The American Historical Review October 2005 [antikvár]

In This Issue This issue contains three articles and an AHR Forum. The articles are about the politics of faith in Colonial Mexico, nationalism in West Africa, and the utility of material culture as a source for historians. The Forum brings four scholars together to assess the nature of the "Constitutional Revolution of 1937." In addition, the issue includes our usual array of book and film reviews. Articles William B. Taylor gives an account of rural devotion in late colonial Mexico. It revolves around a loss later remembered by rural devotees in ways that made the place of a miracle of a self-restoring crucifix more important than the relic itself. More broadly, it is about the politics of faith and the importance of place expressed in the direction and redirection of an official story. Based on several unusually well-documented episodes of dispute and religious practice, the article takes on the difficult issue of how cultural practices are reenacted and appropriated—what Michel de Certeau called "the secondary production hidden in the process of utilization." It attempts to reach beyond the ideas of center-periphery and a hierarchy of shrines; to address elusive questions of religion and the negotiation of colonial circumstances by Indian villagers; and to contribute to the ongoing interest of Latin Americanists in South Asian scholarship on colonial and postcolonial experiences. Elizabeth Schmidt examines the post-World War II nationalist movement in Guinea, French West Africa, drawing conclusions with broad ramifications for the non-Western world. The Guinean case demonstrates that anticolonial nationalisms' embrace of heterogeneous populations belonged to a progressive political tradition of "inclusive nationalism." Western-educated elites often led these nationalist movements, but they did not initiate them. Rather, elites found support among popular groups already engaged in movements against the state by identifying issues that had mass appeal and including them in the nationalist agenda. Indeed, elites and nonelites alike shaped the ideas, objectives, strategies, and methods of the nationalist movements. While elites contributed European ideas and models of nationalism, the nonliterate majority brought elements of indigenous culture to the movement. This case study in nationalist mobilization shows us how people were