In this paper we wish to postulate and examine kinds of relationships between ritual dramas, ceremonials, and culture change. A number of individual studies concerned with this question deserve to be seen as focusing upon a unitary phenomenon. By this we have in mind ceremonies or ritual dramas which symbolically mediate structural conflicts or oppositions either within a society or between societies. Max Gluckman (1954) and Hilda Kuper (1947, 1964) among others have pointed out that rituals of rebellion symbolically alleviate conflicts at the level of the social structure of a single society, for example the Swazi of South Africa. In doing so the ritual intensifies identification with the traditional social structure in spite of the conflicts within this structure. C. Geertz (1957) and James L. Peacock (1967, 1968a, b) point out that the traditional Javanese slametan ceremony tends to increase neighborhood, or kampung, social integration. Geertz shows that with urbanization and modernization the neighborhood becomes socially and economically differentiated and that in this situation slametans tend to force interaction between individuals who no longer share specific cultural beliefs and symbols and thus increase rather than reduce hostility and anxiety. Peacock extends this argument to ludruck, an urban proletarian drama. In ludruck, Peacock argues, the individual is led to identify not with his kampung (neighborhood) nor with a traditional village set of values but rather with the urbanite and his urban set of values. Turning to Latin America we may cite the study of Maya Passion Plays by June Nash (1968).

Agricultural or nonindustrial civilization is customarily defined by social scientists in terms of urbanism and a dual social organization. Such a definition is not recent and, like many other concepts in Western thought, can be traced back to the Greeks, to Strabo for example, if one wishes to do so. Another way of considering the definition is in terms of two complementary societal components, neither existing without the other. One component is an elite in an urban setting with an elaborate high culture or Great Tradition based on literacy, and the second is a large rural peasantry with a Little Tradition or illiterate folk manifestation of the Great Tradition. However, civilization with its elite and peasants is also found when cities are absent, as in Mayan Mesoamerica; nonexistent or not vital, as in early Dynastic Egypt; or atrophied into uninhabitable ruins, as in Ethiopia. Indeed, cities were neither numerous nor large throughout the time of Bronze Age civilizations. Cities and civilizations are thus not always related. As shown above, the latter may exist without the former, and in preliterate western Africa urbanism existed without civilization.

The traditional Yoruba city has proved a refractory concept in the otherwise ordered universe of urban enquiry. Most students of Yoruba culture have felt obliged to treat the permanent and compact aggregations of population which were, and are, characteristic of south-western Nigeria as urban forms while yet recognizing that they differ in important respects both from the present-day industrial and commercial city of the West and from the several genres of city occurring elsewhere in the traditional world. Among the first to attempt to assign a precise status to these settlements was Professor William Bascom. Measuring them against the yardstick of Louis Wirth' minimal definition of a city as ‘a relatively large, dense, and permanent settlement of socially heterogeneous individuals,’ he concluded that the urban status of the larger Yoruba settlements was in doubt only in respect of the last of these criteria, namely heterogeneity.

Weber, in his comparative studies of religion, characterized millennial eschatologies (embodying beliefs in a just redistribution of fortune through a future revolution in this world) as one possible type of solution to a problem of meaning which he considered central to all religious traditions—the problem of explaining the world's imperfections. Taking this type of solution as his point of departure, he arranged the other types in a logical order. Thus when the supervention of the messianic kingdom in this world appeared to be unduly delayed, a second type of solution became necessary and possible, a solution in terms of other-worldly expectations of heaven and hell. This second solution itself entailed difficulties of its own: when heaven and hell were conceived as intermediate realms of existence, there still remained problems regarding the eternity of salvation (and damnation); and, when they were conceived as eternal realms of existence, there arose, especially in the context of theistic beliefs, the difficulty of reconciling the punishment of human errors with the conception of a benevolent and powerful creator of the world who would ultimately be responsible for these human actions himself. The third, fourth and fifth types of solutions were seen as responses to this problem, a problem which in Christian theology came to be known as ‘theodicy’ or the problem of reconciling the two fundamental attributes of God, universal benevolence and omnipotence, in view of the existence of evil. The third type of solution, best exemplified in the Protestant doctrine of predestination, preserved God's omnipotence and resolved his lack of benevolence by placing him beyond the ethical claims of his creatures.

The Second World War became a world war only in December 1941. By that time not only the extent but also the character of its warfare had changed, with the German invasion of the Soviet Union. Thus 1941 was even more of a turning-point in the history of the Second World War than 1917 had been in the history of the First. Most historians of the Second World War would agree with this assessment. Thus it is perhaps not surprising that relatively little interest has been devoted to the history of the everyday lives of European peoples during the years 1939–41, during what could be called in retrospect (perhaps hopefully so) the Last European War.