The role of regional associations in urbanization has been the subject of recent debate. From the study of clubs in Lima, Peru, Mangin( 1959) and Doughty (1969) conclude that their role is threefold: to act as a mechanism to integrate the rural migrant into the urban and potentially hostile environment, to act as an agent to promote home-town development, and to contribute to the social and political integration of the nation. The evidence discussed by Little (1973) from a number of African countries supports the first of these contentions. However, in an article in volume 17 of CSSH, Jongkind (1974), also using data from Lima, has strongly challenged these three supposed roles, finding that they cannot “survive the test of empirical criticism.” He argues that the regional associations are composed of elitist, well adjusted and successful migrants and that they are definitely urban institutions, not rural enclaves in the city as Mangin and Doughty have implied.

At the end of his suggestive political analysis of Nairobi, Herbert Werlin asserts that a major goal for Kenya politics “is to build up the basis for cooperation” (p. 197). Cooperation existed in Kenya under British colonialism; it exists in Britain today. Lack of cooperation at present makes it more difficult for Kenya and Nairobi to solve acute social and economic problems. For Werlin, cooperation requires an educated, public-spirited citizenry, a politically conscious, reform minded business class, and a corps of dedicated professional administrators (p. 197). Cooperation requires a modern social order which in American cities has functioned to encourage “good government”. But this very modern concept of cooperation tells us more about where Kenya and Nairobi ought to go than how they should get there.

In the fifteen years following World War II more was done to combat tuberculosis than at any other time in world history. On every continent, hundreds of millions received the BCG (Bacillus Calmette Guérin) vaccine and millions more benefited from newly discovered antibiotics. TB research and attempts to control the disease knit together disparate populations and places as a network of experts and a matrix of ideas spread out across the globe linking the world through a common vaccine, a battery of antibiotics, and a knowledge network. Medicine became internationalized as organizations like the WHO and UNICEF began to see diseases as global problems and not solely the concern of individual countries.

“Phrenology is of German origin: Vienna was its birthplace, Gall and Spurzheim its progenitors. But it was in France that it acquired its European eclat”, stated George Lewes in 1857. But he went on to declare that it was in America and Britain that the pseudo-science had its widest popularity amongst the “general thinking public”. The writing of the history of phrenology has also broken along national lines. Its impact on America and Britain in the first half of the nineteenth century has attracted the attention of a generation of young social historians, whereas its progress in France has drawn the interest only of historians of medicine.

In recent years a number of investigators have been concerned with the antiquity of irrigation agriculture in central Mexico and its possible relationship to processes of social and political differentiation in the ancient urban civilizations of that region. Because of its strategic role in the prehistory of Middle America, attention has centered on the Basin of Mexico in the Mexican central plateau. The semi-arid Valley of Teotihuacan, in the northwestern part of the Basin, has been of special concern because it was the locus of the enormous city of Teotihuacan, one of the most powerful and influential centers in Middle America during a large part of the first millenium of the Christian era. Studies to date have dealt largely with historical and archaeological evidence bearing on this problem.

In recent years, institutionalization has become one of the key concepts in comparative politics in general, and in the study of political development in particular. This elegant and almost geometrically tidy theory of political order best articulated by Huntington has been acclaimed as a major new school, one that will be able perhaps to narrow what La Palombara called the ‘widening chasm’ between ‘macrotheories and microapplications in comparative politics’. Indeed, Huntington in his book attempted to apply his theoretical tenets to the analysis of such important phenomena as military intervention in politics, corruption and violence, all this via the usage of a few major variables. In the notoriously slippery field of theorizing in comparative politics, this constituted a welcome influx of fresh air. No wonder, then, that Huntington's theory and concepts have been widely prevalent and frequently referred to—again a relative innovation in the easy-come-easy-go world of theories in the study of political development.

Among various grassroots governance practices adopted by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), few have proven more adaptive and effective than the deployment of work teams—ad hoc units appointed and directed by higher-level Party and government organs and dispatched for a limited time to carry out a specific mission by means of mass mobilization. Yet, perhaps because work teams straddle the boundary between formal and informal institutions, they have received scant analytical attention. While work teams figure prominently in narrative accounts of the major campaigns of Mao's China, their origins, operations, and contemporary implications have yet to be fully explored. This article traces the roots of Chinese work teams to Russian revolutionary precedents, including plenipotentiaries, shock brigades, and 25,000ers, but argues that the CCP's adoption and enhancement of this practice involved creative adaptation over a sustained period of revolutionary and post-revolutionary experimentation. Sinicized work teams were not only a key factor in securing the victory of the Chinese Communist revolution and conducting Maoist mass campaigns such as Land Reform, Collectivization, and the Four Cleans; they continue to play an important role in the development and control of grassroots Chinese society even today. As a flexible means of spanning the center-periphery divide and combatting bureaucratic inertia, Chinese work teams, in contrast to their Soviet precursors, contribute to the resilience of the Communist party-state.

In the first weeks of the Spanish civil war, there occurred massive popular assaults against the Catholic Church in those cities which did not fall to the Nationalists rising, the Church having been widely (and correctly) perceived as hostile to the Republic and sympathetic to the generals who sought its overthrow. As rumors of priests firing on the populace from church towers circulated wildly, churches and convents were rapidly sacked and burnt. Supporters of the Republic killed religious personnel in large numbers—certainly well into the thousands—while desecrating and destroying church paraphernalia and cultic objects en masse.

Voluntary associations of one sort or another were clearly an important component of traditional Chinese society. Their importance for the economy has long been recognized, and their potential political efficacy was acknowledged—albeit negatively—by the government, which prohibited gentry from forming study associations (xuehui). An earlier generation of Western observers was quick to note this facet of Chinese life. The French social scientist, Maurice Courant, declared that “the fact that dominates the Chinese life is the existence of associations,” and E. T. C. Werner, in a less scholarly vein, commented on “the tendency of the Chinese to act not singly but in groups.” As early as 1803, the American missionary S. Wells Williams had observed in a manner reminiscent of Tocqueville that the natural tendency of the Chinese people to “crystallize into associations” provided a “stimulus to activity,” which he credited with “quickening the vitality of the mass.”

The settlement of the external debt of insolvent sovereign borrowers has become one of the most important issues in relations between the north and south since the outbreak of the global debt crisis in the early 1980s. For the past eight years representatives of governments and international organizations, bankers, and scientists have suggested several proposals and plans to solve the present debt crisis. The most prominent schemes in this respect are the Baker Plan of 1985, which suggested massive new credits for the most highly indebted developing countries, and the recently adopted Brady Plan, which proposes partial debt discounts and reductions in interest rates. Both of these debt settlement proposals were initiated by the United States and are supported by the other principal creditor countries. However, despite the ten years of crisis management, world leaders have not yet agreed upon a longterm solution to the current debt problems. In the history of the capitalist world economy, the current problems of coping with a global debt crisis do not represent a unique event. Rather, recent empirical studies demonstrate that sovereign borrowers have experienced many instances of debt-servicing difficulties during the past 150 years (Eichengreen and Portes 1986; White 1986; Eichengreen and Lindert 1989; Marichal 1989; Suter 1989).

In the present issue, and the one to follow, Comparative Studies has brought together a set of papers which address themselves, in various ways, to the understanding of how peasants come to take part in political mobilization, and how they are affected by such participation. It is thus the intention of the editors to contribute further to the ongoing discussion, in history and the social sciences, about the nature and characteristics of peasantry. This discussion has a secure and venerable genealogy in continental Europe: relevant names which come to mind are those of the Frenchman Le Play, the German Riehl, and the Russian Vasil'chakov. Something of this rich legacy reached North American sociology through the influence of the Polish sociologist Florian Znaniecki. But in the United States the interest in peasantry remained marginal, until it took root in anthropology, primarily through the efforts of Robert Redfield. Drawing on the legacy of Maine, Durkheim, Tönnies, and of the German-influenced urban sociologists at the University of Chicago, Redfield elaborated the concept of ‘the folk society’, possessed of a distinctive ‘folk culture’.

After a period of neglect, civilization as a concept seems once more to have regained popularity among a number of historians and social scientists. Why? What is the appeal of civilization today? And might the return of civilization also herald a return to the work of Arnold Toynbee, once regarded as the towering figure of civilizational analysis? This paper considers the history of the concept of civilization, and argues for the continuing importance and relevance of Toynbee's multi-volume A Study of History within that tradition. The claim is that, whatever the weaknesses of Toynbee's general approach, the civilizational perspective he adopts allows him to cast an illuminating light on many important historical questions. Moreover his belief in the “philosophical contemporaneity” and equal value of all civilizations should make him peculiarly attractive to those many today who reject Eurocentrism and who are increasingly persuaded of the need to consider the total human experience from earliest times up to the present.

In September 1964 עAli Taleb, an employee in the Agricultural Directorate in Gaza, petitioned the civil service administration for what he claimed was a long overdue promotion. On the face of it, there is nothing particularly surprising about such a petition—עAli was certainly not the first employee to feel he deserved more recognition for his work. What makes his petition peculiar were the circumstances which generated it. The Gaza Strip, the territory in whose civil service עAli was employed, came into existence in 1948 as a result of the war over the establishment of Israel. Before 1948, Gaza was a district of Palestine, governed like the rest of the country as a mandate granted to the British government by the League of Nations. When the 1948 war ended in defeat for the Arab forces, the Egyptian army occupied the Gaza area, which it administered for the next twenty years. עAli was hired in 1937 by the Mandate government—and under its rules of promotion—but it was the Egyptian Administration (henceforth “Administration”) which he expected to fulfill the obligations of this system. “I was nominated to be promoted to Grade 3 under the previous Mandate government,” עAli explained, noting that, “before my turn arrived the Mandate ended and the Arab Administration came to the Strip.”

The truth and reconciliation commissions of Latin America and Africa are paradigms of transitional justice, often regarded as part of the process of transitioning from authoritarian to democratic rule. But truth commissions are also common in first-world settler states, which raises the question of what “transition” such commissions effectuate in Canada, Australia, and the United States. This paper examines the efforts of Canada's Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples to resolve a controversy over a government relocation of Inuit families in the 1950s for which the relocatees were demanding compensation. Concurrent with historical controversies in the Canadian courts concerning Aboriginal rights and title, the historical controversy over the relocation raised questions about the Canadian state's ability to “hear the voices” of First Nations people, who objected that their accounts of the past had been disregarded by government-contracted historians and courts alike. I argue that the Royal Commission's efforts to hear the voices of Inuit relocatees, showcased in nationally televised hearings, was a phatic ritual in which communicative contact between marginalized citizens and the state was ritually established. The ritual was presented as a remedy for failures to achieve phatic communion among citizens and state—a condition of communicative contact held up as essential to the realization of liberal democratic ideals. The work of the Royal Commission and other truth commissions highlights the growing prominence of communication, particularly liberal communicative events construed as “open,” “equal,” and “free,” as a concern of both theory and practice in liberal democratic polities.

Beyond influencing generations of scholarship in American history, the paradigm of Frederick Jackson Turner has stimulated a series of monographs and articles on the role of the frontier in the formation of other societies. A synthesis of this comparative research on these frontier societies has been ably undertaken by Gerhard and Mikesell. While there have been numerous articles in both English and Portuguese on the Brazilian frontier, these largely descriptive studies have not been systematically integrated into any conceptual framework, much less the comparative tradition inspired by the Turner thesis. In this essay, I propose to test the robustness of the frontier paradigm against some Brazilian frontier experiences

The French celebration of the centenary of Victor Hugo's death in 1985 included new editions of his works, biographies, an exhibit at the Grand Palais in Paris, all that you would expect in honor of his life and art. But Hugo's death and funeral also drew the attention of some scholars, and forgood reason. Beginning on 18 May 1885, when what proved to be his final illness was announced, the newspapers were filled with reports and rumors about Hugo's condition. Following his death on 22 May journalists concentrated on what has been called the funeral of the century. Two million peoplecame to see Hugo's body lying in state at the Arc de Triomphe, and anenormous crowd viewed the procession to the Panthe on where he was buried.

In the summer of 1996, when French policemen stormed Paris' Eglise Saint-Bernard, evicting dozens of African immigrants and activists who had taken refuge in the church, people in both France and West Africa surged with anger. Many of those immigrants had lived in France for years, often with an ambiguous legal and bureaucratic status (hence their moniker sans-papiers, those without papers), and they had occupied the church in order to demand the regularization of their status.The sans-papiers' story is complex; see Balibar et al. (1999), Dubois (2000), Fassin et al. (1997), Goussault (1999), Rosello (1998), and Siméant (1998). Each of the leading spokespersons has written a memoir (Cissé 1999; Diop 1997; Sané 1996). My analysis most closely resembles that of Dubois. However, while his interest lies in the implications of the “culturalist” stance within the sans-papiers movement and in the colonial origins of universalism, I am pursuing the deployment of a particular argument materially grounded in the colonial period. Mine is also the only study of which I am aware that analyzes how the dispute was understood in the immigrants' countries of origin. West African, French, and international protests of the high-handed and violent government action called on both universal and particular arguments to support the rights of the sans-papiers. Editorialists lambasted the French government for disregarding the “Rights of Man” and for forgetting the sacrifices of West African soldiers—the tirailleurs Sénégalais—in the defense of France.The point had already been made by Konaté: “Everything has its price, including having been the country of the Enlightenment and a colonial power” (1994).

This essay examines relations between eastern Africa and western India in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in respect to two related sets of problems: the changing regimes of commercial circulation, and more particularly the evolution of patterns of human movement, notably via the slave trade from Ethiopia and the Swahili coast to Gujarat and the Deccan. It argues that over the course of the sixteenth century, commercial relations between Deccan ports such as Goa and Chaul, and the Swahili coast, came to be strengthened through the intervention of the Portuguese and their military-commercial system. At the same time, large numbers of African slaves reached the Muslim states in India, especially in the period after 1530, where they played a significant role as military specialists, and eventually as elite political and cultural actors. The shifting geographical dimensions of the African presence in India are emphasized, beginning in western Gujarat and winding up in the Deccan Sultanates. This contrasts markedly with the African experience elsewhere, where the meaning and institutional context of slavery were quite different.

Marshall Sahlins (1996) argues that anthropology has been the bearer of a “bourgeoisified” Judeo-Christian cosmology according to which an original state of chaos, akin to the Hobbesian state of nature, gives way to the order of society or the state. The central conundrum that this anthropology has sought to explain is how fallen and needy individuals come together in cooperative organization. Sahlins furthermore contends that, by universalizing this problematic as the key to interpreting human societies and social action, anthropology has subverted its attempts at cross-cultural understanding. My aim in this paper is to draw attention to a growing commitment within anthropology to a different cosmological paradigm with an inverse structure. Today, the elevation of ethnic and cultural hybridity as both an approximate return to primordial human unity and an emancipatory moral high ground renders socio-cultural difference at once the presumed telos of many social practices and a scandal to be overcome. Whereas the older anthropological cosmology uncovered by Sahlins posited progress from atomistic privation to social solidarity, this new cosmology posits the politically motivated splintering of essential human unity by the construction of ethnicity and culture. Although I iterate the caution that this emergent paradigm too has the potential to reproduce itself as ethnography, I emphasize as more important its promising and troubling potential to revalorize anthropological thinking on cosmology. Specifically, ownership of the meta-cosmology encoded in hybridity theory ought to prompt anthropologists to question our recently acquired aversion to the idea that cosmologies inform human action. At the same time, however, we need to scrutinize our fascination with hybridity for signs of an unintentionally Nietzschean glorification of dissolution or aestheticization of periodic destruction as the necessary foundation for political and moral renovation.

Buddhism contributed to the culture and politics of thirteenth-century Eurasian intellectual exchange, depositing literary, artistic, and architectural traces subsequently eclipsed by layers of Islamic and Eurocentric history. Within extensive cross-continental networks of diplomatic and commercial activity, Ilkhanid Buddhism and the Buddhist revival of which it was a part drew serious attention among contemporary travelers, scholars, and statesmen including Ibn Taymiyah, Roger Bacon, and Rashid al-Din. This article argues that awareness of a Buddhist scholarly and political elite in the Muslim heartland, with its center at Tabriz, generated a historically significant Eurasian Buddhist discourse during a critical passage in the turn to modernity.