Current Table of Contents

• Editor's Introduction
  
• "I vote, therefore I am:" Rituals of Democracy and the Turkish Chief Rabbi
  This article describes how the election and investiture of a chief rabbi in 2002 created a unique space for Turkish Jews to debate the meaning of democracy. I document current Turkish Jewish discourses about democracy by combining ethnographic observations of the election season with an analysis of the production and reception of local narratives (speeches, news articles, and interviews) about the process. I then analyze the election and inauguration as a "politics of presence" in which democracy is seen not only as a practice through which to debate ideas but a discursive move to represent collective difference in the public sphere. As such, this article contributes to discussions about the performative nature of minority politics and how these alternative discursive spheres relate to the broader contexts in which they occur.
• Flexibility versus Rigidity in the Practice of Islamic Family Law
  The last decades have witnessed a sustained critique of the mainstream Orientalist notion that classical Islamic family law was rigid, inflexible, and homogeneous. Many historians have used innovative methods to demonstrate that jurists and judges in precodification times enjoyed the intellectual space to translate the principles of theand Sunna into socially workable rules. Yet, perhaps unwittingly, these authors have presented classical Islamic family law as flexible by contrasting it with postcodification legal practice. The latter is represented as characterized by rigidity and textuality due to, among other things, the prominent role of the nation-state in many Muslim countries. On the basis of extensive fieldwork in 2002[ndash]2003, this article juxtaposes the claim of inflexibility with ethnographic material in order to properly conceptualize the present-day practice of Islamic family law. I argue that the role of the state should not be overemphasized at the expense of the analytical significance of actors' agency, including that of the judges, in effecting change. The analysis shows that, despite codification, Islamic family law in many Muslim countries is still characterized by flexible, heterogeneous, and context-bound implementation.
• States of Insecurity: Everyday Emergencies, Public Secrets, and Drug Trafficker Power in a Brazilian Favela
  This article analyzes how drug traffickers and police in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, co-participate in the creation of a state of (in)security in the city's poor neighborhoods. I draw on ethnographic research to argue that drug traffickers dominate Rio's favelas (squatter neighborhoods) by producing everyday emergencies (or "ordered disorder") and by deliberately manipulating secrecy.
• Territorial Democracy: Caste, Dominance and Electoral Practice in Postcolonial India
  This article examines the relationship between caste identities and electoral democracy in India. Drawing from fieldwork in Bihar, I suggest that at the center of what is popularly referred to as "caste politics" is the influence of local relations of dominance and subordination on electoral practice, resulting in what I refer to as "territorial democracy." The article examines how a politics of caste empowerment has challenged a long history of upper caste hegemony, contributing to a breakdown of state institutions as newly elected lower-caste politicians have clashed with an overwhelmingly upper-caste bureaucracy. The article seeks to demonstrate the radical potentiality of democracy and argues that an ethnographic mapping of the ways in which electoral practice is embedded within local power configurations is necessary in order to understand the dynamics and implications of democracy in the postcolonial world.
• Gluing Globalization: NGOs as Intermediaries in Haiti
  Drawing from two ethnographic case studies, both from Haiti, this article argues that nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), as intermediaries, "glue" globalization in four ways. First, in their "gap filler" roles NGOs provide legitimacy to globalization, representing alternatives to states fragmented by neoliberalism. Second, NGOs, in the contemporary neoliberal aid regime, can undermine the governance capacity of states in the Global South, eroding the Keynesian social welfare state ethos and social contract that states are (or should be) responsible for service provision. Third, NGOs provide high-paying jobs to an educated middle class, reproducing inequalities inherent to and required by the contemporary neoliberal world system. Fourth, NGOs, as an ideologically dependent transnational middle class, constitute buffers between elites and impoverished masses and can present institutional barriers against local participation and priority setting. Drawing on recent anthropological scholarship that moves away from reifying NGOs and their professed ideologies, this article focuses on NGO practice.
• INTERVIEW: The "New Anthropology of Crime"
  
• Distorting the Law: Politics, Media, and the Litigation Crisis by William Haltom and Michael McCann
  
• El Estado y los indígenas en tiempos del PAN: neoindigenismo, legalidad e identidad edited by Rosalva Aída Hernández, Sarela Paz, and María Teresa Sierra
  
• Markets of Dispossession: NGOs, Economic Development, and the State in Cairo by Julia Elyachar
  
• The Logic of Environmentalism: Anthropology, Ecology, and Postcoloniality by Vassos Argyrou
  
• Le Jugement en Action – Ethnomėthodologie du Droit, de la Morale et de la Justice en Egypte by Baudoin Dupret
  
• The Pedagogical State: Education and the Politics of National Culture in post-1980 Turkey by Sam Kaplan
  
• The Politics of Citizenship of Mexican Migrants by Alejandra Castañeda
  
• Accelerating Possession: Global Futures of Property and Personhood edited by Bill Maurer and Gabriele Schwab
  
• Global "Body Shopping": An Indian Labor System in the Information Technology Industry by Biao XiangVirtual Migration: The Programming of Globalization by A. Aneesh