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Draws an analogy between the threats posed by social heterogeneity in the USA and the threats posed by differing national allegiances in the EU. The author reminds USA that core political identities can vary over time and that early conceptions of citizenship in the USA focussed almost exclusively on state, not federal, citizenship; in his view, within unitary states communities of identity are fine so long as individuals do not conflate these with their core political identity. In a federal system, the problem or challenge is exactly that of belonging to several political communities. Lacorne argues that pure constitutional patriotism will not suffice, since individuals require a substantial citizenship; what is needed instead are ‘common and concrete political experiences’ that would give rise to ‘a new European ethics of responsibility’. The two sections of the chapter are: The Irrelevance of the American Model of Federal Citizenship; and The Relevance of the American Multicultural Model.

The strength of Lake Mills' plant-community identity, its historic vertical integration, and its domestic market orientation all combined to inhibit cooperation with other plants within APV to improve the effectiveness of the parent company as a multinational association. There was, in short, no American equivalent to the Danish Mafia, nor could such a network be easily imagined from the perspective of Lake Mills. Without the institutional resources and external allies to support a more expansive vision of the plant's future, local unionists and managers understandably fell back on a slew of defensive carrot-and-stick strategies for maintaining its position within APV. On the positive side, they sought to reinforce Lake Mills' indispensability to the multinational by providing a quick turnaround service to the company's large US customer base, and by developing new products tailored to US technical standards.

It has sometimes been argued that the larger regional formations of the 15th century resulted in greater market integration. It is a contentious argument, and one that is difficult to apply to Lucca—precisely because Lucca never made the political transformation on which the argument is based. In so far as the thesis contains an implicit comparison between city‐ and regional state, 15th‐century Lucca fits quite neatly into the conventional image of the former. Laws continued to be passed that banned all artisanal and retail activity in the Sei Miglia. Legislation was less restrictive with regard to some of the small towns in the vicariates. But here, too, state policy aimed to confine rural manufacture to the production of goods and necessities for local peasant consumption—a fact that the chapter has tried to reconcile with the manufacture of quality goods for export that was actually taking place in some of the larger centres. The chapter ends with a social history of the vicariates; an examination of mountain civilization; and with a reassessment of community identity even amongst villagers of the Lucchese plain.

This chapter discusses the example of a slightly different kind of local history from the Bhojpuri region, which represents just one attempt among many in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to bring ‘history’ to the witness-stand and assert a community identity in terms both of temporality and territoriality. The example — Sheikh Muhammad Ali Hasan's Waqeat-o-Hadesat: Qasba Mubarakpur—takes the form of a history or chronicle of events in the qasba prepared in the 1880s by a scion of a local Muslim zamindari family. The importance of the text is illustrated by drawing on alternative reconstructions of the same history as found in other sources.

The conclusion argues that Iron Age Levantine luxury arts played a central role in generating and maintaining community identities through their entanglement with human practices that forged collective memories. In particular, the artworks’ visual and formal effects, which can be understood as style, reside at the heart of these entanglements, catalyzing individual and collective experiences through their affective properties. Theories of materiality that underlie the book’s arguments are expanded upon and it is proposed that art and artistic styles contribute to the very formation of social communities. Some of the main conclusions derived from the different studies in the book include the need to question the autochthonous nature of style as bound to geographical locale and the problematic implications of using ethno-linguistic and geo-cultural designations, such as Phoenician, for artistic styles of the Iron Age Levant. The conclusion also proposes that over the course of the Iron Age, especially from the eighth century on, ethno-linguistic community identities became increasing entrenched, and it is the later textual legacy of these identities that has obscured the fluid, networked character of the earlier centuries.

This chapter briefly summarizes and contextualizes the book's contributions. The focus is on contextualizing both social identities that occur at the level of the community and those which take place at the level of the individual.

This chapter introduces the corpus of objects that form the core of the book. Because the large majority of works has been excavated at sites outside the Levant, scholarship has concentrated on questions of attribution and location of production. The chapter presents a case for a generally Levantine attribution for most of the ivories and metalworks and for their initial use and significance within this Levantine context. Encapsulating the narrative flow of the individual chapters, it also sketches the basic argument that these works belonged to communities of stylistic practice that catalyzed collective memories and community identity in both the Iron Age Levant and elsewhere in the ancient Near East and eastern Mediterranean.

Echeverrí’s contribution to the volume, alone among the essays, crosses the temporal divide separating colonial from independence Latin America. She argues that liberal elites pushed for a notion of law and justice rooted in a principle of formal equality and sovereignty, one at odds with colonial ideas of vassalage and ideas of justice rooted in protection of the vulnerable from the powerful. In effect, Colombian elites articulated a vision undercutting indigenous collective rights in favor of individual rights as citizens. Natives, by contrast, continued to assert collective tribute obligations and to demand the king’s substantive justice in protecting corporate and community identities, as they had done for centuries prior to independence. Nevertheless, elites’ reliance on sovereignty to ground law redistributed power within the legal system in ways that challenged intelligibility and made it more difficult for people to defend communal rights.

This chapter examines the intersections of race, ethnicity, and slavery in Spanish America and the African Diaspora by focusing on the development of African Diasporic ethnicity in Mexico City to 1650. Drawing on marriage records from early seventeenth-century Mexico City, it considers how Africans constructed multiple new ethnic and community identities in Spanish America. Through an analysis of selection patterns of testigos (wedding witnesses) alongside marriage choice, the chapter highlights the networks of social relations formed by slaves. It shows that ethnic Africans tended to marry and form communities of association with Africans from the same general catchment areas. It argues that the foundations of the ethnic communities under formation were not intact African ethnicities, pan-African identities, or race-based identities. Rather, slave marriages in Mexico City point to the creation of African diasporic ethnicities that were spontaneously articulated in the Diaspora. Africans formed new ethnic identities based upon Old World backgrounds and commonalities while in Diaspora.

The third chapter takes us to the issue of community identities, particularly in respect of the Muslim community and the backward and untouchable castes. This chapter argues that while on the one hand there were tendencies towards syncretism across the Hindu–Muslim community boundaries, there were in both communities contradictory tendencies in the name of ‘purification’ on religious lines. Further, the chapter argues that while on the one hand the so-called Hindu social order accommodated the lowest castes, on the other hand there was a rigid hierarchy and abominable inequality. The general picture is one of tendencies towards integration, counteracted by tendencies towards social exclusion in respect of non-Hindu communities and the lower castes.

This chapter offers an account of the desperate economic and social situation on the Virgin Islands prior to their transfer from Denmark to the United States, setting the stage for the argument about the navy's positive contributions. The story of the United States Navy Band of the Virgin Islands follows its inception, expanding activities, and social initiatives. This band served as a bridge between the navy and native Virgin Islanders, between white and black. The band's public concerts, educational outreach, and tours contributed to the development of both the islands' community identity and their tourist industry. Adams is an exemplar of a self-made man who took full advantage of shifting circumstance to realize what many thought impossible—a vibrant musical career in a location once considered lacking in opportunity. By working with the navy, Adams reached new heights of artistic performance and creativity.

This chapter explores the circumatlantic visual history of African water deity Mami Wata and traces its evolution, contexts, and significances in shaping personal and community identities. It considers three episodes in the visual history of Mami Wata: a European representation of an exotic other that became implicated in Mami Wata's art history in Africa, case histories of the assemblages of this European image and other alien objects on Mami Wata shrines in Africa, and the representation and transformation of Mami Wata into an African Catholic saint in the Americas. It argues that images are expressions of agency and self-actualization.

This chapter discusses the nature of the Śrīvaiṣṇava hagiographies or guruparamparās, their relation to the larger textual tradition of the community, the notion of a canon and its relation to community identity, and finally the structure of the narratives within the larger textual framework of the hagiographies. Despite the similarities of themes in the hagiographical texts, there are differences in their internal structures, thus presenting us with diverse representations of Rāmānuja’s life. Section one of this chapter briefly analyses the structure of the hagiographical tradition. Section two discusses the context in which this textual tradition developed; section three examines the textual tradition in general, and section four analyses the role of these texts in generating historical consciousness and constructing a specific historical memory or memories in general. It is emphasized that the hagiographical texts created a normative paradigm that defined the Śrīvaiṣṇava identity and emerged as a reference point for the self—definition of the community.

Geoffrey Clark’s chapter on the culture of insurance describes the changes that came about with the advent of modern insurance especially in Britain in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and how they prepared the grounds for reinsurance. The chapter describes insurance and related forms of probabilistic reasoning and practice as a comparatively late development in the quest for material security and psychological relief from the hazards of life. The global growth of reinsurance services from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day may be seen as the culmination of a prolonged process by which age-old forms of mutual aid and locally provided compensation have gradually been supplanted by impersonal indemnifying institutions operating according to rules-based protocols that take no heed of community identity, ethnicity, or religion.