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The Senegalese social movement Y'en a Marre formed in 2011 in response to political stagnation and a lack of key public services. It played a decisive role in defeating incumbent president Abdoulaye Wade in his unconstitutional reelection campaign in 2012. This article considers the movement within the context of postcolonial Senegalese cultural politics. After a brief survey of the recent forms of hip-hop engagement with social issues in other African countries, this study presents Y'en a Marre as articulating a social identity, a collective movement, and a cultural/musical form that are distinct from these other examples of hip-hop activism because they are continuations of a specifically Senegalese hybrid of art and social engagement imagined first by Senghor. Y'en a Marre is a culminating articulation of various trends within post-independence Senegalese culture by bridging the divide between tradition and modernity, between the national and the local, between elders and youth. Y'en a Marre combatted the threat to Senegal's prized political stability, and has continued to challenge social and political stagnation, by reconfiguring, but also confirming, Senegalese cultural philosophy for a diverse, inclusive audience., Introduction In the summer of 2011, when President Abdoulaye Wade announced his intention to seek an unprecedented third term in the presidential office and began tinkering with the two-term limit [...]

The history and social context of the ethnic conflict of the German Diaspora in Romania, Hungary and Slovakia are traced. The Germans, a privileged group in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, became ethnic minorities living in East Central Europe following the break up of the empires and the creation of new nation states, Ubermenschen during Nazi rule and finally ended up as refugees.

FAMILY, GENDER, AND HOUSEHOLD RELATIONSHIPS ASSUME CENTER STAGE in fictional portrayals of southern life from Absalom, Absalom to Steel Magnolias. By contrast, historians showed little interest in these topics until [...]

A study on how art objects, especially special wrappings and containers, become imbued with sacred qualities and aspects of divinity in Polynesia is presented.

The relationship between crime, law, and labor of prisoners in building infrastructure in colonial Asmara during the Italian presence in Eritrea in 1890-1941 is presented. How these developments influenced the postcolonial political and social history of the country is also revealed.

When power and identity mix, the result is a potent brew. Add differing flavours of the past and the concoction may well threaten to bubble over. The struggle over power, [...]

The use of ethnic and racially classified DNA in the search for genetic susceptibility for type 2 diabetes is described and the effect of the complicated social and biological meanings of race and ethnicity on biomedical production and diabetes knowledge is examined. A process called bioethnic conscription is used to differentiate between ethnic and racial taxonomies and it is an ethnographically sound alternative.

An analytical perspective that draws on theories of national identity construction and on the political and moral economy of the welfare-state therefore would allow for a better understanding of the popular discourse on hadhar and badu in present-day Kuwait than explanations grounded in history and culture. The cultural differences between the hadhar host population and the badu immigrants can be explained by resorting to analytical models centered on nationalism and the role of the welfare-state.

An account of the Shi'a uprising of 1979 between the security forces and thousands of frustrated Shi'ites rocked the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia. The implications of the uprising, which coincided, with the occupation of the Grand Mosque in Mecca resonated widely, both inside the kingdom and out at it stood poised to topple the al-Saud and the protests and violence of 1979-1980 forced the regime to reflect on its domestic policies and toward the minority.

A study of four tribes is made which varied in geographical concentration and hierarchical organization showing that top down and bottom up strategies can be employed together depending on the transformative process of state-social/tribal group interactions. Findings show that geographically bounded and hierarchical tribes are sedentarized by mediating with tribal authorities.

An attempt to analyze the Turkish minority rights regime is made, focusing first on the implications of the Ottoman millet system along with a look at the failure of the Ottomanist policies that sought to accomplish a framework of equality within difference. It would review the modern establishment of the Republican minority rights regime with a special emphasis on the formulation of the scope of minority provisions in the Treaty of Lausanne concluded in the aftermath of the First World War.

Introduction In 1859, Caroline Dunkel married schoolteacher John Martin, whom she had known for two years. John was a black-haired, dark-complexioned man, as revealed in the small leather-framed tintype of […]

In 1976, in a pathbreaking article on divorce in eighteenth-century Massachusetts, Nancy Cott argued that the growing willingness of late eighteenth-century women to seek divorce implied that these wives were […]

The 1880's witnessed the worst of the 19th century waves of anti-chinese violence in the United States. While most of these incidents occurred in the West, there were a few outbreaks east of the Mississippi River. Possibly the largest occurred in the Midwest--in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In March of 1889, that city saw four days of protest and one day of rioting against its Chinese laundry-men. Sparking this city-wide disturbance were allegations of sexual misconduct between two Chinese and a number of underaged white females. Recovering this forgotten episode gives historians an analytic frame by which to trace the intersection of anti-Chinese violence, interracial sexuality, and the formation of urban girl cultures in the late nineteenth century. This essay argues that the scandal and riot exposed new social aspects of two marginal populations: Chinese residents and white females in 1880's Milwaukee. The resulting unease was assuaged by the direct disciplining of the city's Chinese and the indirect disciplining of its school-aged white females., By the evening of Wednesday, March 6, 1889, many residents of the neighborhoods bordering Grand Avenue in Milwaukee, Wisconsin suspected something was afoot. By the next morning, numerous persons were […]

This article examines the wave of Marian apparitions that spread across Italy in the weeks leading up to the national election of April 1948, held to elect the first parliament of Italy's post-Fascist Republic. By widening the conventional notion of what is 'political,' the article weaves together the broad political narrative of 1948 with social and psychological dimensions, in order to understand how such factors as popular piety conditioned the conduct of the campaign, as well as its outcome. The 1948 apparitions reflected an individual and collective search for meaning, order and protection on the part of ordinary Italians who worried about the implications for the faith and for the country of a Communist win at the ballot box. This was evidence of the extent to which the cult of the Virgin Mary had moved from fighting secularization, to fighting the spread of Soviet Communism. That hundreds of people flocked to the sight of an alleged apparition in an age that knew the radio, air travel and the atom bomb suggests that the traditional division between the 'modern' and 'pre-modern' era--the former rational, secular, scientific, the latter irrational, confessional, superstitious--may not hold., I shall come to ask for the consecration of Russia to my Immaculate Heart ... If my requests are heeded, Russia will be converted, and there will be peace; if […]

This article explores the everyday life of Michael Boyle, a social climber who failed to ascend the ladder of American success. Although he rose from day labor to white-collar work, Boyle acquired neither an important managerial position nor a business of his own. He never owned a home, and mobility through marriage eluded him. Regardless, at the end of his life, he did not regard himself a failure, became he had re-imagined himself as a successful bachelor, consumer, and salaried employee. Historians have produced a voluminous literature on economic elites and the working class, and America's 'managerial class' has received considerable attention over the past decade, but fewer scholars have examined the rank-and-file office workers and economic strivers who bolstered capitalist expansion by eschewing working-class politics despite their failure to achieve mobility through entrepreneurship, property ownership, marriage, or the emerging professions associated with the rise of big business. Boyle's surviving diaries (1876-90) thus provide a rare opportunity to glimpse the world of ordinary Americans who adjusted to, rather than challenged, their descent into respectable mediocrity. They also suggest that we need to know much more about the complexities of salaried life, and the spending (rather than investment) mentality that energized expansion and fueled demands for credit and more affordable goods during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries., During March of 1887, as he approached his thirty-first birthday and ten-year anniversary as a salaried employee with St. Paul, Minnesota's most prestigious dry goods firm, an Irish-American named Michael [...]

This article examines an episode of worker flight in colonial Mozambique and urges a rethinking of resistance in African social history. Worker flight has often been cast as a form of resistance to colonial rule and wage labor but the case considered here rests awkwardly within the paradigm. The social history of resistance in Africa has occupied a central place in the historiography since the 1960s. Such work has contributed greatly to the writing of African history, especially of the colonial era. The article suggests that it may be time, historiographically and methodologically, to look beyond resistance. Moving beyond resistance may permit examinations of African politics that do not fit neatly into the category of resistance or the related ones of collaboration and domination. The resistance paradigm often clothes historical actors in the guise of oppressed and oppressor, when they frequently possessed multiple and overlapping identities. The now orthodox use of oral testimony makes it possible to explore these identities, defined as much by societies as by the demands of the state., In late 1926, African workers fled from their positions as field hands on Portuguese-run maize farms in the central Mozambican districts of Manica and Chimoio. The workers, all male, were [...]

Preface In his essay "The Politics of Culture: Ethnicity and Nationalism," Anthony D. Smith makes the following remark: "But, in fact, many ethnie, usually of the demotic ('vertical') variety, have […]

This article established its theoretical framework by criticizing the way in which social historians have practiced their scholarship in the last two decades and how and why they have not respondent to the challenges of "the cultural turn" and postmodernism. The main focus of this essay is on the rise in interest in microhistory across the globe in the last decade and on the topics of recent microhistorical research. The essay pays particular attention to one element common to the theoretical orientations of all microhistorians, viz, the connections between micro and macro. Microhistorians of all persuasions emphasize the importance of placing small units of research within larger contexts. In this article, the author seeks to refute this principle and show its inherent contradictoriness. The article explores the implications of this move for the epistemological grounding of microhistory. The author encourages historians to cut the umbilical cord that ties them to grand historical narratives, but he is aware that this is not an easy task, as the grand narratives inform the conventional codes of scientific research. As an alternative to accepting the guidance of grand narratives, the author advances an approach that he proposes to call the "singularization of history". Taking this approach involves scrutinizing the details and nuances of the events and objects of research and looking for meaning within them, rather than in larger contexts. The article severely critiques the conventional theoretical framework of microhistorical research and attempts to redefine the aims and parameters of microhistory in order for it to achieve its full potential. The "singularizarion of history" shows the way.

The problem of the character and function of a "peasant" newspaper bedeviled the Bolsheviks. The party determined to create local journalistic/political agents to establish contact with the villages and set the boundaries of discourse, thereby insinuating itself into peasant society by forming the poorest peasants into a force to destroy the remnants of the old order, in effect Russian peasant society. The sel 'kory were to be crusaders, indoctrinated in most cases through their experience in the Red Army, crusading in the name of socialism to bring alien western values to the countryside, values that the Communist party believed would no longer be alien to these particular peasants. In April 1926, however, the question of the boundaries of discourse exploded in a series of angry exchanges between a sel 'kor, "Vladimir Ia.", and Mikhail Kalinin, nominal head of state. The party had desired that the peasants organize around concepts and ideas, but those of the party. Such ideas failed when they hit the traditi onal Russian peasant social structure. The attempt to break the traditional society through mobilizing the sel'kory, the "out," to destroy the "ins" of kulaks and kulak-influenced local party and government agents appeared to Kalinin as instead threatening to strengthen the traditional society. Vladimir Ia. had to be unmasked as a counterrevolutionary., "V nachale bylo Slovo" (In the beginning was the word)--few religious expressions would have such an impact on revolutionary movements as this. Russian political culture was wrapped around the ideas […]

The article examines the emergence of women's studies as an academic discipline through the framework of advances in women's education. Discussion chronicles the entrance of women into higher learning, the broadening variety of subjects taught to women, and government's role in educational assistance.

A. L. Kroeber invented frequency seriation in 1916 to measure the passage of time. This chronometer measured the flight of time's arrow with artifact types that changed their relative frequencies in a uniform fashion over what seemed, on the basis of other evidence, to be the linear passage of time. In 1919 and again in 1940, Kroeber sought to measure cycles of cultural phenomena over time and chose a different method for doing so. This method, now termed time-series analysis, was implemented by plotting the averages of several metric dimensions of a kind of artifact against their known age. Kroeber observed recurring averages and concluded that cultural phenomena cycled through time. Frequency seriation and time-series analysis as implemented by Kroeber comprise significant differences in the units they use, their protocols, and their analytical goals.

In 1831, in the space of a few months, notices appeared in several Nova Scotia newspapers announcing proposals for the publication of two new collections of church music. One called [...]