither characteristic of autonomous actors as suggested by liberal theory nor a form of state corporatism. This paper adopts the “state-in-society” approach, which contends that the state and society should be considered through new governance spaces within the state. These spaces create institutional mechanisms for interaction between the government and business, and provide a framework for deliberative engagement between state and non-state actors. This framework will be tested through an examination of associations of small and medium enterprises in Ho Chi Minh City and their connections to the city authorities. I argue that business associations will be accommodated by the state and will coalesce with existing bureaucratic interests. This proposition contributes to the new research agenda that applies the state-in-society approach to post-socialist institutions.     

The dark side of cultural policy: economic and political instrumentalisation,white elephants,and corruption in Valencian cultural institutions

Cultural policy is usually assessed as a positive element for socio-economic development and therefore, its criticism is generally confined to poor implementation and discussion of its social effects. However, it is occasionally analysed as an instrument that produces unsustainable development, as a generator of white elephants, or as a means of waste, corruption, and clientelistic domination of the political sphere. This is what we might call the ‘dark side’ of cultural policy. Our case study of the city of Valencia (Spain), focussing on two of its major cultural institutions, the Valencian Institute of Modern Art and the Palace of Arts, exemplifies this cultural policy dimension. This article aims to analyse the systemic and contextual causes of this phenomenon of cronyistic behaviour and to elucidate in what sense it can be understood as a contingent drift specific to a particular territory or as a structural condition of cultural policy.     

The art of nationalism: Artists' perspectives on the Latvian Centenary film programme

In the aftermath of several decades of neoliberalism in Eastern Europe, the social fabric of post-socialist societies is frayed. In this context, nationalist cultural policies and everyday displays of national belonging have emerged as key instruments of social solidarity. There has recently been a drive of state initiatives in Latvia in the field of cultural policy aimed at strengthening national identity. In this paper, we focus our attention on one particular cultural policy initiative, Latvian Films for Latvian Centenary. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 16 film directors who participated in the Centenary film programme, the paper explores how artists and cultural operators involved in this programme are mobilised as national(ist) subjects and how they see their work within such a framework. We argue that nationalist cultural policy can be successfully implemented because the artists, themselves formed as responsible political and moral subjects in the tradition of Latvian cultural nationalism, share a regard for culture and the arts as a resource for sustaining the political statehood and the national community. However, the artists also recognise the limitations of their work as a source of social cohesion and solidarity in a society that is ethnically divided.