In February 1989, in Pune, a city of a million people in the western Indian state of Maharashtra, I visited a simple outdoor pottery workshop. It consisted of a shallow pit kiln surrounded by eleven spaces shaded by gunny sacks on a flat area at the top of stairs leading down to a large river that ran through the city center. The families who used this space were kumbhars, members of a Hindu caste group found throughout the subcontinent. In India to teach, I thought that time spent with these potters might provide a perspective on Sinhalese potters I had known in a Sri Lankan village in the 1970s. The Indian potters were willing, so this first visit was followed by many more over the next four months.

Have women in third-world societies been made second-class citizens by colonialism, incorporation into the capitalist world economy, and class formation? Or are women relegated to less prestigious and less economically rewarding roles by patriarchal ideologies and practices the origins of which lie in indigenous cultures? Much of the anthropological scholarship on women can be divided between those who emphasize the relative importance of capitalism (for example, Leacock 1981; Nash and Fernandez-Kelly 1983; Boserup 1970) and those who emphasize culture (for example, Ortner and Whitehead 1981; Schlegel 1990; Rosaldo 1974) as determinants of gender roles and relations.

The first years following independence in Africa were an exciting time for scholars who rushed off to observe the emerging politics of new states across the continent. The analytical frameworks these scholars brought with them for the purpose of interpreting what they saw were largely borrowed from mainstream models derived from the study of American politics that were widely popular at the time. However, soon after the early independence era (1956–1966), it became obvious that a sole focus on the formal structures and functions of state and society revealed little about the actual practice of politics. Across the continent, governments were suffering from constitutional failures, an inability to offer a consistent application of regulatory mechanisms or enforceable law; and few states could even extract sufficient revenue to support either pre-existing colonial-era governmental structures or the many new ambitious projects undertaken by politicians soon after independence.

Don Anselmo, the protagonist of a story by Mesonero Romanos, was a wealthy established gentleman in one of Andalusia's leading towns. Young, good-looking, affable, and generous, Anselmo held all the virtues and qualities that can make a man happy, except for one weakness: an overbearing ambition for becoming important. First, he did everything possible to attain a position of power in his town. Unsatisfied with merely local power, he decided to leave his house and possessions in the hands of an administrator and emigrate to Madrid, the only place in Spain where one could achieve a brilliant political career. Once in Madrid he spent his time and his money looking for protection and political connections, a process in which he experienced only personal humiliation and frustration. In the end, Don Anselmo, once a wealthy provincial gentleman, became a failed politician who abandoned both his family and his estate. Don Anselmo's sorry destiny illustrates, according to Mesonero, one of the worse diseases of Spanish society: the empleomania of its elites, a terrible misjudgment that provoked the abandon of productive activities and contributed to the country's backwardness.

When Cantonese cartoonist Liao Bingxiong (1915–) mounted his show, The Cat Kingdom (Maoguo chunqiu), at the Sino-Sovfet Cultural Association (Zhong-Su wenhua xiehui) in Chongqing—China's wartime capital—in March 1946, he was prompted by more than an artistic urge: He intended to issue a strong criticism of the Guomindang (Nationalist) government for its inability to deal with the country's rapidly deteriorating situation. The show was an overwhelming success, “creating a sensation in this hilly city,” in the words of one contemporary artist. The show was greeted with equal enthusiasm when it was put on later in other cities, such as Chengdu and Kunming. Such a favorable reception reflected both the artistry of Liao's works and, more important, the relevance of cartoons as a powerful tool for airing opinion.

The profusion of fresh flowers in Italian graveyards amazed nineteenth-century travellers from America used to more severe practices. In England, too, flowers were sparse. Nor was their paucity unintentional. Strong sentiments were involved, for despite the increasing pomp of Victorian funerals, much ambivalence was displayed about elaborate rituals and offerings in the Anglo-American world—“a green grassy turf is all I crave,” wrote Beattie in the Minstrel. Even Loudon, the great architect of the new rural cemeteries in England, was reluctant to make a place for flowers in his plans.