The question of populism in Uganda was investigated by Professor D. A. Low in this journal in 1964.1 He argued that the concept of populism was appropriate to describe the political agitation by the independent small landholders and poor peasants against the breakdown of the traditional hierarchical structure of Buganda under the impact of colonial rule. The populists were particularly concerned to reduce their economic disabilities through control of the marketing system for cotton, but at the same time were concerned to articulate ‘the kingdom's corporate solidarity’. To that extent Buganda populism was socially conservative, though it may have seemed radical to the colonial rulers.

Such is the power of early conditioning, that it is only after many years of reflection that I have come to question the university of the class struggle. Economic exploitation, and an intimate relationship between economic and political power, may be almost universal. But there are some societies in which the relationship to the means of production does not define the political struggle, and in which class conflict is not the source of revolutionary change.

One of the weaknesses of students of African development studies has been their inability to speak in the idiom of Africans. Anthropologists, despite their often magnificent contributions of earlier times in the field of ethnography must find a new role in the present state of African studies. The tendency to conceive precolonial developments in Africa in terms of primitivity, tribality, and feudality, has conveyed the erroneous impression that Africa is characterized by the static nature of its past. In other words, the dynamics of the growth of African societies has traditionally not been their concern. Unfortunately, the African historian who should have been particularly concerned with this aspect of study has, until recently, proved to be of little help. He has first to win the battle of African history, the mopping up operations of which are still going on. But he, too, must now realize that a history of specifically political developments is an anachronism: precolonial Africa had no clear-cut distinction between the political, the economic, and the social. To be meaningful, history must be conceived in its totality. Finally, the economist seems to speak least in the idiom of theAfrican. It is ‘fashionable’ for him, it has been pointed out, to assume that ‘the African economy’ ought not to work in a basically dissimilar fashion from ‘the Western economy’ and that something is wrong with it if it does. The problem of the African economist, then, is that of relevance, a problem that has to be satisfactorily solved if his readiness to offer his services as the specialist ‘doctor’ of African economic problems is to be taken seriously.

In an increasingly integrated world social system, the communitarian society must guard its autonomy while it simultaneously adjusts to external institutions in order to survive. In this paper we are concerned with the ways in which two of the most successful or at least enduring examples of collective agriculture and communal living, the kibbutz communities of Israel and the colonies of Hutterian Brethren in North America, are adapting to the pressures of the external society in order to retain their cultural integrity.1 Although the ideologies of these groups are linked in the distant past, from the standpoint of cultural background one could hardly find two more disparate cases: the sixteenth-century Anabaptist Hutterites with their Christian brotherhood, and the kibbutzniks, with their secular socialism and Zionist zeal. These are real differences, but these communities also have two important things in common: a dedication to the principles of communal property and communal living, and making a living by operating large, diversified agricultural enterprises. These similarities create a common need on the part of both Hutterites and kibbutzniks to maintain a certain distance from the surrounding society and its prevailing individualistic organization; to calculate the advantages and disadvantages of an agrarian economy in an industrial age; and to experience virtually identical problems of management and social organization created by large-scale agrarian diversification.

In this article a system of ordering space found among the people of the central and western Caroline Islands of Micronesia will be described, the fundamental concepts of which bear a striking resemblance to particular regulative principles found among various Southeast Asian peoples. If a genetic connection is accepted for these parallels the form taken by Southeast Asian cultures after contact with ‘Hindu/Buddhist’ peoples can be interpreted as a natural outgrowth of concepts already basic to these cultures before such contact. The ethnographic information presented here, therefore, is directed to the comparative analysis of the culture history of Southeast Asia and Oceania and should be viewed in conjunction with the recent work of linguists and archaeologists on this topic (e.g. Benedict, 1966, 1967; Grace, Solheim and Chang, 1964).