The Iranian revolution of 1979 presents a case in which religion has stimulated profound social change, rather than serving only as a basis for social integration. Although scholars have recently been reminded of the revolutionary potential of religious commitments, the view that religion tends to inhibit large-scale social change continues to enjoy currency. It may be that, in the light of events in Iran in the last five years, observers of Islamic societies will now be tempted to overstress the revolutionary tendencies of that great world religion. Yet it is difficult to exaggerate the force and depth of feeling which Shi'i belief and practice has generated in Iran for the purpose of the structural transformation of society.

The Hutterites are an Anabaptist sect that was founded early in the sixteenth century. Their society today is characterized on the one hand by a traditional social order and on the other by the pursuit of rationally structured economic activities. How is it possible to combine these seemingly contradictory characteristics in the daily life of communities whose populations hardly exceed 140 members? Would it not be much more reasonable for Hutterites not only to uphold their traditional social order, but also to follow conservative economic practices as some of the Old Order Amish do? How is it possible that a Hutterite individual can at one moment give detailed technical instructions for repair of a complicated machine over shortwave radio and an hour later expose himself to a religious sermon, the text of which has not changed for 350 years?

Early on the cold morning of Wednesday, December 2, 1885, a crowd beganto gather in the forecourt of a handsome brick church on the outskirts ofDetroit. The church, only recently blessed, was the Polish Roman Catholicchurch of Saint Albertus; the crowd, eventually numbering perhaps eighthundred, were Polish immigrants. Most of them were women. Shortly after 6:00, seven policemen marched into the convent opposite the church and soon emerged escorting two Polish priests. The group moved toward the church, but at the church steps the crowd—“the women,” according to witnesses—began to jeer at and jostle the priests, and even pelted them with gravel. The police responded vigorously, but they and the priests were pushed from the door several times before they were finally able to enter.

The prevalence and attraction of dissident sectarian movements today raises anumber of significant questions about both their participants and their role incontemporary society. The present study examines one such group, the Spiritualistsof Mexico, who form not only a dissident religious movement butalso provide an important health care delivery system (Finkler 1980b, 1981a,1981c, 1983). While the Mexican example is the focus of our attention, the discussion has broader implications because movements of the Spiritualist type exist in many cultures (e.g., Berger 1969; Burridge.1969; LaBarre 1971; Lanternari 1963, 1974; Lewis 1971; Wilson 1963).

During the early 1830s Russian officials drew up plans to reform the educational system of foreign colonists in southern Russia. The colonies of Mennonites there welcomed the proposals as evidence of official interest in plans already formulated by leading Mennonites. In certain quarters, however, educational reform met fierce resistance. Around 1833, Heinrich Balzer, a Lehrer of the Kleine Gemeinde, a small schismatic group in the Mennonite colony at Molochnaia, wrote a number of tracts warning fellow brethren and the other colony Aeltesten of the dangers of close involvement with the “world”, particularly through educational reform. One pamphlet was concerned with the categories of “understanding and reason” (Verstand und Vernuft).

Considerable interest is again being expressed, in the public domain as well asin the academy, in the processes of change-ideational and pragmatic-which seem to characterize Islamic societies; societies, that is to say, of thosewho regard themselves as muslim, acceptors of the revealed law or “way“ shari'a of God. This interest is not new, but it seems to present itself anew in each generation, partly perhaps because it is something that has concerned Muslims themselves for most of the fourteen centuries that have elapsed sincethe religion of islām was proclaimed afresh and finally, by the Prophet Muhammad, in 622. Muslims are of course not alone in being required to see life as ideally governed by an unchanging set of rules which must be understood and conformed to, for this much is true of many other systems of belief which rest upon transcendent authority. It is sometimes held, however, that of all such believers in transcendence, that is, in a transcendent moral law, Muslims have an especially hard time in bringing life as (and where, and under what other cultural constraints) it is led into conjunction with the enjoined ideal.

It has lately become commonplace to suspect that most household and family structures in history were much the same. Under the pugnacious influence of the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, historians have grown wary of drawing attention to apparently abnormal household structures, and perhaps weary of reiterating the predominance in northwestern European societies of the simple or nuclear family household. Ireland, however, was not easily squeezed into the Cambridge standard model as generated for preindustrial England. Not only were Irish households before the First World War uncomfortably large, but their bulges appeared in the wrong places. Admittedly these divergences were not great; yet to students following the path of Conrad M. Arensberg and Solon T. Kimball they betokened a more fundamental divergence between the underlying structures of English and Irish families.

The modern history of Asians in the New World is a long and complex one beginning with South Asian indentured laborers brought to the West Indies in the early decades of the nineteenth century and continuing into the present, when, in recent years, wholly apart from Southeast Asian refugees, Asians have amounted to about one in four of the legal migrants to the United States. Almost all of the literature about these immigrants and their descendants has been particularistic, focussing on one particular ethnic or national group residing within a limited geographical area, often as narrow as a particular city. This being the case, the articles in this journal by Stephen I. Thompson (1979) and Bernard Wong (1978) about the degree of relative assimilation of East Asians in Peru and the United States should be welcomed by all scholars interested in comparative ethnicity. Although the comments to follow are largely negative they should not be considered as dismissive of the value of the empirical research of either scholar; I have learned from each and hope to continue to do so.