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Why do pogroms occur in some localities and not in others? This book address that age-old question through an examination of a particularly brutal wave of violence that occurred across hundreds of predominantly Polish and Ukrainian communities in the aftermath of the June, 1941 German invasion of the Soviet Union. Exploiting the collapse of state authority, some Poles and Ukrainians viciously attacked their Jewish neighbors. Against explanations that focus on antisemitism or alleged Jewish support for communism, Intimate Violence argues that pogroms were most likely to occur where Jews had sought national equality with Poles and Ukrainians prior to the outbreak of war. In these communities, where Jews challenged Poles’ and Ukrainians’ dreams of national dominance, local non-Jews were more likely to perpetrate violence and less likely to protect their Jewish neighbors. Intimate Violence is a novel social scientific explanation of ethnic violence and the Holocaust that combines statistical analysis of an original data set with archival research and case studies. It cuts through painful debates about relative victimhood that are driven more by metaphysical beliefs in Jewish culpability than empirical evidence of actual perpetrators and victims. In doing so it sheds new light on the roots of mass ethnic violence and the ways in which such gruesome acts might be avoided.

This book explores urban public life through the microcosm of the Chengdu teahouse. Like most public spaces, the teahouse was and still is an enduring symbol of Chinese popular culture, stemming back centuries and prevailing through political transformations, modernization, and globalization. The time period covered begins basically with the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949-50, goes through the end of the Cultural Revolution and into the post-Mao reform era. We see clearly that the role and importance of the teahouse changed abruptly, going from severe constriction in its operations to a time when public spaces flourished unrestricted. During the Mao era, the state achieved tight control over society generally, and it was able to penetrate to the very core of society in order to control almost all its resources. Thus, the spaces usually available for sociality and for the natural development of social activities were sharply limited. The post-Mao economic reforms were a turning point in public life because everyday life was dominated by sweeping “open-market” economic reforms that were structured within a unique type of socialist political system, and to a significant degree public life moved away from state control. This book can enhance our understanding of public life and political culture in Chengdu under the Communist state, with its political needs and agendas; from there we may reflect on the situation of other Chinese cities.

Markets and traders in Vietnam are on the move, literally and figuratively. The chapters in this volume offer rich ethnographic exploration of daily interactions among small-scale traders, suppliers, customers, family members, neighbors, and officials within contemporary Vietnam and across its borders. These quotidian encounters occur within contested spaces, through expanding and contracting circuits of mobility, and across physical and conceptual boundaries that are fixed, yet porous. As they ply their wares and negotiate state regulations, traders shape notions of self and personhood, not just as economic actors, but also in terms of gender, region, morality, and ethnicity. Taken together, the diverse contributions to this collection demonstrate that markets form and transform through uneven interplay among global processes, state regulatory regimes, individual identities, and local trajectories of economic and social development. Rather than impede market function, these trading frictions shape the necessary ground on which new forms of political economy emerge.

During the Renaissance, the Venetian Mediterranean empire stretched from the lagoon city’s shores to the island of Cyprus. This vast empire was governed by aristocratic men: educated as humanists, they were sent out into the empire armed with ancient geographies and classical epics. Once there, they married women who were their own subjects, and in doing so crossed the boundaries of ethnic and religious identity which divided the early modern Mediterranean world. An Intimate Empire undertakes the first study of this relationship between humanism, empire, and family. Mining private writings, humanist geographies, letters, and extensive archival documentation, the book takes an intimate view into the emotions and subjectivities of imperial governors. It finds that it was within intimate life that one’s relationship to empire – to its politics, its shifting social structures, its metropolitan and colonial cultures – was determined.

Based on long-term fieldwork in a rural Tibetan region in China’s northwest (2002-13), The Battle for Fortune is an ethnography of state-local relations among Tibetans marginalized underChina’s Great Develop the West campaign and during the 2008 military crackdown on Tibetan unrest. The study brings anthropological approaches to states and development into dialogue with recent interdisciplinary debates about the very nature of human subjectivity and relations with nonhuman others (including deities). The author does this by drawing on a linguistic anthropological approach to contested presence (as an ongoing “battle for fortune”). For most Tibetans, the active presence of deities and other invisible beings has been the ground of power, causation, and fertile or fortunate landscapes. The author thus takes divine beings seriously as interlocutors and parties to exchange in Rebgong, refusing to relegate them to a separate, less consequential, “religious” or “premodern” world. The book thus challenges readers to grasp the unpredictable, even violent, interpersonal dynamics at the heart of development projects in China and elsewhere. And it encourages a more multidimensional and dynamic understanding of state-local relations than mainstream accounts of development and unrest that portray Tibet and China as a kind of yin-and-yang pair for models of statehood and development in a new global order.

The two-and-a-half centuries between 800 and 1050 are commonly viewed as a 'dark age' in the history of women's monasticism. Dark, in the sense that the realities of life in and around the cloister are difficult to access: the primary evidence is extremely fragmented; the context is ill-understood; and scholars’ findings are scattered across a multitude of case studies. But dark also in the sense that, according to the dominant academic narrative, women's monasticism suffered from the catastrophic disempowerment of its members, the progressive ‘secularization’ of its institutions, and - barring a few exceptions - the precipitous decline of intellectual and spiritual life. Based on a study of forty institutions in Lotharingia – a multi-lingual, politically and culturally diverse region in the heart of Western Europe – this book dismantles the common view of women religious in this period as the disempowered, at times even disinterested, witnesses to their own lives. Drawing on a wide range of primary sources, it highlights their attempts - and those of the men and women sympathetic to their cause - to construct localized narratives of self, nurture beneficial relations with their environment, and remain involved in shaping the attitudes and behaviors of the laity.

This book chronicles and assesses the little-known involvement of US diplomat George F. Kennan—renowned as an expert on the Soviet Union—in US policy toward East Asia, primarily in the early Cold War years. Kennan, with vital assistance from his deputy John Paton Davies, played pivotal roles in effecting the US withdrawal from the Chinese civil war and the redirection of American occupation policy in Japan, and in developing the “defensive perimeter” concept in the western Pacific. His influence, however, faded soon thereafter: he was less successful in warning against US security commitments in Korea and Indochina, and the impact of the Korean War ultimately eclipsed his strategic vision for US policy in East Asia. This was due in large part to Kennan’s inability to reconcile his judgment that the mainland of East Asia was strategically expendable to the United States with his belief that US prestige should not be compromised there. The book examines the subsequent evolution of Kennan’s thinking about East Asian issues—including his role as a prominent critic of US involvement in the Vietnam War—and the legacies of his engagement with the region.

Historians have become increasingly interested in material culture as both a category of analysis and as a teaching tool. What new insights can historians gain about the past by thinking about things? A central object (and consequence) of modern warfare is the radical destruction and transformation of the material world. And yet we know little about the role of material culture in the history of war and forced displacement: objects carried in flight; objects stolen on battlefields; objects expropriated, reappropriated, and remembered. This book illuminates the ways in which people have used things to grapple with the social, cultural, and psychological upheavals wrought by war and forced displacement. Chapters consider theft and pillaging as strategies of conquest; soldiers' relationships with their weapons; and the use of clothing and domestic goods by prisoners of war, extermination camp inmates, freed people, and refugees to make claims and to create a kind of normalcy. While studies of migration and material culture have proliferated in recent years, as have histories of the Napoleonic, colonial, World Wars, and postcolonial wars, few have focused on the movement of people and things in times of war across two centuries. This focus, in combination with a broad temporal canvas, serves historians and others well as they seek to push beyond the written word.

Since its founding more than one hundred years ago, the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) has been a fulcrum in debates over what constitutes proper boyhood and manhood. Although the BSA developed a strong national identity, these debates had implications that extended far beyond the borders of the United States. Writing the global back into the history of one of the country’s largest youth organizations, Our Frontier is the World details how the BSA operated as a vehicle of empire from the Progressive Era to the countercultural movements of the second half of the twentieth century. American boys and men wearing the Scout uniform never simply hiked local trails to citizenship; they forged ties with their international peers, camped in foreign lands, started troops on overseas military bases, traveled to Africa, and even sailed to icy Antarctica. Weaving together these stories of youthful border-crossings, this book demonstrates how the BSA presented America’s complex engagements with the world as an honorable and playful masculine adventure.

The Second Dutch Atlantic was a distinct era in Dutch colonial history, different both from the imperially-minded period from 1620 through 1680 and the years after 1815, in which the Dutch Atlantic faded into insignificance. While marked by a lack of geographic expansion, the Second Dutch Atlantic saw remarkable Dutch colonial and inter-imperial activity. On the one hand, the Dutch engaged in the Atlantic slave trade, built their own plantation colonies on the “Wild Coast” of South America, and developed their Caribbean islands into commercial assets. On the other hand, they were deeply involved in inter-imperial trade and finance. Maintained by slave majorities and, increasingly, free people of color as well as whites from various European backgrounds, the Dutch Atlantic realm was heterogeneous in its governance, religious profile, and ethnic composition.