Most of the extraordinary waves of terror which have swept many Latin American societies since 1970 have occurred in guerrilla-based insurgencies or even civil wars. Because of the massive body counts produced during these confrontations between revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries based in or linked with a government, human rights organizations have issued a long series of reports about terror—especially that which has been carried out by incumbent regimes and death squads—and which has been supplemented by the exposés of the guerrillas themselves. Amnesty International, the Human Rights group in the Organization of American States (OAS), and Americas Watch have been the major international actors documenting the wave of terror. Many independent national groups, such as El Salvador's “Socorro Juridico” and other human rights organizations linked with church bodies have undertaken that more perilous task at home.

Political violence, labeled loosely as “terrorism,” is a seemingly ubiquitous factor in twentieth-century world politics. Coping with it has become a major preoccupation of governments and is the object of considerable international cooperation among them. The purpose of this paper is to examine the case of ETA (Euskadi ta Askatasuna or Basque Country and Freedom) within the Basque nationalist movement in order to underscore several of the conceptual weaknesses in the literature on terrorism while also suggesting avenues for future research.

A late nineteenth-century epidemic of banditry seems to have swept through the Egyptian countryside, at least according to the writings and actions of influential Egyptians at that time. Contemporary newspapers recounted daily episodes in which gangs composed of between six and sixty or seventy members raided large estates, robbed travelling merchants, and organized local protection rackets. The threat to public security drew the greatest attention in the decade following the British occupation of Egypt in 1882.

In the aftermath of the February 1986 “revolution” that forced Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos out of the Philippines, the government of Corazon Aquino turned the presidential palace, Malacañang, into a museum and in doing so meant to put the Marcoses legacy of excess on display. A guidebook on the presidential palace describes one instance of that excessiveness, in which the doors leading to the Grand Staircase are said to have “depict[ed] the Philippine legend of ‘Malakas’ (Strong) and ‘Maganda’ (Beautiful), the first Filipino man and woman who emerged from a large bamboo stalk. Mrs. Marcos liked to think of President Marcos and herself in terms of these legendary First Filipinos.” They identified so thoroughly with this myth that they had portraits of themselves done as Malakas and Maganda in the palace—seminude and emerging from a forest of bamboo stalks (see Plate 1). In 1985 they even commissioned a group of Filipino academics to rewrite the legend that culminated in the celebration of the Marcos regime.

In recent years historians of Europe and North America have discovered the importance of the spoken word in past times and have explored the ways in which language reflects particular social contexts. Retrieving fragments of popular speech from police reports, court records, and other sources, these scholars have sketched colorful vignettes which reenact such mundane activities of daily life as a game of cards or an argument over a stray calf. Their work has shown that seemingly trivial face-to-face encounters offer valuable clues for understanding social hierarchies and community values of a given time and place. Abstract relationships of class, gender, and social rank take concrete form in the routine conversations of men and women in streets, taverns, and markets, as “ordinary” people tell us about the societies in which they lived—sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly, but always in their own words. The historian of popular speech moreover recognizes that the social order, far from being static, remains subject to continuous modification not only by the powerful but also by those in subordinate positions, whose words and gestures may either reinforce or undermine accepted standards of behavior and social precedence.

Since the Second Vatican Council opened in 1962, several changes have occurred in the Society of Jesus. The Jesuits have suffered a drop in manpower: Membership in the international order peaked at over 36,000 men in 1965 and had fallen by 1988 to below 25,000. Another change has been ideological: The Jesuits seem to have shifted from a conservative or disengaged posture toward a progressive and occasionally radical stance on social and political matters, and they have struggled to implement this orientation by abandoning some of their routine commitments and taking on new ventures in “faith and justice.” Finally, the Society of Jesus has deregimented its procedures in the areas of training and governance. It would appear that the liberalization that took place in mainline Protestant denominations over several decades was recapitulated by the Jesuits in a shorter period.

In the shadow of the Historikerstreit over the meaning of the Nazi era, West German historians are conducting a less highly publicized but similarly politicized debate about the role of ethnography in social history. The following analysis of local club life, based on ethnographic and archival research in Boppard on the Rhine, is offered as a contribution to and comment on this debate from the viewpoint of interpretive cultural anthropology. I contend that “local knowledge”—to employ the phrase by Clifford Geertz—is indispensable to broader historical syntheses, though for different reasons than have been suggested by either critics or advocates of cultural anthropology among West German historians.

To ask how the “third world writes its own history” appears, at first glance, to be exceedingly naive. At best, it reaffirms the East–West and Orient–Occident oppositions that have shaped historical writings and seems to be a simple-minded gesture of solidarity. Furthermore, in apparently privileging the writings of historians with third-world origins, this formulation renders such scholars into “native informants” whose discourse is opened up for further disquisitions on how “they” think of “their” history. In short, the notion of the third world writing its own history seems to reek of essentialism. Seen in another way, this formulation can be construed as positing that the third world has a fixed space of its own from which it can speak in a sovereign voice. For many, this notion of a separate terrain is rendered problematic by the increasing rapidity and the voracious appetite with which the postmodern culture imperializes and devours spaces.