In This Issue

This issue contains three articles and a tripartite review essay. The articles examine dance as a cultural force in early twentieth-century European society, the bureaucratic rituals used in the United States to enforce Chinese exclusion, and the development of American business history as a field of scholarly inquiry. The tripartite review essay offers three disparate assessments of Jean and John Comaroff's influential historical anthropology of South Africa. In addition, the issue contains our usual array of book and film reviews.

Articles

Judith R. Walkowitz explores the remaking of Central London as a cosmopolitan space of pleasure and danger in the decade immediately preceding World War I. She examines cosmopolitanism as a system of distinction and taste that reordered the economy of the city, drawing new constituencies into expanding consumer markets. Walkowitz identifies dance as a major cultural expression of a double-edged cosmopolitanism that confirmed some existing hierarchies but disrupted others. She focuses on the performances of the North American dancer Maud Allan, whose London performances enable her to track shifting conceptions of gender and the national body through spaces, moments, and individual histories. When Allan introduced the "new" "expressive" dancing into London in 1908, her cosmopolitan performances materialized a new femininity and facilitated the entry of respectable women into the nocturnal spaces of the cosmopolitan center. Her dance program gained an added charge from the raffish performance space where it was staged, as well from the diverse audience attracted to it. However, Allan's notoriety also led a highly publicized libel trial. In charting Allan's career, Walkowitz moves beyond the linguistic turn to consider dance history's relation to printed texts, urban space, and visual display. And in doing so, she historicizes the shifting meanings of pre-war cosmopolitanism and its relation to gender politics, national identities, metropolitan space, and commercialized culture, and also contends that the conventions of historical periodization that divide World War I and its aftermath from pre-war cultural developments must be reconsidered.

Adam McKeown argues that the power exercised through formalized bureaucratic activity can be better understood by accounting for the ritualized dimension of those activities. As a case study, he examines the enforcement in the United States of the Chinese exclusion laws, which were pioneering in their requirement that government agents sift through migrants one by one to determine the unique facts and apply a particular status to each individual. This entailed: extensive examination, cross-referenced documentation, and the staging of a direct encounter between government representative and individual applicant that strived to exclude other social relationships as valid sources of identity. Despite these efforts, agents and migrants believed that as many as 90 percent of admissions were based on "fraudulent" claims. The techniques of surveillance had failed to produce "truth," but the historical conditions under which they were implemented did create ritualized social encounters. These rituals subjected Chinese migrants to universalizing social categories and mechanisms of justice, the exercise of which required the systematic humiliation of applicants. Rather than facilitating solidarity and integration into a social order, these ritualized encounters marked the migrants with suspect identities and isolated them from nationalized and territorialized power structures. McKeown's essay thus demonstrates the analytical possibilities of subjecting bureaucratic procedures to an internationally informed social and cultural inquiry.

Naomi R. Lamoreaux, Daniel M. G. Raff, and Peter Temin offer a new synthesis of the past two centuries of American business history. Moving beyond the markets-versus-hierarchies framework that underlies the previously dominant interpretation of Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., they highlight the great variety of coordination mechanizations in use in the economy at any given time. Drawing on recent theoretical work in economics, they show how the relative advantages and disadvantages of these different mechanisms have shifted in complex and often unpredictable ways as a result of changing economic circumstances. An important advantage of this perspective, they contend, is that it allows them to avoid the teleology that has characterized so much writing in the field. As a result, Lamoreaux, Raff, and Temin can situate the "New Economy" of the late twentieth century in broad historical context without succumbing to the temptation to view it as a climactic stage in the process of economic development. Their essay thus provides a particularly persuasive example of the importance of business history to our understanding of national and international history.

Tripartite Review Essay

This review essay offers three different assessments of Jean and John Comaroff's highly influential two-volume work of historical anthropology, Of Revelation and Revolution. The first volume is subtitled Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa, the second The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier. Elizabeth Elbourne, a historian of South Africa, begins the reviews by providing some potential critiques of the work of the Comaorffs as well as alerting readers both to its influence and to debates between Africanists about it. From a methodological point of view, she makes a historian's appeal for attention to context and chronology even while acknowledging the great utility for historians of the insights of historical anthropology. Her essay also addresses the debate among scholars of religion and colonialism about whether to see those targeted by missions primarily as agents who used Christianity and missionaries in various ways or primarily as victims of cultural colonialism. Elbourne thus helps us understand the diversity of possible approaches to the study of empire, the history of religion and colonialism, and the cross-regional utility of the Comaroffs' approach to the history of missionary activity. Sally Engle Merry, a legal anthropologist, continues the discussion by noting that the Comaroff' study of colonialism in South Africa has contributed to an expansion of the terrain for historical analysis and a retheorizing of culture as contested and changing. She explains that these important books contributed significantly to the 1990s development of a historical anthropology that examines culture as a fluid and porous phenomenon and that explores power through attention to representation and meaning. The books present an analysis of the making and unmaking of hegemony on the frontier of British imperialism that foregrounds the way cultural understandings and their materialization in dress, housing, labor arrangements, and land ownership instantiate and naturalize relations of power. As result, Merry concludes, the volumes represent a pathbreaking contribution to our understanding the role of hegemony in the making of social life under conditions of rapid and dramatic social transformation and sharp inequalities of power. Greg Dening, a cultural critic who studies Oceania, concludes the review essay by musing about the analytical possibilities of the Comaroffs' approach to historical anthropology. They tell us, he suggests, what historical anthropology might be—neomodern, processual, descriptive of hegemonic practices on both sides of a cultural boundary. Consequently, he explains, the Comaroffs' analytical program provides a compelling way of linking present to past in colonial situations. Indeed, Dening argues that these volumes should be considered supportive documents for a new genre of historical analysis, "neomodern" history. He urges more historians to take up the mantle. Together, the three articles suggest the analytical and substantive lure of the Comaroffs' monumental work.

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