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Contents

:

THE LETTER OF THE LAW:

THE INSTITUTIONALIZATION OF BELONGING TO POLITY

2006 annual theme:

ANTHROPOLOGICAL REFLECTIONSON LANGUAGES

OF SELF DESCRIPTIONOF EMPIREAND NATION

11

:

From the Editors Subjected to Citizenship: The Problem of Belonging

to the State in Empire and Nation

Myron J. AronoffForty Years as a Political Ethnographer : -

Interview with Peter Sahlins Subjecthood That Happens to Be Called

Citizenship, Or Trying to Make Sense of The Old Regime on Its

Own Terms

, , -

23

I. METHODOLOGYAND THEORY 10

17

39

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/Contents

versus XVII . ( / )Natalia YakovenkoLife Space vs. Identity of the Rus Gentleman (the Case of Jan/

Joachim Erlich)

Ltat cest nous? , -

- (1819-1820 .)Alsu BiktashevaLtat cest nous? Local Citizenship, Imperial Subjecthood, and

the Revision of Government Institutions in Kazan Province, 1819-1820

Olga MaiorovaSearching for a New Language of Collective Self: The

Symbolism of Russian National Belonging During and After the

Crimean War :

: - - (1860- .)Mikhail Dolbilov The Tsars Faith: Mass Conversions of Catholics to Ortho-

doxy in the North-Western Region of the Russian Empire (ca. 1860s)

James Kennedy, Liliana RigaMitteleuropa as Middle America? The

Inquiry and the Mapping of East Central Europe in 1919 , Mitteleuropa ? The In-quiry 1919 .

, :

XIX XX Benno GammerlNation, State or Empire: Subjecthood and Citizenship in British

and Habsburg Empires at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

271

137

225

101

HISTORYII. 100

187

59

, , XVIII .: Alexander Kamenskii Subjecthood, Loyalty, and Patriotism in Imperial Discourses

in Eighteenth Century Russia: Outlining the Problem

301

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329

371

401

ARCHIVEIII. 328

, Ernest Gyidel On Ukrainofilia of George V. Vernadsky, Or Miscellaneous Notes

on the Topic of National and State Loyalties

: -George V. Vernadsky: I Think of Myself Both as a Ukrainian and a Russian

Rebecca Chamberlain-Creang The Transnistrian people? Citizen-

ship and Imaginings of the State in an Unrecognized Country - ?

, ,

SOCIOLOGY, ANTHROPOLOGY,

POLITICAL SCIENCE

IV. 370

347

410

R-FORUM

IMPERIAL CITIES

Felix Driver and David Gilbert (Eds.), Imperial Cities: Landscape,

Display and Identity (Manchester and New York: Manchester Uni-

versity Press, 2003). 272 pp. (=Studies in Imperialism). Index. ISBN:

0-719-0 6497-X (paperback edition);

Julie A. Buckler,Mapping St. Petersburg: Imperial Text and Cityshape

(Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005). 320 pp.

Bibliography, Index. ISBN: 0-691-11349-1.

Elena Hellberg-Hirn, Imperial Imprints: Post-Soviet St.-Petersburg

(Helsinki: SKS / Finnish Literature Society, 2003). 446 pp. Bibliogra-

phy, Index. ISBN: 951-746-491-6 (hardback edition).

d

BOOKREVIEWSVII.

Reviews 400

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419

437

415

432

428

Richard Stites, Serfdom, Society, and the Arts in Imperial Russia: The

Pleasure and the Power(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005).

xii+586 pp. ISBN: 0-300-10889-3 (hardback edition).

Louise McReynoldsLutz Hfner, Gesellschaft als lokale Veranstaltung. Die Wolgastdte

Kazan und Saratov (18701914) (Kln: Bhlau Verlag, 2004). 594 S.

(=Beitrge zur Geschichte Osteuropas; Bd. 35). ISBN: 3-412-11403-0;

Guido Hausmann (Hg.), Gesellschaft als lokale Veranstaltung. Selb-

stverwaltung, Assoziierung und Geselligkeit in den Stdten des ausge-

henden Zarenreiches (Gttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002).

485 S. (=Brgertum. Beitrge zur europischen Gesellschaftsgeschich-

te; Bd. 22). ISBN: 3-525-35687-0.

. . . (-

XIV XV .). : -

, 2006. 160 . , -

, , , ,

. ISBN: 5-9273-1017-6.

Charles Halperin

Frithjof Benjamin Schenk,Aleksandr Nevskij: Heiliger, Frst, Nation-

alheld; eine Erinnerungsfigur im russischen kulturellen Gedchtnis

(12632000) (Kln: Bhlau Verlag, 2004). 548, [32] S. Ill. (=Beitraege

zur Geschichte Osteuropas; Bd. 36) Quellen- und Literaturverz. ISBN:

3-412-06904-3.

Timothy Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine,Lithuania, Belarus, 15691999 (New Haven and London: Yale Uni-

versity Press, 2003). xv+367 pp. ISBN: 0-300-08480-3.

Nicholas V. Riasanovsky,Russian Identities: A Historical Survey (Ox-

ford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). 278 pp. Index.

ISBN: 0-19-516550-1.

453

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464

476

481

509

469

Susan P. McCaffray, Michael Melancon (Eds.),Russia in The Europe-

an Context, 17891914: A Member of the Family (New York and

Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). 256 pp. Index. ISBN: 1-4039-

6855-1.Natalie Bayer

. . 19972002 .

: , 2004 (=: -

). 816 c. .

ISBN: 5-86793-300-8.

Marina Peunova

/ ., ., , . .. . . -:

-, 2003. 396 . ISBN: 5-94380-

024-7.

Alexander Ogden

Richard Kieckhefer, Theology in Stone: Church Architecture From

Byzantium to Berkeley (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press,

2004). 372 pp., ill. Index. ISBN: 0-19-515466-5.

ii. i i. -:

, 2003. 243 . ISBN: 5-94716-032-3.

Caroline Milow, Die Ukrainische Frage 19171923 im Spannungs-

feld der europischen Diplomatie (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag,

2002) (=Veroffentlichungen des Osteuropa-Instituts Mnchen. Reihe:

Geschichte; Bd. 68). 572 S. ISBN: 3-447-04482-9.

. . . . - /

1968 . -: -

- , --

, 2004. 252 c., . , ,

. ISBN: 5-98187-042-7.

490

503

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/Contents

List of Contributors

Ab Imperio 2007 /Books for Review

535

538

547

541

516

524

Rebecca Kay, Men in Contemporary Russia: The Fallen Heroes of

Post-Soviet Change? (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006). 246 pp. Bibli-

ography, Index. ISBN: 0-7546-4485-5.

Richard Sakwa (Ed.), Chechnya: From Past to Future (London: An-

them Press, 2005). 300 pp. ISBN: 1-84331-165-8.

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Myron J. ARONOFF

FORTY YEARS

AS A POLITICAL ETHNOGRAPHER*

I, on my side, require of every writer, first or

last, a simple and sincere account of his own life,

and not merely what he has heard of other menslives; some such account as he would send to his

kindred from a distant land; for if he has lived sin-

cerely, it must have been in a distant land to me.

(Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 1854)1

I choose the autobiographical approach in this discussion of political

ethnography for several reasons. First, I know my own work best and donot presume others familiarity with my publications beyond specialists in

* An earlier draft was presented as the keynote address on October 26, 2006 at a workshop

on Political Ethnography: What Insider Perspectives Contribute to the Study of Powerheld at the University of Toronto. All further references will be cited as op. cit., workshopon Political Ethnography. I thank Edward Schatz for inviting me to give the address and

for his helpful comments on it. I am grateful to my fellow participants for a moststimulating exchange of experiences and ideas. I am indebted to Marina Mogilner andAlexander Semyonov for soliciting this essay for publication and for their probing

comments and questions.1 Cited by Dvora Yanow. Reading as Method: Interpreting Interpretations // Op. cit.

Workshop on Political Ethnography.

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Myron J. Aronoff, Forty Years as a Political Ethnographer

my fields.2 This approach, therefore, affords an opportunity to broaden

awareness of the fruits of four decades of my own ethnographic research

while discussing a number of important general problems and issues. Sec-

ond, I hope that young scholars at the outset of their careers may benefitfrom my experiences so they do not constantly attempt to reinvent the same

wheel. Finally, my self-referential approach introduces the self-reflexivity

that presently dominates in anthropology to scholars in other disciplines. I

shall illustrate, for example, how the unintended consequences of choices I

made influenced my career, my work, and my life.

I have been fascinated by politics for as long as I can remember. I was

the only kid in Middletown, Ohio in 1952 proudly sporting an Adlai Steven-

son campaign button. My liberal Democratic family was likely considered

by most of our neighbors in the bible belt of southwestern Ohio to be com-

munist. My fascination with other cultures began while working a summer

in Israel and traveling through Europe during the Fall of 1960. I discovered

ethnography in graduate school at UCLA (1962-1965). As a political sci-

ence major with an area concentration in African studies, I was obliged to

choose an additional major outside of political science. Anthropology

was a natural choice for understanding the postcolonial politics of nation

building and identity formation in Africa. These developments were part of

a general redefinition of the field of political science that began after WWIIand received greater impetus in the 1960s with the independence of the

new African states.

Among the outstanding scholars with whom I studied the political theo-

rist (philosopher) David C. Rapaport and the anthropologist Michael G.

Smith had the greatest intellectual influences on me. By studying classical

and more contemporary political theory with Rapoport I learned to ask

important questions particularly about the nature of political legitimacy,

which has remained the central conceptual focus throughout my academiccareer. Smith introduced me to ethnography in his course on traditional

political systems. I delved more deeply into the nature of legitimacy in his

seminar on Max Weber. I decided that I must do ethnographic field work

for my doctoral dissertation because I felt that the only way I could under-

stand the meaning of politics was to observe the people involved in the

2 I earned Ph.D.s in both political science (UCLA) and social anthropology (ManchesterUniversity) and have spent my career attempting to build conceptual and methodological

bridges between the two. My forthcoming volumeAnthropology and Political Science:Politics, Culture, and Identity (co-authored with Jan Kubik) (New York: Berghan)

represents the culmination of this career-long project.

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processes I wanted to study and learn how they understood what was going

on.3 Nation building was the hot topic at the time for Africa. However, for

reasons beyond my control I was unable to do the fieldwork I had planned

in Africa. As an ABD (all but dissertation) I turned down an attractive, wellpaid tenure-track job offer at a respected university in the United States in

order to accept a very poorly paid position on a research team from Manches-

ter University (UK) directed by Professor Max Gluckman to conduct field-

work in Israel. In other words, I chose the opportunity to conduct ethno-

graphic fieldwork over my fascination with Africa and over a decent salary

and the promise of potential job security. I was bitten by the ethnographic

bug and have remained infected ever since. As I shall elaborate below, once

you have the opportunity to observe and interact with people who are en-

gaged in the activities that fascinate you and that you are attempting to

understand, you realize that there is simply no better way to understand

what is going on, and no other way to understand what these events mean

to the participants themselves, than through participant observation.

Strangely enough there were no courses offered, nor was there any for-

mal training in ethnographic methods in the department of social anthro-

pology at Manchester University in 1965.4 We picked up informal tips from

gossip about famous anthropologists in the field and personal anecdotes in

the common room and in the pubs to which we retired after our seminars.We learned by an almost Talmudic reading of classical ethnographic texts.

For example, we learned about extended-case analysis by reading the clas-

sic formulations by Max Gluckman and by J. Clyde Mitchell.5 The

(in)famous Manchester seminars when classes were called off for intensive

critiques by professors and graduate students of the work of those just re-

turning from the field was a baptism under fire through which we became

initiated in the Manchester school approach. Maxs only direct method-

ological advice to me as I set out for Israel was to keep your eyes and ears

3 I was asked on my oral comprehensive Ph.D. exam at UCLA: Is political science ascience or an art to which I immediately replied, If we are to succeed in understanding

people and politics, it must combine both.4 One of my professors, A. L. Epstein edited: The Craft of Social Anthropology.London,1967, when I was in the field in Israel.5 Max Gluckman. Analysis of a Social Situation in Modern Zululand (Rhodes Living-stone Papers # 28). Manchester, 1958 (republished by Manchester University Press, 1968);J. Clyde Mitchell. The Kalela Dance (Rhodes-Livingstone Papers # 27). Manchester, 1956

(republished by Manchester University Press, 1968). See J. Van Velsen. The Extended-case Method and Situational Analysis // A. L. Epstein. The Craft of Social Anthropology.

Pp. 129-149, for one of the earliest descriptive formulations of the approach.

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open and your mouth shut tight. The former was easier than the latter for

me. The only stricture he placed on us was that we were required to study a

community small enough to employ participant observation as our primary

research method.Although I received an excellent education at Manchester, training in

ethnographic methodology was not the only gap. Most of my professors

had worked with Gluckman at the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute of Social

Studies in central Africa and were African specialists.6 Emrys Peters taught

the only seminar dealing with Middle Eastern cultures. (Peter Worsely taught

a more general third world seminar.) I have never taken a course at the

undergraduate or graduate level that dealt with Israel even in passing. Also,

like my British trained professors of anthropology at UCLA, M. G. Smith

and Hilda Kuper, my professors at Manchester were all British social an-

thropologists. We studied social structure and networks, not culture. In some

ways this was closer to the political science I studied than is the work of

Clifford Geertz and other American cultural anthropologists who I read

outside my formal education. Whereas the methodological innovations of

extended case analysis, particularly of protracted political strife, developed

by the Manchester school are highly relevant for political scientists, I shall

suggest below the cultural focus on the semiotic and hermeneutic analysis

of the interpretation of meaning is the most important contribution ofAmerican cultural anthropology to understanding politics.

I chose to study one of the two newest of Israels thirty development

towns that had been recently established in the Negev desert. Two sociolo-

gy students had conducted surveys for their masters theses in town so the

residents were familiar with what sociologists do. I explained that I was a

political anthropologist doing an ethnographic study. It later became ap-

parent that not everyone understood what ethnography involved. Many

thought I was just a lazy sociologist and asked when I was going to conductmy interviews. Others bluntly suggested I get a job. One local recent immi-

grant who was serving in the border police manned a check point on the

border between the West Bank and the pre-1967 war border. When I ar-

rived at his check point he excitedly called his colleagues over to introduce

me as an American astronaut living in town.

The leader of the opposition who was elected mayor during my study

was shocked when he read a copy of my dissertation saying he had no idea

6 Gluckman attempted to replicate the spirit of the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute in theteam he assembled to study Israel that was funded by the Bernstein family (owners of

Granada television in the United Kingdom).

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it would be so personal. He pointed out a dissertation on local government

in Israel on his desk written by a political scientist which he thought was

the kind of work I was writing. He objected that my study was so personal

that publishing it would be like publishing an x-ray of his ample stomach.

7

He was the son-in-law of the prime minister at the time and had higher

political ambitions. In fact, he eventually became finance minister.

I lived with my wife and infant daughter in town, participating in the

life of the community from October 1966 through the summer of 1968

(including the war of June 1967). Toward the end of my stay I conducted a

survey to test a hypothesis developed from my observations and to prove

not only that I was not a lazy sociologist, but that I was a competent political

scientist. After months of getting data that made no sense based on my

intimate knowledge of the population, I discovered that the magnetic tape

had broken and a piece of someone elses data had been accidentally spliced

into mine. Had I not known the population as well as I did, under the pres-

sure to complete my dissertation, I might have been forced to attempt to

make an interpretation of spurious data. On the other hand, the multivariate

regressions I ran once the problem had been corrected corroborated the

central hypothesis of my analysis derived from the ethnography: the con-

struction of a strong collective identity and sense of communal pride within

a remarkably short time was due primarily to the mobilization of the resi-dents through competing local socio-political factions. Whereas I certainly

agree with Ed Schatz that one need not utilize multiple-methods in all re-

search, there are definitely contexts when they are not only useful, but per-

haps even essential.8

My analysis ofFrontiertown was framed in the context of Victor Turn-

ers political phase development in which social situations were presented

as phases in an ongoing process of political strife over an extended period

of time.9

Each phase was analyzed using the method developed by the

7 I negotiated with him and agreed to delete a few of the most personal matters which

did not detract from my analysis. He finally consented to the publication of my disserta-

tion. The town and its inhabitants were all given pseudonyms in the tradition of anthro-

pology.8 Edward Schatz. The Problem with the Toolbox Metaphor: Ethnography and the Limits

to Multiple-Methods Research. A paper presented at the annual meeting of the Ameri-

can Political Science Association, August 31-September 3, 2006. A similar argument is

made by: Sanford F. Schram. Why I am not an Interpretivist // Op. cit. Workshop on

Political Ethnography.9 Myron J. Aronoff. Frontiertown: the Politics of Community Building in Israel.

Manchester & Jerusalem, 1974; Victor Turner. Social Dramas and Ritual Metaphors //

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Manchester school known as the extended case method and situational

analysis. One case constituted what Turner termed the deployment of ad-

justive or redressive mechanisms. I analyzed the ritual interaction be-

tween representatives of local merchants and housewives employing ErvingGoffmansEncounters,which analyzed the ritual nature of face-to-face in-

teractions.10 A confrontation over economic issues on the eve of a hotly

contested local election in which violence had been threatened was defused

by the skillful employment of framing through what Goffman metaphori-

cally termed an interaction membrane that excluded direct reference to

politics and disguised references to ethnicity.

The encounter, which began with considerable tension, ended in good

humored laughter prompted by a joking exchange between the unofficial

leader of the housewives and the head of the merchants association. Coin-

cidentally, they were the only two people present who were of Middle East-

ern background. The housewife, who was from Yemen, joked about the

incongruity between her dark complexion and her European (married) name.

She also called the leader of the merchants, who was from Morocco origi-

nally, habibi using the Arabic pronunciation rather than the common pro-

nunciation used by Israelis of European background. I suggested that the

use of the Arabic term, rather than the Hebrew equivalent, in this context

was a subtle reference to their common ethnicity after the two had con-fronted each other over economic issues. It successfully brought the en-

counter to a conclusion because of the relative absence of ethnic prejudice

and tensions among the participants.

When I gave my presentation back at Manchester, Professor Emrys Pe-

ters, who had worked among the Bedouin in Libya and in a Lebanese vil-

lage, insisted that there was a sexual innuendo in the exchange and that she

was actually coming on to him. As we sat in the pub after the seminar

continuing the discussion I asked my professor to listen to the conversationtaking place next to us. One of my fellow graduate students was engaged in

a conversation with a stranger in the booth next to ours. The stranger asked

Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors. Ithaca, NY, 1974. Pp. 23-59. The model was formulated

earlier in the introduction to: Marc J. Swartz, Victor W. Turner, and Arthur Tuden (Eds.).

Political Anthropology. Chicago, 1966. His co-editors credit Turner for the major

contribution in formulating the approach. Turner was one of Gluckmans most prominent

students. He moved to the United States where he had a significant impact on American

anthropology as well as British anthropology.10 Erving Goffman. Encounters: Two Studies in the Sociology of Interaction. Indianapolis,

1961.

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my friend his name. He replied, Len Mars. The man asked if that was his

original name. Len replied that the family name was originally Margolis.

When I asked what had transpired, my professor gave a very literal inter-

pretation. I then explained that the two strangers were simply establishingtheir mutual Jewish identity which is exactly the point I had made about the

two in the encounter I had analyzed.

When I gave the same analysis at Tel Aviv University there were also

differing interpretations of my data. My Israeli Palestinian graduate research

assistant supported my interpretation. He stated that the meaning ofhabibi

varies contextually. He explained that when his fianc called him habibi it

meant exactly what Professor Peters suggested. When his buddy called him

habibi, it meant my friend. When his Jewish boss in the Histadrut labor

federation used the term my student considered it condescending and pa-

tronizing. He confirmed that in the context I described the term was clearly

as I had interpreted it. One essential contribution of ethnography is the

understanding of the meaning of words and actions in specific contexts

through deep immersion in the culture and mastery of the language. Even

verbatim stenographic minutes of the meeting (had they existed, which they

did not) would not have enabled the nuanced analysis of such an exchange

because the nonverbal communication and good-natured laughter of the

participants was essential for an accurate explanation of the significance ofthe exchange.

My second major research project involved eight years of participant

observation of the national institutions and local branches of the Israel La-

bor party which dominated Israeli politics for nearly fifty years. This re-

search was conducted during the period I taught at Tel Aviv University.

The book that resulted from this research, Power and Ritual in the Israel

Labor Party was first published in 1977.11 The book essentially anticipated

and explained the defeat of the party that year that was so shocking that itwas popularly known in Hebrew as the earthquake.

I utilized the conceptual repertoire of political science to explain the

politics of factionalism, the nomination of leaders, the analysis of represen-

tation on national party institutions, and the relationship between the party

center and the local branches. At the time there was much debate in politi-

cal sociology and political science about non-decision making and non-

11 Myron J. Aronoff. Power and Ritual in the Israel Labor Party: A Study in PoliticalAnthropology. Assen, the Netherlands, 1977; revised and expanded edition published

by M. E. Sharpe (Armonk, NY, 1993).

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issues. I was able to add conceptual clarity to this discussion and empirical

evidence through my analysis of the suppression of extremely important

and controversial issues from the national convention of the party. Scholars

dependent upon archival evidence and interviews were completely unawareof this phenomenon which never appeared in previous studies of this party

or any other. However, I feel that my greatest theoretical contribution in

this study is to the analysis of ritual, the refinement of Gluckmans notion

of rituals of rebellion, and the conceptual challenge to the predominant

reified, mutually exclusive, dichotomous distinction between traditional and

modern societies.

I had not planned to study ritual in my research design. But after ex-

hausting the explanations for much of my data there remained a significant

range of activity, particularly in one closed top party forum, which defied

explanation by the aforementioned concepts. The more I examined the sym-

bolic dimension of behavior in this assemblage of the secondary echelon of

national party leaders, the more I was reminded of Gluckmans classic es-

say Rituals of Rebellion in South-East Africa (1952).12 It met Gluck-

mans key criteria that the outcome was known in advance and that the

social unit must end united as a consequence of the ritual. The rebellious

criticism by the secondary leaders of their patrons in the top party elite was

strikingly similar to that of the Lozi priests of Barotseland analyzed byGluckman and to the chiefs designated by the king of Baganda reported by

Lucy Mair.13 Yet, Gluckman argued quite explicitly that with the develop-

ment of proto-classes you cannothave rituals of rebellion because when

actors can opt for alternative social roles you get genuine revolts rather the

ritualized rebellions. By explicitly delineating the conditions that prevented

the actors in my study from opting for alternative roles (e.g. overthrowing

the top leaders or switching parties), I eventually convinced Gluckman that

what I observed was, indeed, a ritual of rebellion. By showing the limitedscope and efficacy of such ritualized solutions and the suppression of

issues that were highly salient to the public I was able to document Labors

loss of ideological dominance and legitimacy and to anticipate its loss of

political dominance in the forthcoming election. I note that no other politi-

cal scientist and only one (little known at the time) pollster predicted the

defeat of Labor in 1977. If I had not managed to observe the events ana-

12 The most accessible version of this classic essay was republished in Gluckmans

collected essays: Order and Rebellion in Tribal Africa. London, 1963. Pp. 110-136.13 Max Gluckman. Rituals of Rebellion in South-East Africa; Lucy P. Mair. An African

People in the Twentieth Century (Baganda). New York, 1934.

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lyzed I would not have been able to make either this theoretical contribu-

tion or the successful prognosis. In 1993 I published a substantially ex-

panded and updated edition of this book dealing with Labors years in op-

position and eventual return to power.My third major research project (which resulted inIsraeli Visions and

Divisions)was even more unconventional since it was an ethnography of

Israeli society, culture, and politics in the period from 1977 to 1990, which

was a period of major cultural and political transformation and polariza-

tion.14 Based largely on fieldwork in Israel during 1982-1983 and 1987-

1988, I utilized a wide range of methods. I engaged in participant observa-

tion of selected meetings of the Ministerial Committee on Symbols and

Ceremonies, the Knesset plenary, parliamentary committees, and the dele-

gates dining room, the activities of several peace movements (particularly

Peace Now), the major settlers movement (Gush Emunim or Bloc of the

Faithful), academic conferences, theater performances, movies, television

programs, e.g., a documentary series on the 1981 election campaign, and

the first Palestinian uprising (intifada). I interviewed more than a hundred

political, religious, cultural, and educational leaders. I also examined an

archive of more than twenty years of meetings of the Ministerial Commit-

tee on Symbols and Ceremonies (housed in the Prime Ministers office),

from which I selected for analysis two major decisions that focused on themanipulation of political culture.

The leader of the nationalist Likud party, Menachem Begin, became

prime minister in 1977 and set out to overcome the pariah image with which

Labor had stigmatized him and his movement. He attempted to eradicate

the last vestiges of Labors ideological legitimacy and to establish the Likuds

political dominance and ideological hegemony. Begin utilized state agen-

cies to reinterpret Israeli history; to elevate his movements ideological

leader, Vladimir Jabotinsky, to the national political pantheon; to enshrineas heroes the martyrs of the dissident underground movements particular-

ly the one he commanded; and to establish the authority of their myths. The

Begin government made extensive use of ceremonies commemorating his-

torical figures whose actions were used to attempt to lend legitimacy to

Begin, his movement, and his governments policies. The most elaborate of

these ceremonies was an official state funeral held on May 11, 1982, in the

Judean desert for the purported remains of the fighters and followers of

14 Myron J. Aronoff. Israeli Visions and Divisions: Cultural Change and Political Conflict.

New Brunswick, NJ, 1989; 1991 (paperback edition).

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Shimon Bar Koziba, popularly known as Bar Kochba, who led the second

Jewish revolt against Rome in 132-135 CE.

I contrast the elaborate official state ceremony attended by state offi-

cials and representatives of foreign countries who were brought by heli-copter to the remote dessert site with an unofficial parody of the event. The

central event of the official ritual was the prime ministers eulogy. Premier

Begin, frequently referring to the liberation and unification of Jerusalem,

emphasized the historic link between the Bar Kochba revolt and the rise

and expansion of the new Third Jewish Commonwealth. He reminded

the audience that it had been the Roman emperor Publius Aelius Hadrianus

who had given Judea the name Palestine, a name that still haunts us. He

declared, Our glorious fathers, we have a message for you: We have re-

turned to the place from whence we came. The people of Israel lives, and

will live in its homeland of Eretz Israel for generations upon generations.

Glorious fathers, we are back and we will not budge from here. 15 The full

ceremonies were covered by Israels only television channel (at the time)

as well as by radio broadcasts, thereby reaching a wide section of the deep-

ly divided population.

A group of twenty-four young protestors wearing Roman-style togas

and carrying spears parodied the official ceremony chanting You are mak-

ing a laughing stock out of history. When Chief Ashkenazi Rabbi ShlomoGoren emerged from his helicopter they broke out in a song about chasing

darkness from the land which is traditionally sung on Hanukkah. Although

the police and soldiers eventually succeeded in destroying their signs and

forcibly removing them from the ceremonies, their protest dramatized the

opposition of approximately half of their fellow countrymen including

the majority of the educational and cultural elite, many of whom boycotted

the ceremonies. A respected rabbi and Labor member of the Knesset claimed

the ceremony perverted Jewish tradition. Opponents of the governmentsexpansive settlement policy in the territories Israel occupied during the war

of June 1967 were particularly critical of the obvious political implications

of the ceremony. Even a very senior member of the government avoided

the ceremony which he told me he considered to be a farce.

Israel became embroiled in a polarized national debate over the mean-

ing of Bar Kochbas revolt and its implications for the contemporary quan-

dary caused by Israels occupation of land on which two million Palestin-

ians reside. The national debate arguing contradictory implications of the

15 Aronoff. Israeli Visions and Divisions. P. 59.

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Bar Kochba revolt for contemporary political dilemmas facing Israel re-

flected deeply polarized ideological interpretations of the Zionist vision.

Yet, the fact that secular scholars and leading rabbinic figures engaged in

public debate with one another and with the prime minister and other leadingpoliticians over the implications of two thousand year-old events for con-

temporary problems implies the sharing of an underlying Zionist/Israeli

world view that made the debate over interpretations of this root cultural

paradigm both possible and significant. In the past two decades since then

Zionism has been seriously challenged from various internal and external

groups, which has loosened its hegemonic hold on the public, although it

still retains considerable salience for the majority of Israeli Jews. I have

analyzed the contested nature of Israeli identity in other publications since

the publication of this book most recently at a workshop in Antwerp in

October 2006.16

My most recent book, The Spy Novels of John le Carre: Balancing Ethics

and Politics, employs an ethnographic approach to the analysis of works of

fiction.17 Although not based on participant observation as were my previous

studies, it is based on what Jan Kubik calls ethnographic problematization

and framing.18 I reverse the trend of many post-modernist scholars who

interpret the words and actions of real people as literary texts. By contrast,

I interpret the plight of fictional characters in literary texts as representativeof real life situations and moral dilemmas. This approach is consistent with

the authors intent. As he told Melvyn Bragg, at the moment, when we

have no ideology, and our politics are in a complete shambles, I find it [the

espionage novel] a convenient microcosm to shuffle around in a secret world

and make that expressive of the overt world.19 I suggest that le Carre is the

ethnographer, having experienced the secret world personally and imagi-

natively recreated it in fiction. I then supplied an interpretation of the cen-

16 See, for example, Myron J. Aronoff. Temporal and Spatial Dimensions of Contested

Israeli Nationhood // Brigitta Benzing and Bernd Herrmann (Eds.). Exploitation and

Overexploitation in Societies Past and Present. Berlin and New Brunswick, 2003. Pp.

269-272.17 Myron J. Aronoff. The Spy Novels of John le Carre: Balancing Ethics and Politics.

New York, 1999; 2001 (Palgrave paperback edition).18 Jan Kubik. Ethnography after Post-Modern (De)construction: Is It Still Useful for

Political Science? // Op. cit. Workshop on Political Ethnography. Italics are in the original.

Kubik refers to: Roger Peterson. Resistance and Rebellion, Lessons from Eastern Europe.

Cambridge, UK, 2001, which uses an ethno-historical approach.19 Melvyn Bragg. The Things a Spy Can Do John le Carre Talking // The Listener.

1976. 27 January. P. 90.

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tral tension in his work between ethics and politics. I treat the novels as

extended cases which I interpret very much as I did the data I gathered in

my previously discussed political ethnographies.

Using the notion of ideological temperament, which Wilson CareyMcWilliams defined as dispositions of the soul as distinct from more

codified ideological doctrines, I suggest that high tolerance of ambiguity is

one of the key defining features of the liberal temperament.20 George Smi-

ley best represents the liberal temperament and skeptical balance that I ar-

gue are the core concepts in Le Carres political ethics. Smiley, who ap-

pears in eight novels, is le Carres most fascinating, enduring, and endear-

ing character. I devote an entire chapter to him as the center of an extended

case-analysis of skepticism. Le Carre writes of Smiley in his second novel,

A Murder of Quality (1962), It was a peculiarity of Smileys character that

throughout the whole of his clandestine work he never managed to recon-

cile the means to the end. Smiley constitutes the moral center in those

novels in which he appears, as do other Smiley-like characters in those

novels in which he does not appear.

The chapter in which I most fully explore the concept of skepticism is

titled Learning to Live with Ambiguity: Balancing Dreams and Realities.

My analysis ofThe Little Drummer Girl constitutes the central case for the

elucidation of this theme. It is the story of the recruitment of an Englishactress to infiltrate a Palestinian terrorist ring operating in Europe against

Jewish and Israeli targets. She is recruited by an agent of the Israeli Mossad

as bait to track down the leader of the Palestinian cell in order to assassinate

him. The agent, Gadi Becker, a younger and more physically attractive

version of George Smiley, is the moral center of the novel. The novel forces

the reader to consider the psychological and ethical price paid by the agent

and her handler (and by inference by Israel as well) for the successful ac-

complishment of this goal. It also symbolically addresses the future ofIsrael/Palestinian relations in the twice promised land.

With reference to my analysis, former Senator Bill Bradley (who served

on the Senate intelligence committee) wrote: Aronoff poses challenges,

20 Wilson Carey McWilliams. Ambiguities and Ironies: Conservatism and Liberalism in

American Political Tradition // W. Lawson Taitte (Ed.). Moral Values in Liberalism and

Conservatism. Austin, TX, 1995. Pp.175-212; Michael Schatzberg (Evacuating the

Emic // Op. cit. Workshop on Political Ethnography) urges us to seek ambiguity and

embrace it. I suggest that his advice to the ethnographer is reflective of a liberal tem-perament and of what Eviatar Zerubavel (The Fine Line. New York, 1991) defines as a

flexible mind.

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such as the limits to which democracies can go in using nondemocratic

means to protect democratic freedoms for example, in the war against

terrorism without undermining those very freedoms.21 Democracies,

unfortunately, sometimes violate the spirit of liberty and freedom in thename of their defense especially under perceived threats to national secu-

rity. The discussion of the implications of this has never been more salient

than it is today amidst the current war on terror. I suggest that the ethno-

graphic reading of novels helps elucidate this by allowing the reader to

enter into the hearts, minds, and souls of individuals engaged in this activity

and exploring the personal, institutional, and national costs and implica-

tions of these ethical compromises. It thereby makes abstract Jeffersonian

principles concrete and more understandable in the present world context.

My approach weds an ethnographic spirit of inquiry with what political

scientists call a political theoretical (philosophical) analysis of ethical is-

sues.22 The combination of ethnography with political philosophy explores

the broader moral public implications of private actions. This is done im-

plicitly without invoking a broader academic discussion of the relevant

philosophical literature. I deliberately avoided such an academic discus-

sion precisely because I wanted to address a broader audience than my

colleagues in academe who specialize in these issues. Moral dilemmas are

discussed without invoking contractual theory, natural rights, and notionsof sovereignty. The problems facing us are too important to be limited by

obfuscation by self-segregating academic jargon. Although this work may

not constitute a conventional ethnography, to me it is ethnographic in spirit

and it helps clarify dilemmas which date back to the Hebrew bible and

classical Greek philosophers, not to mention other cultural traditions.

My most recent major project in collaboration with my colleague Jan

Kubik,Anthropology and Political Science: Culture, Politics, Identity, and

Democratization,23

is near completion. In it we explore the ontological,epistemological, methodological, and conceptual similarities and differences

between the two disciplines. A key observation is the paradox that as polit-

ical scientists have become more interested in ethnography and the concept

21 Back book jacket of the hardbound edition of M. Aronoff. The Spy Novels of John Le

Carr. (1999).22 My late colleague Carey McWilliams used to tease me about being a closet political

theorist. After reading the manuscript of this book he said: Mike, you have finally

come out of the closet as a theorist.23 It is to be published in a series edited by William Beeman and David Kertzer by

Berghan Books.

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of political culture, anthropologists have undergone a soul-searching and

scathing critique of the value of both participant observation and the con-

ceptualization of culture.24

Our main argument is that there is considerable added value whenethnography is incorporated into political sciences repertoire for example

in evaluating the symbolic dimension of politics such as in ritual, the con-

struction of collective memory (and amnesia), and the constant contesta-

tion over collective identity. This is essential in analyzing problems of le-

gitimacy the transformation of power into authority and the challenging

and undermining of legitimate authority.25 Alternatively, anthropology ben-

efits from the experience and conceptual repertoire of political science

for example in taking into consideration the importance of party systems

and the nature of regimes. Too frequently anthropologists jump from the

local to the global. No one would argue against the importance of under-

standing the trans-national nature of our contemporary world, but we ig-

nore the continuing importance of the state and its institutions at our peril.

Most scholars tend not to read across their disciplinary (or even sub-

field) boundaries. In fact, being interdisciplinary, or bi-disciplinary, can be

professionally marginalizing. For example, I have been introduced both as

half a political scientist and as half an anthropologist by very promi-

nent scholars in both disciplines. For some it is apparently difficult to con-ceptualize a person who earned a Ph.D. in two disciplines as being an equal

member of each field. With noteworthy exceptions, like James C. Scott,

David Laitin, Susanne Rudolph, and Lloyd Rudolph, few political ethnog-

raphers have gained high visibility in political science. James Scott, who

was honored with a plenary panel discussion of his contributions at an an-

nual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, may be more

widely read and cited by anthropologists than by his fellow political scien-

tists. In this, he is clearly a dramatic exception to the rule. Perhaps notcoincidentally, all of the aforementioned scholars with the exception of David

Laitin have played leading roles in the perestroika movement in political

science.

Theperestroika movement is a reflection of, and a catalyst contributing

to, the opening up of the discipline of political science to a wider range of

24 Myron J. Aronoff. Political Culture // Neil J. Smelser and Paul B. Baites (Eds.-in-

chief). International Encyclopedia of Social and Behavioral Sciences. Kidlington, UK,

2002.25 Myron J. Aronoff (Ed.). The Frailty of Authority; Political Anthropology. Vol. V.New

Brunswick, NJ, 1986. I am particularly proud of this edited volume.

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approaches than strictly positivist ones. Kristen Monroe called the move-

ment that has challenged the hegemony of positivism the raucous rebel-

lion in political science in the subtitle of her edited volume.26 Among the

contributors to this volume Rogers M. Smith was one of the movementsmain leaders, Jennifer Hochild was the first editor of the new journal Per-

spectives on Politics, Robert Jervis was one of the leaders of the new qual-

itative research section of the APSA,27 Dvora Yanow and Peregrine

Schwartz-Shea, editors of the recently publishedInterpretation and Method

have been active in the organization of panels on ethnography and interpre-

tation at APSA meetings in which many young scholars have participated.28

It is noteworthy that Bob Jervis and Susanne Rudolph are recent past presi-

dents of APSA signifying the success of theperestroika movement and the

legitimization of the diversity of approaches it represents. Last, but certain-

ly not least, a group of scholars gathered in Toronto in October 2006 thanks

to the efforts of Ed Schatz at a stimulating workshop on Political Ethnog-

raphy: What Insider Perspectives Contribute to the Study of Power. It is

particularly gratifying to witness these positive developments and to feel

that I may have made a modest contribution to them. Jan Kubik and I

were asked to organize a new section on Political Anthropology for the

forthcoming annual meeting of the Midwest Political Science Associa-

tion. I am honored to share my thoughts on this subject with the readers ofAb Imperio.

SUMMARY

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Science. New Haven, CT, 2005.

27 American Political Science Association.28 Dvora Yanow and Peregrine Schwartz-Shea (Eds.). Interpretation and Method:

Empirical Research Methods and the Interpretive Turn. Armonk, NY, 2006.

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Interview with Peter SAHLINS

SUBJECTHOOD THAT HAPPENS TO BE CALLED

CITIZENSHIP, OR

TRYING TO MAKE SENSE OF THE OLD REGIME

ON ITS OWN TERMS*

* Interviewer Sergei Glebov.

Sergei GLEBOV: Professor Sahlins, thank you for your interest in thegeneral questions we sought to discuss in the framework of our thematicissue The Letter of the Law: the Institutionalization of Belonging to Poli-ty and for your willingness to share your thoughts with our readers. Letme begin by asserting that the narrative of Modernity is essentially a narra-tive of the nation: the revolutionary nation as the political body and theeternal nation as the physical body of the society, united by a common

language, culture and memory. All contradictions and ruptures of Moderni-ty are mysteriously brought together when viewed through the nationalperspective: the inevitable monological form of narrative finds its ultimatesubject in the singularity and homogeneity of society as embodied by thenation. The revolutionizing effect of forging the common narrative of thenation (parallel to the forging of national identity itself) is well known, notleast thanks to your seminal studies.

What remains understudied yet is the functioning of societies that have

not fully experienced the integrating potential of nationalization. Old re-

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Interview with Peter Sahlins, Trying to Make Sense of the Old Regime...

gime polities, as well as contiguous empires of the nineteenth century (Rus-sian but also Habsburg) did not overcome local particularities (in both aregional and social sense) as rival sources of group identification, parallel

to the pan-imperial narratives of unity and loyalty. In the twentieth century,the Soviet Union represented a modern post-revolutionary polity, yet it nevermanaged to become a proper nation state because a federalist model wasemployed to accommodate deep cultural, economic and ethnic inequalitiesconcealed by the umbrella of political loyalty to the regime. Today we wit-ness attempts to reshape Europe as a supranational community. What isimportant in all those different cases is that the internal heterogeneity ofsociety goes far beyond a normal diversity, to the extent that it includesthe co-existence of different political subjects holding different degrees ofsovereignty, competing principles of social identification, and narratives ofmemory. We believe that your interest and experience in studying the be-ginning of the synthesis of national narrative provide you with a uniqueperspective on the world before and beyond the nation.

To begin our conversation, let me ask you how accurate is the veryperception of the national ideal as a monologue (even if established as aresult of disputes and conflicts)? A decade ago, James Lehning1 challengedthe perceived wisdom of Eugene Webers model of forging a nation through

institutional standardization, suggesting instead a more complicated visionof national unity as a result of negotiations of mutual projections by socialactors. What is your attitude to Lehnings model, and does it change theperception of the nation as a normative monologue?

Peter SAHLINS: It is worth beginning with Eugen Webers model ofthe transformation ofPeasants into Frenchmen,2 since, Id like to suggest,Lehnings attempt to revise Webers formulation is still very much framedby the same kind of oppositions that he purports to disrupt between the

traditional and modern on the one hand, and peasants and Frenchmen onthe other. What this suggests, to me at least, is the deep-seated nature of theparadigm of cultural modernization and the difficulty, even within theframework of cultural history, of disrupting it or dislodging it in some sig-nificant way. In my earlier work, on boundaries,3 and also in my work on

1 James Lehning. Peasant and French: Cultural Contact in Rural France During the

Nineteenth Century. Cambridge, MA & New York, 1995.2 Eugen J. Weber. Peasants into Frenchmen: the Modernization of Rural France, 1870-

1914. Stanford, 1976.3 Peter Sahlins. Boundaries: the Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees. Berkeley,1989.

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peasant rebellion in the nineteenth century,4 I was very critical of Webersmodel and by extension of Lehnings attempt to reformulate it, largely be-cause of the implicit model of collective identity it contained. Specifically,

I would suggest that such models still imagine identity to be constructed asa series of expanding concentric circles, in which identity and loyalty de-crease in correlation with geographic distance from a specific social ego atits center, such that a peasants attachments, in this schema, would be pri-marily to his or her family, and would be diluted in their extension to a kinnetwork, then to a neighborhood, then to the village community itself, thenperhaps to a valley, a region, and only distantly and weakly to the nation asa whole. Implied here is also a paradigm of nation-building that assumesthat when nations are built from distant centers, they reverse the vectors ofloyalty and identification, effacing the embedded concentric circles, suchthat a direct and unmediated identification between the peasant and the na-tion, in this case France, is achieved. This is what youve called the nationas normative monologue. To my mind, deploying this model is not alwaysthe most useful way of making sense of the regularities in the historicalrecord because to do so presupposes, including in Lehnings reformulation,an original position occupied by peasants as outside of the discursive, insti-tutional or political community called the nation. My own work included

an effort to re-imagine the peasantry as part of France, to write the historyof the peasantry, however marginalized and peripheralized with respect to adistant political center, as nonetheless engaged, or at least articulated with-in the same historical processes. In doing so I tried to rethink the modelitself, abandoning the metaphor of circles for the notion of segments, whichI borrowed from a certain anthropology, and which was well known, atleast among the structural functionalists, through the work of Evans-Prit-chard.5 In this segmentary model, identity is conceived in all of its possi-

ble iterations as an oppositional and contingent and relational quality, capa-ble of collapsing lesser distinctions into more inclusive ones. In my work,this meant that peasants might express their identities in village communi-ties at the same time that they could consider themselves Frenchmen orSpaniards, and this occurred in an historical context that we might considerprecocious, since the institutional mechanisms outlined by Weber that linkpeasants and the nation roads and railroads, schools and military service

did not yet exist. Still, through segmentary oppositions, peasants could iden-

4 Idem. Forest Rites: the War of the Demoiselles in Nineteenth-Century France.Cambridge, MA, 1994.5 See Mary Douglas. Edward Evans-Pritchard. New York, 1981.

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tify themselves as part of France, but only in opposition to an Other. In thePyrenean borderland in the Pyrenees, the Other was Spain, even if Spainhad just as ephemeral an institutional existence in the pre-modern world, at

least in terms of the homogeneous creation of national institutions. Never-theless, discursively, the Spanish nation or Spain as a nation was an entity,which became strategically deployed within peasant society in order to statea set of claims about local and national identity. Key here were the ways inwhich the national as a category became articulated with the local, in sucha manner that neither effaced or erased the other: a localizing of the national

and a nationalizing of the local. So I was most interested in my early workin critiquing the expectation that nation-building involves the complete ef-facement of other kinds of identities and other kinds of differences. Notthat this wasnt, in fact, the political project, since it really was a goal ofstatesmen and politicians (and educators and army officers) who built na-tions, but it was never a successful project, and not even in the most preco-cious and developed of the nation-states, England or France, or to a certainextent Spain, did the effort ever come to approximate the lived experienceof peasants and others. All the more important, I think, turning to imperialand post-imperial histories further east on the continent, to emphasize theextent to which national-building agendas, agendas of nationalization, with

their integrating, homogenizing efforts, were never nearly as successful asnation-builders imagined them to be.

SG: I wonder if I can interject a question at this point regarding some-thing that you mentioned in your answer, namely, your reliance upon andindebtedness to anthropological models. Could you elaborate on how im-portant anthropology has been to your intellectual project, and, further-more, what, in general, is your perception of the relationship between an-thropology and history? Are we indebted to anthropologists and if so, what

kind of an intellectual debt do we owe to them? Is it methodology, analyti-cal concepts, or a conceptualization of the language of social sciences?

PS: There are, obviously, two histories here that come together. There isthe history of the disciplines, but also a personal trajectory. My own expo-sure to anthropology took shape as a contingent and accidental develop-ment, namely my birth and education in a family which lived all over theworld, and in which anthropology and culture was the stuff of the dinnertable conversations. I was never trained in anthropology but I grew up in aworld in which the concepts and key categories of anthropological knowl-edge, at least of a certain moment, were part of an everyday language, so

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generally speaking my training as an anthropologist comes from home.More generally, I think that history as a discipline has developed and flour-ished during the last century through a process of cannibalizing, if you will,

collateral disciplines in the social sciences and humanities. One can pointto different decades in the twentieth century in which different auxiliarydisciplines, from economics to sociology to anthropology to literary theoryto geography, have been not just helpful but necessary for history as a dis-cipline in its continuous self-re-invention. The anthropological moment ofhistorical inquiry has in some sense passed, meaning that the heyday of thisborrowing can be seen in the works of E. P. Thompson or Natalie ZemonDavis or any of the so called new historians of the Anglo-Saxon world,whose research agendas came out of an interest in social history and history

from below, beginning in the late 1960s. This was an especially creativeand fertile time for the marriage of anthropology and history, a momentduring which a single collateral discipline, in this case anthropology, reallyallowed history to pose new questions about the collective logics of be-havior, or invent new objects of inquiry (such as kinship, ritual, or othersymbolic practices). The marriage also provided historians with a vocabu-lary with which to investigate and to answer queries that, at least in theirmost successful iterations, were never efforts to import wholesale the meth-

ods of anthropological inquiry onto history, which of course wouldnt workin that the field is not the archive, and historians will always be bound to agreat extent and constrained by this silence of their informants Rather,historians imported not the research methods of anthropology but its vo-cabulary, its questions, and certain of its intellectual concerns and agen-das All this is not to say that this moment has definitely receded into themists of time, but there is an enduring legacy to be found in the everwidening set of legitimate historical subjects, and there is still fruitful cross-

fertilization that can occur at this point in time, particularly around themuch studied question of identity. At the same time, it should be empha-sized, that history as a discipline its central paradigms and informingprinciples has already learned its lessons from anthropology and has movedon to other disciplines, from which it takes equally in measure to think ofnew sets of problems and ways of interpreting them. Similarly, when history

turned to literary theory in the 1980s, what was at stake was less a whole-sale importation of methods even if there are historians who would arguethat history is a text and should be read in the same way as a literary cre-ation but most practicing historians still work in archives and now under-stand that they are working with texts in an important, literary sense, and

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that all of the aporia and explicit meanings of a text that need to be studiedas part of the way of making these texts speak to a particular intellectualproblem thats been posed. So I would not be a historian who continuouslywaves the flag of anthropology feeling that this is in any way a definitivesolution or even the first steps down a particular path, but, rather, one of themany tools in the rather capacious toolbox of the historian that can be usedto make sense of a changing and evolving set of problems that we willcontinue to invent and give our best to answer.

SG: Despite some efforts to undo the boundary between the modern andpre-modern forms of citizenship, historians still operate under the assump-tion that there occurred, at the time of the French revolution, a profoundbreak with citizenship based on privilege (or private law). To what extenthas your own work contributed to complicating that boundary? Has thestory of the passage from a foreigner to a subject altered our perception ofthe roots of modern citizenship?

PS: Its harder to imagine in a French institutional context and histori-ography, but there have been a lot of efforts in English to de-center theFrench Revolution itself as the origins of modernity, at least within theaccepted narrative of the development of modern citizenship. My own work,and that of other historians of the eighteenth century, has helped us to de-mythologize, in some sense, the central place of the French Revolution inthe discipline itself, especially as its been developed in France and in Eu-rope. This is not to say that we, historians, who are deeply attracted to themutations of the eighteenth century long before the French Revolutionnecessarily see the Old Regime as inevitably containing all of the elementsof modernity that would come to maturity in the nineteenth and twentiethcenturies. The problem, rather and this a theme that recurs in your ques-tions lies in trying to imagine an Old Regime that is independent of its

outcome, or of what we see retrospectively as some kind of inevitable out-come, meaning 1789 and all that. Many historians using different approachesand drawing on different methods, especially in intellectual and culturalhistory, are finding possibilities to talk about the ways in which the discur-sive contributions and transformations of the eighteenth century find theirexpression in the French Revolution but cannot be situated as a cause. Weare far beyond the conservative reactions during the revolutionary upheaval

itself that linked the rhetoric of Enlightenment and the revolutionary pro-

cess: its Rousseaus fault, its Voltaires fault. So my work, in thatsense, like the work of Keith Baker, Roger Chartier, and younger scholarslike Michael Kwass and others, is very much part of this effort to move

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back from the Revolution as some inevitable outcome of the Enlighten-ment or eighteenth century developments, and to think through the kinds ofmodernity that took shape in the eighteenth century, but that were not struc-

turally determined to produce, inevitably, a revolutionary outcome.All this to preface my comments on citizenship itself. What struck meand what got me started on the project that became my last book,6Unnatu-rally French, was an initial surprise, and indeed astonishment, about thevocabulary that I discovered when reading juridical texts in the seventeenthand the eighteenth century. I never expected to find the word citizen,citoyen, and indeed, to find it recurring frequently, albeit within a relativelyisolated linguistic domain, among lawyers. More, it was a bit of a revela-tion to read how the category was quite elaborated in jurisprudential terms.That was the starting point for re-thinking what it would mean to actuallyuse a term we associate with certain characteristic features of modernity, inparticular with political participation, equality, and cultural homogeneity.What do we mean when use such a term in which the referent had nothingto do with the modern world? One possible response might simply end theclaim there and say well, the word is used but it had nothing to do with thething as we know it and as we practice it in the post-revolutionary world.That was not my choice because I did believe that there was something

intrinsically important about the way in which the word was used, whichstood in some relation, but again, not easily predictable or inevitable one,to the development of the modern notions of belonging, attachment, andloyalty. And one of the ways of thinking about what that relationship mightbe between the modern and the pre-modern forms of citizenship was toexplore, in some important sense, what the difference would result in notusing the word. Some of my critics have said, well, in fact, all youre talk-ing about is subjecthood that happens to be called citizenship, or more

accurately, subjects who happen to be called citizens, but there is nofundamental distinction. And that is actually a position that comes, amongothers, from Rousseau himself at the moment of a great intellectual andcultural mutations of the eighteenth century and the Revolution this ideathat all inherited linguistic categories were wrong and that the world can belinguistically created anew. Rousseau himself was quite critical of what hecalled the egregious error of the sixteenth century jurisconsult Jean Bodin,

who had relied heavily on the term citizen in his treatises. For Rousseau,

6 Peter Sahlins. Unnaturally French: Foreign Citizens in the Old Regime and After.Ithaca, NY, 2004.

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the citizen was unimaginable before the time that he himself could think itup, in its modern iteration. In my own understanding, there is an importantand subtle distinction between subject and citizen in the Old Regime, in

both discursive terms and in their practical consequences. I think that thesubtle distinction has to do with the fact that although all citizens weresubjects, and although in fact most subjects were citizens, the distinctionmade a difference, that is, it had had practical consequences to name some-one a citizen. True, as Bodin himself had seen, the category of citizenwas heterogeneous and internally differentiated; citizens were by their na-ture unequal in obligations, in their privileges, in their liberties, in theirfranchises, to use all the terms of the Old Regime. But despite this hetero-geneity, there was in fact an underlying unity, and one with real life practi-

cal consequences, that emerged not from efforts to create homogeneity outof difference, but that appeared by drawing distinctions between citizensand foreigners, that is, those outside the boundaries of citizenship. Foreign-ers suffered any number of legal disabilities, including, most importantly,the inability to deed and inherit property from natural-born Frenchmen andwomen (the gendering is important here because unlike modern citizenshipin its initial iteration, Old Regime citizenship was a status to which womenas well as men could both aspire and acquire). That oppositional nature of

citizenship actually places the category of citizenship much closer to a no-tion that did not exist linguistically in the Old Regime, the category ofnationality. This is a tricky and complicated arena, because in so manyways the notion of pre-modern citizenship leads not in some evolutionarysense towards modern citizenship, but rather towards a modern conceptionof nationality itself, at least in a juridical sense. So the confusion is doubled,

because on the one hand the term citizen doesnt seem to belong in theeighteenth century, and on the other hand, when it does appear in the Old

Regime, its read better through the lens of nationality and nationality law,then it is through citizenship as political participation, as a conditional equal-ity, or as corresponding to a certain cultural homogeneity. And so my ownwork in some sense has followed this slippage and contributed, hopefully,with some productivity and fruitfulness to the confusion by stressing theextent to which in examining the pre-modern citizen and pre-modern citi-zenship, what I am really after is the well, the French title of myAnnalesarticle, Nationality avant la lettre,7 the history of nationality before theword itself had come into being.

7 Peter Sahlins. Nationality avant la lettre: les pratiques de la naturalization sous lAncienRgime // Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales. 2000. Vol. 55. No. 5. Pp. 1081-1108.

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SG: Your complex vision of nationality avant la lettre inAncien RgimeFrance suggests a definition of the citizen as someone not subject to thelimitations imposed upon a foreigner; albeit, of course, citizens were not

equal before the law or to each other. Then to what extent does pre-modern or pre-revolutionary citizenship in France compare to, or help ourunderstanding of the phenomenon of subjecthood in composite imperialstates? To put it simply, does such citizenship equal subjecthood, given thatit was defined by obligations, privileges, and rights particular to ones so-cial position?

PS: It is always a struggle, and frequently a productive one, to try tomake intellectual linkages between the pre-modern and the modern that arenot over-determined. Some sites and regions of the modern world wouldseem to lend themselves more easily than others to certain kinds of com-parisons. So, for example, in thinking about the modern experiences ofempire and nation among the sprawling polities of the nineteenth centuryempires, that is, Russian but also Habsburg, an obvious point of referencein the pre-modern world might be Spain and the Spanish Habsburg monar-chy of the early modern period. The Spanish Habsburg empire, like moststates in the pre-modern period, has been usefully identified by John Elliotamong others as a composite monarchy, that is, one that is literally com-

posed of distinctive polities. It is thus quite similar in structure to the nine-teenth century Habsburg Empire as described by Benedict Anderson, whopoints out inImagined Communities how the emperor himself holds literal-ly dozen of separate titles corresponding to the component polities of theempire, from king of Bohemia to duke of Carinthia to Margrave ofIstria and so forth. Now, in the pre-modern world, what is important, andthis is in some sense a pertinent observation for the 19th century empires aswell, is that each of these polities that together compose the empire is

constituted not simply of subjects of a particular jurisdiction but also bya legal framework of rights and disabilities that comes to approximate amodern notion of nationality. So, for example, in the early modern Spanishempire, each of the composite polities, that is, the Kingdom of Aragon, orof Castile, or of Naples, had its own institutions, its own legal frameworkof privileges and prerogatives and rights and obligations, but also of dis-abilities and exclusions political, professional, legal for those who werenot members of that particular group. In other words, I think we can speak,

with some caution and many caveats, of the existence of nationality law inthe pre-modern Spanish empire in the same way that we can make thisobservation for the more politically homogeneous monarchies in the same

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period, such as France. Now, whats interesting about Spain is that themovement of political modernization, including the reforms of the Bour-bon monarchy at the beginning of the eighteenth century, produced an in-

stitutional and legal framework of belonging that transcended the moreparticularistic and heterogeneous framework of an early modern polity, andwas thus more modern in the sense that a broader, national set of insti-tutions and laws came to displace, however slowly and incompletely, thedistinct privileges and franchises of the composite polities of the empire.The Bourbon reforms of the early eighteenth century in Spain were alreadyanticipated and reflected in the so called Indies Laws, in these laws of theHabsburgs, in which it is possible to tease out the notion of a Spanishidentity, and indeed, a Spanish nationality that transcended and displacedthe different legal frames of belonging within the composite monarchy.Projecting this model onto the contiguous empires of the nineteenth centu-ry, its altogether possible to imagine how the movement toward a legalidea of nationality as both a project of state building from above but also aproject of resistance to imperial structures was not dissimilar to processesfound in the pre-modern world. Im not saying that pre-modern states at-tempted the kind of nation-building that later empires undertook (withoutmuch success), but I am suggesting that the conditions under which it be-

came possible to develop a claim that was rhetorical but also institutionalabout the separateness and identity of a component part in a monarchy wasnot entirely dissimilar from the structures and processes of group member-ship as these took shape in the early modern world.

SG: Well, its an interesting perspective. I am curious, though, aboutyour use of the term nationality, especially when it is applied to pre-modernand composite polities. Am I right in assuming that your reference is reallyabout an anthropological perspective of the sense of belonging to the polity

first of all?PS: No, not quite. Im pulling the term much more into its juridical

framework, away from the more anthropological sense of homogeneouscultural identity, which really accrues somewhat later and becomes evermore important as the nineteenth century progresses. And its certainly truethat the term nationality appears in European languages with both mean-ings: the first literary uses of the term, say in Germaine de Stahls Corinneand Italy in 1807, refer to an idea of belonging thats founded on some deepcultural, we might today say, ethnic sense of collectivity; but the term na-tionality also makes a near simultaneous appearance in administrative dis-

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course and then a little bit later in legal terms to describe a juridical notionof belonging empty of a particular cultural content, that is, which doesntdepend on a shared similarity of custom, language, culture, or even histori-

cal experience In short, it doesnt depend on the notion of shared culture,but on a legal framework that identifies the formal rules of inclusion andexclusion.

SG: To what extent did the revolutionary nation exist in a latent formwithin the ancien rgime society, or did it emerge completely from scratchunder the impact of revolutionary experience and to be further developedduring the struggle with the remnants of the Old Regime and new challenges

of the moment? What part of the legacy of the ancien rgime was inherited

by the revolutionary nation, either positively or by negation of the old world?Could we trace elements of the revolutionary discourse (in a literal sense,as rhetorical devices and tropes) in the pre-revolutionary cultural milieu,beyond usual references to the radical representatives of the Enlightenment?Is it possible to imagine the French Enlightenment not resulting in the revo-

lutionary outburst of the type that actually did take place in 1789?

PS: The hardest assignment I ever faced as a professor was teaching theeighteenth century, for in this period all of the difficult and hoary questions

are brought to the surface history as outcome, history as origin, historyas condition for the possibility of other histories, and history as a frame-work for being able to account for modernity. In brief, its nearly impossible,

Ive found, to teach the eighteenth century without knowing and anticipating

the outcome, that is, without teaching the outcome. Its very hard to treatthe ancien rgime as a period in and of itself, without teaching that theancien rgime, at least in France, comes to an explosive end in a ratherabrupt and unexpected way. This presents enormous obstacles for trying to

make sense of the ancien rgime on its own terms starting with the nomen-clature that we use to describe the eighteenth century. In calling somethingthe Old Regime, were obviously implicitly positioning a new regimethat succeeds it. In French, ancien rgime is perhaps better translated aspast regime as opposed to old regime, and the ancien rgime was in-vented by the revolutionaries themselves at the beginning of the revolutionin order to describe something that was quite new. Indeed, one could arguethat there were certain critical moments such as the decrees that cameout of the night of August 4th, 1789 in which the ancien rgime wasliterally invented in order to be dismantled, and laws proposed at thesemoments become a kind of systematic inventory of the institutions of the

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Old Regime, described for the first time in their institutionalized, reifiedform as old precisely in order to be dismantled. As historians, as teachers,

were confronted with this very deterministic and teleological reading of

the eighteenth century that requires us to at once make sense of the fact thatthere is a revolutionary rupture at the end, and to avoid the argument thatrevolution was in constant preparation in the course of the eighteenth cen-tury. So, to return to your question, yes, many historians have tried to re-think in many different kinds of ways the relation of eighteenth centurydevelopments, especially intellectual ones, and the French Revolution. Somehave located a revolutionary discourse as a set of rhetorical devices or tropesin a pre-revolutionary set of contexts. Consider the work of Keith Baker,who isolates three different discursive strands that will appear in the Revo-lution but whose intellectual origins he locates at different points in theeighteenth century. This is not to say that their utterance or their iterationduring the course of the eighteenth century was a cause of the French revo-

lution; indeed, most intellectual and cultural history these days stresses con-ditions, not causes, trying to disengage Enlightenment and Revolution atleast from an over-determined relationship. But this can go too far as well.The reductio ad absurdum of trying to disengage the Enlightenment fromthe French Revolution in the work of Roger Chartier, for example, self-

consciously and almost perversely states that the Enlightenment did notcause the French Revolution but the French revolution caused the En-lightenment, in the sense that it gave it coherence and identity and thehistorical role that the Enlightenment or Enlightenment thought would nothave had had there not been a rupture with the Old Regime.

SG: Your work has played a very important role in applying anthropo-logical methods to the study of group formation. In recent years, manyscholars questioned not just the concept of identity (I have in mind the

works by Frederick Cooper and Rogers Brubaker) but also the usefulnessof operating with notions of groupness. For historians, however, the taskbecomes increasingly complex because in our research we are constantlyin need of terms and concepts to describe groupness (e.g., nations, classes,

ethnic, confessional and linguistic groups). How can we reconcile an un-derstanding of groups as constructed and invented with the need to writereadable and comprehensible histories taking into account how people de-scribed their own sense of belonging to a group?

PS: Right, well, this is a problem that periodically reappears throughoutthe social sciences, not just in history, and its often framed as the classic

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contrast between an emic and an etic approach. These are terms that comefrom the linguistic anthropology of Kenneth Pike in the 1950s,8 who triedto distinguish, without necessarily stating what the relationship was be-

tween the two, between approaches and categories of interpretation thatemerged from the lived experience of the subjects who are the objects ofstudy (the phonemic tools that the users of a language might have), andcontrasting that with the phonetic grammar that is the etic, rules and cate-gories imposed by non-users (and indeed incomprehensible to users them-selves). Its a classic opposition; never resolved, frequently invoked, anddebated in particular as concerns the relation between the two perspectives.How do we reconcile, as you say, our use of these terms with more indige-nous ways of formulating belonging and identification especially in the lastcouple of decades as weve come to understand the problem of identity as aconstruc

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