** Introduction

* Part I — Some Thoughts On The Origins of Our Current Predicament

** 1 — Manners, Deference, and Private Property: or, Elements For A General Theory of Hierarchy

*** Joking and Avoidance, Substance and Property

*** On Hierarchy

*** The Generalization of Avoidance

*** Education and the Fate of Youth

*** English Puritans

*** Perspectives

*** Bibliography

** 2 — The Very Idea of Consumption: Desire, Phantasms, and the Aethetics of Destruction from Medieval Times to the Present

*** Etymologies

*** Theories of Desire

*** Lovers and Consumers

*** Complication I: Individualism

*** Complication II: Shifting Lines of Class and Gender

*** On Having Your Cake and Eating It Too, and Certain Problems Incumbent Therein

*** Sacrifice

*** Conclusions: But What About Consumerism?

*** Bibliography

** 3 — Turning Modes of Production Inside Out: or, Why Capitalism Is A Transformation of Slavery (Short Version)

*** Observation 1: The concept of the “mode of production” was distinctly under-formulated.

*** Observation 2: The concept of the “mode of production” largely dissolved when removed from the framework of the state.

*** Observation 3: The main result of the eclipse of the mode of production concept has been a naturalization of capitalism. This becomes particularly evident when looking at the way “continuationists” treat wage-labor and slavery.

*** Bibliography

** 4 — Fetishism As Social Creativity: or, Fetishes Are Gods In The Process of Construction

*** Why Fetishism?

*** Pietz on Fetishism

*** Fetishes and Social Contracts: Two Case Studies

*** The Materiality of Power

*** Different Sorts of Social Contract

*** Our Own Actions Coming Back At Us

*** Necessary Illusions?

*** Bibliography

* Part II — Provisional Autonomous Zone: Dilemmas of Authority in Rural Madagascar

** 5 — Provisional Autonomous Zone: or, The Ghost-State in Madagascar

*** Arivonimamo and Betafo

*** The Very Existence of the State

*** The State as Guarantor of Property Relations

*** Provisional Autonomous Zone

*** A Final Question

*** Bibliography

** 6 — Dancing With Corpses Reconsidered: An Interpretation of Famadihana (In Arivonimamo, Madagascar)

*** Some Background

*** A Capsule Description

*** Descent Groups

*** “Playing with Corpses”

*** Cursing and Taboo

*** An Initial Synthesis

*** A Politics of Movement

*** Local Families and Their Tombs

*** The Adults Are All Dead

*** Gender and the Politics of Memory

*** Famadihana as Reversal

*** Ancestral Blessings

*** A War Against Death?

*** Some Conclusions

*** Bibliography

** 7 — Love Magic and Political Morality in Central Madagascar, 1875–1990

*** The Argument

*** On the Ethics of Magical Practice

*** On the Inducement of States of “Amorous Madness”

*** A Professional Perspective

*** Varieties of Ody Fitia Today: or, The Borders of Morality Revisited

*** Background: Royal Service and Slavery

*** Forms of Labor

*** Fanompoana as Slavery

*** Witches Who Go Out at Night

*** So: Why Women?

*** Conclusions

*** Bibliography

** 8 — Oppression

*** PART I Bearing Burdens within the Household

*** PART II Emblematic Labor and the Nineteenth-Century Kingdom

*** The Ambivalence of “Carrying”

*** PART III Arivonimamo and Its Spirit Mediums

**** Spirit Possession

**** Zanadrano

*** PART IV: CONCLUSIONS

**** On the Morality of Hierarchy

**** Terms of Conversation

**** A Plea for Dialogic Relativism

*** Bibliography

* Part III — Direct Action, Direct Democracy, and Social Theory

** 9 — The Twilight of Vanguardism

*** Why So Few Anarchists in the Academy?

*** A Very Brief History of the Idea of Vanguardism

*** Non-Alienated Production

*** Bibliography

** 10 — Social Theory As Science and Utopia: or, Does The Prosect of a General Sociological Theory Still Mean Anything in an Age of Globalization?

*** ON SOCIAL REALITY

**** Some Notes on the History of Comparative Ethnography

**** On Sociology and Wreckage

*** QUESTIONS ABOUT GLOBALIZATION

**** Conceptualizing the Moment

**** Autonomy and Revolutionary Consensus

*** CONCERNING REGULATORY PRINCIPLES

**** In the Absence of Regulatory Principles

**** Prefigurative Social Theory?

** 11 — There Never Was a West: or, Democracy Emerges From the Spaces In Between

*** Part I: On the Incoherence Of the Notion of the “Western Tradition”

**** Parenthetical Note: On the Slipperiness of the Western Eye

**** World-Systems Reconfigured

*** Part II: Democracy Was Not Invented

*** Part III: On the Emergence of the “Democratic Ideal”

*** Part IV: Recuperation

**** The “Influence Debate”

*** Part V: The Crisis of the State

**** The Impossible Marriage

*** Bibliography

** 12 — On The Phenomenology of Giant Puppets: Broken Windows, Imaginary Jars of Urine, and the Cosmolgical Role of the Police in American Culture

*** A Problematic

*** Media Images

*** What then of puppets?

*** Symbolic Warfare On the Part of the Police

*** Rallying the Troops

*** Analysis I: The Hollywood Movie Principle

*** Analysis II: Creative Destruction and the Privitization of Desire

*** Analysis III: The Laws of War

*** So Why Do Cops Hate Puppets?

*** Some Very Tenuous Conclusions

*** Bibliography