The unprecedented number of young people in the world today can be isolated as one of the crucial reality factors conditioning political and cultural developments. Age distribution is only one demographic variable in the complex of social and political life, but the tremendous growth of world population in the twentieth century has magnified its dynamic potentialities. To gain perspective, it will be useful to briefly consider the role of youth in the light of historical experience.

In strong contrast with twentieth-century prevailing forms of military obligation (by which service, whenever exacted, is individual, uncommutable for money, untransferable, no social status or fortune providing a legal basis by itself for exemption), nineteenth-century standards as imposed for the first time in revolutionary France after 1792–1793, were based on principles such as those stated in 1776 in Massachusetts: “That no rank or station in life, employment or office … shall excuse or exempt any person from serving in arms for the defence of his country either by himself or some able-bodied effective man in his stead … or from paying the fine.” As the brokers who made it their business to provide substitutes put it, more crudely, “le conscrit paye sa dette de sa personne ou par celle de l'homme qu'il achete”. Whatever the reasons invoked to justify “rich man's money and poor man's blood”, “l'impôt de sang pour le pauvre, impôt d'argent pour le riche“ the basis for this bastard form of equality in face of military obligation, from a juridical point of view, could be defined as a transition between Old Regime frank inequality and post-1870 personl, uncommutable, untransferable obligation. It was best summed up in Napoleon's words: “Chez un peuple dont Pexistence repose sur l'inegalite des fortunes il faut laisser aux riches la faculte de se faire remplacer.”

The growth of the professions in the nineteenth century occurred as a process of specialization; distinct functions separated out of certain broad categories of activity. The church, the law, and medicine were the matrices from which new professions emerged and became differentiated in response to the growing needs of an increasingly complex society. The reasons for that complexity were in the main economic and stemmed from the industrialization of the first half of the century.

The dramatic re-enactment of an event compresses in symbolic form psychological and social processes. For this reason, ritual dramas are useful events for the study of transmission of culture and reformulation of tradition. Dramatization as a communication strategy has a special importance for solidarity groups, as Young (1965:2) has pointed out. The potential for transforming given attitudes and values has not been explored by social scientists although playwriters, actors, and directors have consciously or unconsciously attempted this in dramaturgy.

This paper deals with some relationships between Javanese modernization, a Javanese ritual called slametan, and a Javanese folk-show called ludruk. I shall illustrate how slametan and ludruk play complementary roles with respect to Javanese modernization.

The two authors of these papers face in common one very complex and perplexing problem: the place that representations of dramatic art take in the personal lives of their spectators. Enormous effort has been put into this question, particularly in works on the popular forms of dramatic art in the United States. Both authors take the same point of view on the question, that there is a fairly direct correspondence between the content of the dramas they analyze and the content of the personal experiences and social world of the spectators. Nash argues that the differing contents of the passion plays produced in the three towns she examines faithfully reflect the differing local configurations of religious organization and Indian/Ladino relations. Peacock argues that the ways the ludruk dramas characterize the inner, kampung life versus the outer, more modern and worldly city life bias the spectators directly in their personal attitudes and decisions toward rejecting features of kampung life in favor of modes of modern city life.

In 1905 the Viceroy of India, Lord Curzon of Kedleston, was forced to resign as a result of a disagreement with his Commander-in-Chief, Lord Kitchener of Khartoum. What began as a mild bureaucratic affair soon escalated into a major power battle, and the scene of the struggle shifted in turn from the narrow confines of Indian bureaucracy to the exalted chambers of Imperial decision-makers to the public forum of two continents.