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This chapter concerns claims to the religious in federal Indian law as part of broader claims made in the register of sovereignty. It follows a number of crucial cases that concerned the shape of treaty-protected rights to fishing, hunting, and gathering off-reservation, notably those in the Great Lakes region and the salmon cases in the Pacific Northwest, rulings that cleared the way for the Makah whale hunt. The chapter argues these cases are not simply about political sovereignty or about the economic value of the treaty rights. They are also about the religious and cultural importance of those sacred practices and how the practices themselves constitute peoplehood. It also signals where protecting religion as peoplehood, under international law and especially under federal Indian law, can have its limits, particularly in the short term.

This chapter extends the discussion of “Religion as Peoplehood” beyond the very real limits of federal Indian law. It explores the possibilities and drawbacks of increasing appeals to Indigenous rights under international human rights law. The possibilities of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples are quite rich, as are its implementation apparatus for protecting Native religions under Indigenous rights. However, without having to define them as such, the approach is slow to grow domestic legal teeth in the United States. Its incremental development as authoritative law can, as this chapter shows, be strengthened by making clearer associations with U.S. religious freedom law.

Examining cases of anti-Jewish and anti-Catholic violence alongside anti-Mormonism helps us better understand not only the historical encounter of religious minorities in the postbellum South but also the multivalent dynamics of religion in a conflict setting. Religion played different roles in the ways that Mormons, Jews, and Catholics precipitated, experienced, and responded to southern violence as religious outsiders. In each case, the victims were accused of sinning against the social order, and violence (actual and threatened) became the means of punishing the transgressors and compelling them to conform to southern cultural and religious orthodoxies. The extent of religious violence suffered by Mormons, Catholics, and Jews directly related to the degree to which these various groups deployed their particular religious peoplehood. For Mormons and other religious minorities, relative inclusion occurred only after a lengthy process of accommodation and compromise in which certain minority rights were renounced even as others were realized.

Nationalist populist leaders today often claim they will protect “who we are” against cultural and economic threats and corrupt elites, speaking in essentialist terms, even as scholars portray national identities as constructed. But because we have failed to recognize how all human identities are partly constructed, scholars have not accepted the need to compose better stories of peoplehood to combat discriminatory and repressive stories. This book shows how to do so.

This chapter addresses the development of the colonial state and the construction of the colonial capital city, Khartoum, as well as its extensions as progressive forms of colonization and modes of control. Khartoum was the colonial city, the citadel, and the dual center of operation for British direct and indirect rule. Through these modes of control, the simultaneous operations of differential arrangements of identity management, which produced peoplehoods and differentiation as well as the country's different spheres of power, different Sudanese community-of-the-state groups developed and grew, working with each other as well as with other emerging social groups—with and against that state. They all worked as “intimate enemies” both to build and to impede the very existence of that state.

This chapter discusses the Palestinian moment of liberation. It recognizes that Hamas presents an extreme case because Palestinian postcoloniality has, to an extent, been concretized by way of the establishment of the Palestinian Authority and its accompanying institutions under the Oslo Accords. Nonetheless, the case of Hamas shows that liberation is not entirely contingent on the singular moment when the colonizer withdraws from the lands of the colonized. Instead, the colonial subject begins the process of conjuring up a liberated peoplehood while still in a colonial condition. Thus, in the case of Palestine, this means that Gaza is not just a story of siege, war, and the challenges Hamas faces while maintaining its dual role or its growing authoritarianism. If one considers the long moment of liberation to have begun already, one also notices that a Gaza Strip under the canopy of a single Palestinian leadership becomes, albeit minimally, reminiscent of the eventual liberated State of Palestine as a single territorial unit, inhabited by the Palestinian people and ruled by a Palestinian government.

This book highlights the ways in which Paul’s letters to the Corinthians deploy various rhetorics of ethnicity to persuade or challenge audiences in Corinth. It demonstrates how questions of peoplehood, ethnicity, identity, cultic practice, leadership, and diet are intertwined in Paul’s rhetoric. The book also dwells on the haunted inheritance of race and spectral presences and challenges the assumption that early Christianity was constructed as a universal, nonethnic form of religion.

This chapter is divided into two main parts. The first part comprises a theological and cultural analysis of the Highland evangelical movement. The second part enquires into the development of Highland ‘peoplehood’ and the cultural awakening of pro-Gaelic sentiment. The social and economic aspects of these processes are examined and there are case studies of the contribution of two prominent Highlanders, the journalist John Murdoch and the leading Free Church minister, John Kennedy.

This chapter argues that it is not property that should determine personhood or peoplehood, but the other way round. It explores how the emergence of biocultural rights asks for a fundamental rethink of property jurisprudence itself. It notes that the very notion of personhood, and hence the juridical subject in liberal democracies, is based on an assumption that a right to property is integral to what we understand as a person. The chapter seeks to answer the question regarding the moral limits of commodification. The chapter also attempts to clarify what our understanding of personhood or ‘human flourishing’ should be, to enable us to distinguish between personal property that should not be commodified and fungible property that can be.

This chapter explores how intellectuals of the Progressive Era, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Horace Kallen, Randolph Bourne, and John Dewey, sought to define a strain of Americanism that not only celebrates ethnic and racial difference but also nurtures a unified civic culture. It considers these thinkers' efforts to formulate a kind of liberal democracy rooted in a civic foundation consistent with cultural pluralism, rather than embedded in Anglo-American culture and history. It also examines their argument that a sense of community, or “peoplehood,” is essential to effective government and describes their call for an ideal of American national identity that balances a sense of civic solidarity with the principles of individuality and cultural inclusiveness. Finally, the chapter discusses these intellectuals' views about patriotism in relation to internationalism.

This chapter explains that cultural outgroups, those who fall outside the traditionally restrictive visions of the American people, offer more cautions to modern theorists of the Second Amendment, and fear that the amendment narrowly defines the people. As a result, outgroups support the warning against exclusivist populist theories. However, these groups have also the most to gain from a broadly inclusive populist theory, because in the long run the only solution to violence against outgroups is popular unity on the appropriate use of force. The condition of outgroups gives the most compelling reason not to concede the hope for peoplehood expansively defined, as this will be an essential component in the relevancy of the Second Amendment in the new century.

This chapter discusses religious consciousness in working-class Detroit. Working peoples' religious consciousness emerged out of a complex, ambiguous, sometimes paradoxical worldview. Scrutinizing religious consciousness offers insight into workers' attitudes and beliefs on a wide number of important subjects with both moral and political implications: why people were made to work, what it meant to be a man or a woman, how ethnic peoplehood was defined, what was right and what was wrong, how to live a good life, and what a person could expect from human existence. Indeed, working-class religions created a complex set of idioms and practices for mediating the ambivalences of industrial life. Despite the significant differences separating immigrant Catholics and migrant African American workers, both Catholics and African Americans made a religious consciousness that forged a sense of tradition and peoplehood, while simultaneously providing a source of richness and meaning for individual lives.

This chapter discusses Franz Rosenzweig’s political theology in light of the tension between nationalism and cosmopolitanism. Christian political theology is based on a message of universal love and brotherhood, but Rosenzweig points out how the reception of this message in the West took the form of nationalism and a sanctification of imperialism. This chapter offers a new reading of Rosenzweig’s wartime unfinished work on geopolitics, Globus, as an early meditation on what we now call “globalization.” It then reconstructs his masterpiece The Star of Redemption as a treatise on political theology that opens an alternative path to peoplehood based on the possibility of a cosmopolitan empire of law that is not territorially delimited and an access to citizenship that is not ethno-culturally predetermined. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the contested interpretation that Rosenzweig gives of Islam in the Star of Redemption and the problem of “holy war.”

During the early twentieth century, Kiowa people expertly deployed material culture as symbols of themselves as a people. Beadwork specifically illustrated the significance of kinship and is use and exchange among people, which constructed family relationships and a sense of belongingness. Beadwork and other expressive forms were highlighted in the American Indian Exposition, a fair, and an event, which provided a venue of public display that encouraged intertribal competition. The chapter also examines the representation of young women as American Indian Exposition princesses.

This chapter explores how certain vectors of interpretation and thought in Jewish tradition have led to a kind of pious arrogance deeply imbedded in the Jewish self-concept. Jewish theological arrogance is rooted in the central concept of peoplehood, or am yisrael. Three supernatural attributes are assigned to am yisrael: (1) eternality; (2) moral (and perhaps intellectual) superiority and authority; and (3) oneness, including indivisibility. The association of these attributes with Israel lies at the heart of Jewish self-understanding, since corporate identity is fundamental to Judaism's theological structure. The chapter first investigates the sources of these aggrandizing attributions. Second, it explores whether the attribution of these qualities to am yisrael is necessary in order for Judaism to remain coherent. Finally, it excavates resources within the tradition for a more humble understanding of am yisrael.

The Introduction establishes Anna Sokolow’s choreography among revolutionary spectatorial currents of the 1930s international Left as it aligned with Jewish peoplehood and shows how these values remained present through Sokolow’s career. It positions Sokolow’s choreography within leftist transnationalism; it methodologically renders her dancing body from archival evidence through discourse analysis to ground the book’s discussion; and it defines Jewish cultural and aesthetic elements in Sokolow’s work to explain how her dances’ Jewish signifiers engendered their meaning-making processes. Arguing that Ashkenazi Jewishness undergirds Sokolow’s choreography, the Introduction shows how communism, revolutionary modernism, gender presentation, and social action in Sokolow’s dances were part of Sokolow’s milieu as a member of the “second generation” of American Ashkenazi Jews. Sokolow’s professional arc from Martha Graham dancer and proletarian choreographer to established midcentury modernist dancemaker reflects the assimilation of her generation from the marginalized working class to the American mainstream.