CHAPTER 9
TRANSNATIONAL FEMINISM: EVENT, TEMPORALITY, AND PERFORMANCE AT THE 1975 INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S YEAR CONFERENCE

1. Journalists and organizers referred to the IWY events as a global consciousness-raising session. Margaret Bruce, the head of the UN’s Commission on the Status of Women, explained, “IWY, it is hoped, will result in a worldwide consciousness raising” (National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD, RG 220, Records of the U.S. Center for International Women’s Year; Subject Files, 1973–1975; A-AS; box 1, AAUW folder). The director of Mexico’s IWY program, Gloria Brasdefer, similarly insisted that it was “not an homage to women” but rather a “consciousness-raising effort” (Excélsior, June 18, 1975, 1-B). See also New York Times, June 19, 1975, 41 and July 3, 1975, 1; The Nation, July 19, 1975, 36; The Economist, July 5, 1975, 72.

2. Bonnie Smith has pointed out that this proliferation of forms of women’s activism requires us to consider feminisms in the plural. Global Feminisms since 1945: A Survey of Issues and Controversies (New York: Routledge, 2000). See also Myra Marx Ferree and Carol McClurg Mueller, “Feminism and the Women’s Movement: A Global Perspective,” in The Blackwell Companion to Social Movements, ed. David A. Snow, Sarah A. Soule, and Hanspeter Kriesi (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004). On earlier international women’s movements, see, for example, K. Lynn Stoner, “In Four Languages but with One Voice: Division and Solidarity within Pan American Feminism, 1923–1933,” in Beyond the Ideal: Pan Americanism in Inter-American Affairs, ed. David Sheinin (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2000); Leila J. Rupp, Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Movement (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997); Bonnie S. Anderson, Joyous Greetings: The First International Women’s Movement, 1830–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).

3. Two other UN conferences the previous year had included NGO tribunes—the Food Conference (Rome) and the Population Conference (Bucharest).

4. Akira Iriye, Global Community: The Role of International Organizations in the Making of the Contemporary World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).

5. For support from the Rockefeller Foundation, see the Rockefeller Archives Center (RAC), Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Series 3 (RBF Grants), box 461, Travelers Aid International Social Services of America—IWY Tribune 1975 folder and RAC, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RG 13 (Projects), series 103 (International Organizations), Travelers Aid International Social Services of America NGO Tribune (1975–1975) subseries, box 10, folder 66. On John D. Rockefeller III’s particular interest in the conference, see RAC, RG 5 (JDR 3rd Papers), series 3 (Office & Home Files), box 46, folder 281. On the Ford Foundation’s support, see especially Ford Foundation Archive, grant no. 75-224. The Ford Foundation was in the midst of its own feminist consciousness raising. See Susan M. Hartmann, The Other Feminists: Activists in the Liberal Establishment (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), chap. 5.

6. Francesca Miller, Latin American Women and the Search for Social Justice (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1991), 200. For their respective memoirs, see Domitila Barrios de Chungara and Moema Viezzer, Let Me Speak! Testimony of Domitila, a Woman of the Bolivian Mines, trans. Victoria Ortiz (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978); Domitila Barrios de Chungara and David Acebey, Aquí también, Domitila! Testimonios, 1st ed. (Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1985); Betty Friedan, “Scary Doings in Mexico City,” in “It Changed My Life”: Writings on the Women’s Movement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).

7. Göran Therborn, Between Sex and Power: Family in the World, 1900–2000 (London: Routledge, 2004), 103.

8. The geopolitical divide indicated here has been marked by various designations: North/South, West/non-West, industrialized/developing, and First World/Third World. For the purposes of this chapter, I mostly use the First World/Third World and industrialized/developing designations because the chapter’s subjects used them most commonly. The constantly shifting use of terms, however, attests to the analytical limitations of each of these binaries.

9. Bina Agarwal, “From Mexico 1975 to Beijing 1995,” Indian Journal of Gender Studies 3, no. 1 (1996): 88.

10. Carolyn M. Stephenson, “Women’s Organizations and the United Nations,” in Multilateral Diplomacy and the United Nations Today, ed. James P. Muldoon (Cambridge, MA: Westview, 2005), 214.

11. This diametric opposition echoes the early-twentieth-century European construction of the incompatibility of Marxism and “bourgeois feminism.” See Marilyn J. Boxer, “Rethinking the Socialist Construction and International Career of the Concept ‘Bourgeois Feminism,’ ” American Historical Review 112, no. 1 (2007): 131–58. This imagined synthesis offers an example of what Joan Scott has dubbed the fantasy of feminist history, conjured to fulfill an unmet yearning and to “assign fixed meaning to that which ultimately cannot be fixed.” Joan Wallach Scott, “Feminism’s History,” Journal of Women’s History 16, no. 2 (2004): 5.

12. B. S. Santos, “The Future of the World Social Forum: The Work of Translation,” Development 48, no. 2 (2005): 17.

13. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), 4.

14. Diane M. Nelson, A Finger in the Wound: Body Politics in Quincentennial Guatemala (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 348.

15. The description of Barrios de Chungara’s experience at the IWY tribune appears in her coauthored memoir, Barrios de Chungara and Viezzer, Let Me Speak!, 198ff. Her account offers not a transparent recounting of events, however, but rather a quintessential example of testimonio—the witness-bearing representations that gained traction amid Latin American counterinsurgency campaigns of the 1970s and 1980s and that by the 1990s precipitated anxious debates about subaltern truth telling. On testimonio and its reconsideration, see especially John Beverley, “The Real Thing (Our Rigoberta),” Modern Language Quarterly 57, no. 2 (1996): 129–39; Diane M. Nelson, Reckoning: The Ends of War in Guatemala (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), chap. 4.

16. This representation coincides with what Clare Hemmings has dubbed “progress narratives” that see feminism as evolving from a liberal, racist past to a more enlightened feminist present. Clare Hemmings, Why Stories Matter: The Political Grammar of Feminist Theory (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).

17. Excélsior, July 1, 1975, 1.

18. Quoted in El Universal, July 1, 1975, 1.

19. The Economist, July 5, 1975, 72.

20. Judith Butler, “Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of the ‘Postmodern,’ ” in Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and Joan Scott (New York: Routledge, 1992), 16.

21. Xilonen, June 30, 1975, 8. The anthropologist Ara Wilson similarly describes the inclusion of the term “sexism” among the 2005 World Social Forum’s hit list of global maladies as “a puzzling choice, an atypical reliance on liberal frameworks, perhaps a vestigial artifact of particular archives that inform textual production at the Forum.” Ara Wilson, “Feminism in the Space of the World Social Forum,” Journal of International Women’s Studies 8 (2007): 13.

22. New York Times, June 19, 1975, 41.

23. Pacifica Radio Archives, Betty Friedan versus the Third World (sound recording; North Hollywood, CA: Pacifica Radio Archives, 1975).

24. William H. Sewell Jr., Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 280.

25. See, in particular, Alain Badiou, Being and Event (London: Continuum, 2005); Sewell, Logics of History, chaps. 7 and 8.

26. Challenges to the imposition of normative and coherent meanings on historical evidence constituted one of feminist historians’ most important interventions during the 1990s. See, in particular, Joan Wallach Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” Critical Inquiry 17, no. 4 (1991): 773–97 and Bonnie G. Smith, The Gender of History: Men, Women, and Historical Practice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).

27. For an account of the YWCA’s role in transnational women’s organizing, see Karen Garner, Shaping a Global Women’s Agenda: Women’s NGOs and Global Governance, 1925–85 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010).

28. Mildred Persinger, “Generations of Change: The United Nations International Women’s Conferences” (roundtable presentation, Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Amherst, MA, June 10, 2011).

29. Ibid.

30. New York Times, June 29, 1975, 2.

31. See, for example, Ford Foundation correspondence regarding grant no. 75-224.

32. MacDermot to Waldheim, March 6, 1974; Harris to MacDermot, April 4, 1974, both in International Women’s Tribune Centre Archive, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, MA, box 1.

33. Yuen-Li Liang, “The Question of Access to the United Nations Headquarters of Representatives of Non-governmental Organizations in Consultative Status,” American Journal of International Law 48, no. 3 (1954): 434–50.

34. Francisca de Haan, “Continuing Cold War Paradigms in Western Historiography of Transnational Women’s Organisations: The Case of the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF),” Women’s History Review 19, no. 4 (2010): 547–73. For another discussion of the ICW/WIDF rivalry, see Mary Kinnear, Woman of the World: Mary McGeachy and International Cooperation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004).

35. While the UN had given $3 million for the population conference and allowed two years for planning, the IWY was planned in six months with an initial budget of $350,000. Judith P. Zinsser, “From Mexico to Copenhagen to Nairobi: The United Nations Decade for Women, 1975–1985,” Journal of World History 13, no. 1 (2002): 146.

36. The issue of women’s human rights would not secure a place in the UN’s lexicon until the 1993 Vienna Human Rights Conference and was strengthened at the 1995 Beijing Women’s Conference. Julie Peters and Andrea Wolper, Women’s Rights, Human Rights: International Feminist Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 1995).

37. Reporters noted that the North Vietnamese and South Vietnamese delegations made a point of appearing together at public functions during the conference. For example, New York Times, June 22, 1975, 48.

38. For a more elaborate discussion of reproductive-labor debates at the IWY events, see Jocelyn Olcott, “The Battle within the Home: Development Strategies, Second-Wave Feminism, and the Commodification of Caring Labors at the 1975 International Women’s Year Conference,” in Workers across the Americas: The Transnational Turn in Labor History, ed. Leon Fink (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

39. For a succinct summary of how these debates played out in the emblematic French case, see Joan Wallach Scott, Parité! Sexual Equality and the Crisis of French Universalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

40. The question of whether NGOs have served women well in the ensuing decades, especially in poorer regions, has been a subject of intense debate. See esp. Sonia E. Alvarez, “Latin American Feminisms ‘Go Global’: Trends of the 1990s and Challenges for the New Millennium,” in Cultures of Politics/Politics of Cultures: Re-visioning Latin American Social Movements, ed. Sonia E. Alvarez, Evelina Dagnino, and Arturo Escobar (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1998); Sonia E. Alvarez, “Beyond NGO-ization? Reflections from Latin America,” Development 52, no. 2 (2009): 175–84; Breny Mendoza, “Transnational Feminisms in Question,” Feminist Theory 3, no. 3 (2002): 295–314; Valentine M. Moghadam, Globalizing Women: Transnational Feminist Networks (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005); Incite! Women of Color Against Violence, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2007).

41. “Wangari Maathai,” in Dick Gordon, Connection (WBUR, August 1, 2005).

42. Materials on the founding of the Women’s World Bank can be found in the Margaret Snyder Papers, Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University, and in the archives of the Ford Foundation.

43. See, for example, Eli Bartra, “Tres décadas de neofeminismo en México,” in Feminismo en México, ayer y hoy, ed. Eli Bartra, Anna M. Fernández Poncela, and Ana Lau (Mexico: Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, 2000), 40; Amrita Basu, “Globalization of the Local/Localization of the Global Mapping Transnational Women’s Movements,” Meridians 1, no. 1 (2000): 70; Myra Marx Ferree and Aili Mari Tripp, Global Feminism: Transnational Women’s Activism, Organizing, and Human Rights (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 11; Jean Franco, Plotting Women: Gender and Representation in Mexico (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 184–85; Jane S. Jaquette, Feminist Agendas and Democracy in Latin America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 14; Yoshie Kobayashi, A Path toward Gender Equality: State Feminism in Japan (New York: Routledge, 2004), 33; Amy Lind, “Feminist Post-development Thought: ‘Women in Development’ and the Gendered Paradoxes of Survival in Bolivia,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 31, nos. 3/4 (2003): 229; Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 3–4; Nima Naghibi, Rethinking Global Sisterhood: Western Feminism and Iran (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 76; Millie Thayer, “Transnational Feminism: Reading Joan Scott in the Brazilian sertão,” Ethnography 2, no. 2 (2001): 248; Graham Willett, Living Out Loud: A History of Gay and Lesbian Activism in Australia (St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 2000), 122–23.

44. Elizabeth A. Grosz, Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 1.

45. The strength of this alliance caught at least the U.S. State Department off guard. In communications regarding the nonaligned activities within the GA, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and others predicted that fault lines would appear between oil-producing nations and the less-developed countries that particularly suffered from the oil embargo’s inflationary effects. See, for examples, Secretary of State to Diplomatic Posts, May 14, 1974; State Department report on the Sixth Special Session of the UNGA, June 5, 1974; Secretary of State to Diplomatic Posts regarding 29th UNGA, August 22, 1974; all documents published in Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) E-14, pt. 1 (1969–76): docs. 13, 16, and 17.

46. El Universal, June 20, 1975, 1; El Nacional, June 18, 1975, 1; El Universal, June 19, 1975, 1.

47. For a particularly apropos example, see Friedan’s account of her visit to Iran, “Coming Out of the Veil,” Ladies’ Home Journal, June 1975, 71, 98–103.

48. El Nacional, June 24, 1975, 7.

49. Chicago Defender, July 5, 1975, 6.

50. Jennifer Seymour Whitaker, “Women of the World: Report from Mexico City,” Foreign Affairs, October 1975, 173.

51. The Economist, February 1, 1975, 33.

52. For a sanguine account of the Cuban Family Code’s promise, see Marjorie King, “Cuba’s Attack on Women’s Second Shift 1974–1976,” Latin American Perspectives 4, nos. 1–2 (1977): 106–19. For a historical perspective on how it played out in practice, see Johanna I. Moya Fábregas, “The Cuban Woman’s Revolutionary Experience: Patriarchal Culture and the State’s Gender Ideology, 1950–1976,” Journal of Women’s History 22, no. 1 (2010): 61–84.

53. Matthew Connelly, Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), chaps. 7 and 8; Laura Briggs, Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).

54. Memorandum of Conversation, Secretary’s Luncheon Meeting with Outside Experts, Department of State, May 31, 1974, in FRUS E-14, pt. 1 (1969–76): doc. 15.

55. On “population control establishment,” see Bonnie Mass, “The Politics of Population Control: Birth Control, Population Control, and Self-Help” (address, Harvard Medical School Women’s Conference on Health, March 1975), Bobbye Ortiz Papers, Duke University Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, box 17, Subject File Latin America 2/4. On “indiscriminate birth control,” see Barrios de Chungara and Viezzer, Let Me Speak!, 199–200. See also (among many other examples) the open letter from the Anti-Imperialist Women Against Population Control, March 24, 1975, Ortiz Papers, box 17, Subject File Latin America 2/4; “Con engaños esteralizan a Mexicanonorteamericanas,” El Universal, June 20, 1975, 3; “Forced Sterilization,” Sister: West Coast Feminist Newspaper, June 1974, 8; “Controlling Reproduction,” What She Wants, December 1974, 2; Sharon Lieberman, “The Politics of Population Control,” Majority Report 5 (May 31, 1975): 2.

56. Magdalena de Bastien, “¿Liberación Femenina? Como siempre, slogans y manipuleo,” Excélsior, June 29, 1975, 2-C.

57. Many future IWY organizers were stunned to find that the agenda for the UN Population Conference had made no connection between fertility and women’s status. Hilkka Pietilä and Jeanne Vickers, Making Women Matter: The Role of the United Nations, updated and expanded ed. (London: Zed Books, 1994), 77.

58. Ironically, Mexican President Luis Echeverría, whom most Mexicans hold responsible for the massacre during his tenure as Minister of the Interior, claimed that the UN had selected Mexico for the IWY conference because of its strong record on human rights.

59. Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).

60. Ibid., 28.

61. Ibid, 28.

62. Although this idea has been elaborated fruitfully by feminist scholars over the past two decades, it is compellingly introduced in Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990).

63. El Universal, June 22, 1975, sec. 2, 4; Washington Post, June 22, 1975, A12.

64. Barrios de Chungara and Viezzer, Let Me Speak!, 199.

65. Sewell, Logics of History, 196.

66. Ibid., 341.

67. For a fuller discussion of these issues, see Jocelyn Olcott, “Globalizing Sisterhood: International Women’s Year and the Limits of Identity Politics,” in Shock of the Global: The 1970s in Perspective, ed. Niall Ferguson et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).

68. Barrios de Chungara and Viezzer, Let Me Speak!, 197.

69. Ibid., 203. Such descriptions serve as the archived version of knowledge production that Taylor discusses in The Archive and the Repertoire and offer unmistakably embodied performances that sustain a militancy grounded in gender complementarity.

70. Cindi Katz, “Lost and Found: The Imagined Geographies of American Studies,” Prospects 30 (2006): 1–9.

71. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “ ‘Woman’ as Theatre: United Nations Conference on Women, Beijing 1995,” Radical Philosophy 75 (1996): 2–4.

72. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271–316.

73. Marisela R. Chávez, “Pilgrimage to the Homeland: California Chicanas and International Women’s Year, Mexico City, 1975,” in Memories and Migrations: Mapping Boricua and Chicana Histories, ed. Vicki Ruíz and John R. Chávez (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 176.

74. Friedan, “Scary Doings in Mexico City,” 449.

75. Ibid., 454.

76. For a more elaborate discussion of issues around sexuality, see Jocelyn Olcott, “Cold War Conflicts and Cheap Cabaret: Performing Politics at the 1975 United Nations International Women’s Year Conference in Mexico City,” Gender and History 22, no. 3 (2010): 733–54.

77. Barrios de Chungara and Viezzer, Let Me Speak!, 198–200.

78. El Universal, June 23, 1975, 4; Excélsior, June 25, 1975, 7-A.

79. Archivo General de la Nación (AGN), Investigaciones Políticas y Sociales, Caja 1163-A, vol. 1, Hoja 579–586; AGN, Dirección Federal de Seguridad, June 26, 1975, vol. 9-342–75, exp. 7, p. 156.

80. Norma Mogrovejo, Un amor que se atrevió a decir su nombre: la lucha de las lesbianas y su relación con los movimientos homosexual y feminista en América Latina, 1st ed. (Mexico City: Centro de Documentación y Archivo Histórico Lésbico, 2000), 67.

81. Mark T. Berger, The Battle for Asia: From Decolonization to Globalization (New York: Routledge, 2004), 51ff. Notably, the critic Michael Hardt compares the World Social Forum to Bandung. Michael Hardt, “Porto Alegre: Today’s Bandung?,” New Left Review 14 (2000).

82. Christopher J. Lee, Making a World after Empire: The Bandung Moment and Its Political Afterlives (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010), 15.

83. See, for example, the essays in Antonia Finnane and Derek McDougall, eds., Bandung 1955: Little Histories (Caulfield East, Australia: Monash University Press, 2010); Lee, Making a World after Empire; See Seng Tan and Amitav Acharya, Bandung Revisited: The Legacy of the 1955 Asian-African Conference for International Order (Singapore: NUS Press, 2008).

84. Roland Burke, “Afro-Asian Alignment: Charles Malik and the Cold War at Bandung,” in Finnane and McDougall, Bandung 1955, 27.

85. Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (New York: New Press, 2007), 45–46.

86. Katherine Ann Lynskey, interview of Mildred Persinger, Hollins University, Roanoke, VA, March 12, 2006, http://www1.hollins.edu/classes/anth220s06/lynskeyk/persinger_lynskey_main.htm (accessed June 9, 2009).

NOTES TO
ITINERANCY AND POWER

1. Aristotle, Metaphysics, book 11, sec. 1066a, in Perseus Digital Library Project, ed. Gregory R. Crane (Boston: Tufts University, updated February 7, 2012), available at http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0052%3Abook%3D11%3Asection%3D1066a.

2. Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and reasons of power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 1–24.

NOTES TO
FROM CULTURES TO CULTURAL PRACTICES AND BACK AGAIN

1. I thank Peter Brown, Dan Rodgers, Walter Pohl, Pavlína Rychterová, and in particular Jamie Kreiner for their generous support in translating the German thoughts and ideas behind this afterword into English and their as ever extremely helpful suggestions, comments, and corrections of earlier drafts of this essay.

2. See Klaus Amann, Robert Musil—Literatur und Politik. Mit einer Neuedition ausgewählter politischer Schriften (Reinbek: Rowohlt 2007), 63–84.

3. See ibid., 272, English translation by myself (with the support of Jamie Kreiner).

4. Ibid., 272.

5. Ibid., 106, 113.

6. Cf. the edition in ibid., 268–36.

7. See Luhmann und die Kulturtheorie, ed. Günter Burkert and Gunter Runkel (Stuttgart: Suhrkamp, 2003).

8. Günther Burkert, “Niklas Luhmann: ein Theoretiker der Kultur?,” in Burkert and Runkel, Luhmann und die Kulturtheorie, 11–39.

9. Niklas Luhmann, “Kultur als historischer Begriff,” in Gesellschaftsstruktur und Semantik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1999), 4:31–54.

10. See the still helpful overview in Jörg Fisch, “Zivilisation, Kultur,” in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, ed. Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhard Kosselleck (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1992), 7:679–774; one interesting example of one of many more recent studies on modern “culture” is Michael C. Carhart, The Science of Culture in Enlightenment Germany (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). I owe the reference to this interesting study to Frederic Clark (Princeton).

11. Niklas Luhmann, Die Kunst der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1997). Here and at other places where Luhmann discusses first- and second-order observations, he refers to the work of Heinz von Foerster; see his Observing Systems (Seaside, CA: Intersystems, 1981).

12. Luhmann, “Kultur als historischer Begriff,” 32.

13. See ibid., 52–54.

14. Andrew Sartori, Bengal in Global Concept History: Culturalism in the Age of Capital (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). I thank Bhavani Raman for the reference.

15. Luhmann, “Kultur als historischer Begriff,” 48.

16. See the discussion of cultural practices in Dan Rodgers’s introduction to this volume.

17. Luhmann, “Kultur als historischer Begriff,” 41; see also Dirk Baecker, Die Form der Kultur (Berlin: Stadtlichter Presse, 2006).

18. Peter Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350–550 AD (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012).

19. German historians have been discussing the question of how to use Luhmann’s concepts for some time; see, for instance, Geschichte und Systemtheorie, ed. Frank Becker (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2004).

20. See Plutarch, The Malice of Herodotus, trans. Anthony J. Bowen (Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1992); Augustinus, De civitate Dei, ed. Bernhart Dombart and Alphons Kalb, Corpus Christianorum 47–48 (Turnhout: Brepols 1955), esp. books xv–xviii.

21. See the contribution of Peter Brown in this volume.