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A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S All the essaysexcept Chapter 6 have previously been published. A shorter version of that chapter was presented at a conference entitled "Political Cultures of Criticism," held in November 1991 at the South Asian Institute of Heidelberg University. Chapter i is a revised version of an article that appeared in Man in 1983, and Chapter 2 an expanded version of my contribution to Vernacular Christianity: Essays in the Social Anthropology of Religion Presented to Godfrey Lienhardt, edited by W. Jamesand D. H. Johnson, and published byJASO, Oxford, in 1988. The remaining essays have been subjected to very minor, mainly stylistic , changes. Chapters 3 and 4 originally appeared in Economy and Society in 1983 and 1987, respectively. Chapter 5 was part of Writing Culture, edited by J. Clifford and G. Marcus, and published by the University of California Press in 1986. Politicsand Society first published Chapter 7 in 1990, and Cultural Anthropology published Chapter 8 in the sameyear.My thanks to the editors and publishers of the above for permission to reprint. A number of people have read and criticized these essays at one stage or another, and I record my gratitude to them: Ismail Abdallah, Rifaat Aboul-Haj, Meena Alexander, TanyaBaker, Jose Casanova, John and Molly Dixon, Michael Herzfeld, Charles Hirschkind, U. Kalpagam , Rodney Needham, Keith Nield, Bhikhu Parekh, Rayna Rapp, David Schneider, David Scott, and SamWheeler III. 325 This page intentionally left blank ...

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