The spread of manufacture in the European countryside initiated the formation of vital and complex rural laboring groups that defy neat classification. The nature of livelihood in these rural settings furthered an integration of diverse productive involvements rather than the creation of narrow occupational niches. In the course of their labor careers, men and women moved between agrarian and industrial pursuits—weaving linen cloth, spinning silk, raising livestock, digging potatoes, tending vineyards, making bricks, mining coal, casting iron, and forging steel. In this context, livelihood was not merely an individual concern; rather, it was part of a broader household strategy, rooted in a family-based agrarian holding. The maintenance of bonds to peasant agriculture fostered familial solidarity over working-class identity. These laborers saw their destinies in the immediacy of flesh-and-blood relationships among family and kin and not in more abstract social and political identifications.

When a generation ago G. W. J. Drewes brought to a close his trailblazing study of Javanese millenarian concepts he predicted their decline. As a propaganda device in the arena of modern politics they might perhaps retain some value, he believed, but their inherent strength and uniqueness would gradually diminish. Perhaps Drewes' philological pre-occupation led him to neglect the anthropological dynamics of the messianic currents that he studied in the Javanese religious records. In any event his prediction seemed to assume that the efficacy of the millenarian expectations as propaganda could be independent of the enduring cultural matrix of which these expectations are an inseparable part. Far from losing their inherent vitality the messianic ideas of the Javanese have, as the following pages will argue, remained strong and influential; only the cultural forms by which they are nowadays expressed have changed. In this analysis attention will first be paid to the traditional cosmology of the Javanese as it is reflected in their major cultural motifs. Next the impact of Hindu-Indian, Islamic and Western (both religious and secular) influences on this cosmology will be considered. Finally, the nature of the messianic expectations in the Javanese experience will be described, also in terms of their contemporary manifestations.

Recent concern with the process of modernization has heightened interest in the origins of bureaucracy in societies which have succeeded in modernizing. Relatively little attention, however, has been directed to territorial governing elites as an element of bureaucratic development. In what sense did governors in premodern societies resemble modern bureaucratic officials? Did the resemblances increase as the societies approached the modern period; or (as Marion J. Levy suggests) did the bureaucratic elements tend to degrade in the particularistic environment?

During the past twenty years the major thrust of Indian historiography has expanded from its earlier concerns with imperial politics and sought to uncover the full range of actors within Indian political life and to identify the arenas in which they were active: local, regional, and national. One group of scholars has called particular attention to the diversity of elite groups, their interactions, and often their struggles for power. Their studies usually call explicitly for a broader understanding of ‘political’ activity outside the official levels of administration.

Considerable interest is again being expressed, in the public domain as well asin the academy, in the processes of change-ideational and pragmatic-which seem to characterize Islamic societies; societies, that is to say, of thosewho regard themselves as muslim, acceptors of the revealed law or “way“ shari'a of God. This interest is not new, but it seems to present itself anew in each generation, partly perhaps because it is something that has concerned Muslims themselves for most of the fourteen centuries that have elapsed sincethe religion of islām was proclaimed afresh and finally, by the Prophet Muhammad, in 622. Muslims are of course not alone in being required to see life as ideally governed by an unchanging set of rules which must be understood and conformed to, for this much is true of many other systems of belief which rest upon transcendent authority. It is sometimes held, however, that of all such believers in transcendence, that is, in a transcendent moral law, Muslims have an especially hard time in bringing life as (and where, and under what other cultural constraints) it is led into conjunction with the enjoined ideal.

Many fixed and movable festivals in ancient Mexico were occasions for human sacrifice. The sun in particular was offered hearts and blood, ostensibly because its vitality and, therefore, life itself depended on such oblations. Numerous festivals also included ritual cannibalism, apparently because it was thought to facilitate communion with the gods.

We consider here what has happened to one segment of South African capital since the demise of apartheid, of the Indian businessmen of KwaZulu Natal, and especially of its principal port city, Durban. During the long nightmare of apartheid, South Africa's Indians, a small minority constituting only three percent of the national population, suffered many restrictions on their development.

Most contemporary theories of revolution are derived from the analysis of conflict between social classes in racially homogeneous societies, and they may not be very illuminating when applied to situations of revolutionary struggle between racial groups. This is the problem I discuss in the present paper, and my purpose, in general, is to raise some questions concerning the applicability of theories of class revolution to racial revolution.

Segismundo's services [as notary at the registry office] had, indeed, been admirably suited to the time and place. … He cheerfully registered all the children that ap-peared before him as having been born in the County of Ilheus, State of Bahia, Brazil. … How could one be bothered with such miserable legal details as the exact place and date of a child's birth when one was living dangerously in the midst of gun fights, armed bandits, and deadly ambushes? What did it matter, really, where the little Brazilian about to be registered was born? … He simply took the word of these friendly immigrants and their witnesses—respectable men whose word was worth more than any legal document—and accepted their gifts. … By that venerable hand, on a certain afternoon many years ago, little Nacib [a Syrian immigrant] was turned into a native-born Brazilian.

Three years after the global financial crisis started academic and popular publications assessing its origins, consequences and wider implications are starting to emerge. The origins of the crisis are generally explained as stemming from the rapid increase in subprime mortgage lending in the United States and the credit default swaps banks and other financial institutions traded amongst themselves based on these loans. As homeowners found it increasingly difficult to make their repayments and housing prices in the United States started to drop, a downward spiral ensued. In this cycle ever-growing numbers of homeowners defaulted on their mortgages, unable to meet interest payments or to re-mortgage, and banks foreclosed on the houses even as their own assets and investments were exposed to the losses stemming from defaulted mortgages. With the foreclosures devaluing house prices further and the exposure of banks making them less willing and able to refinance mortgages, the situation quickly spiraled downwards. The complex global trade in credit default swaps and other derivatives meant that the problems were amplified and spread beyond the United States until ultimately many national governments decided to intervene with financial assistance mainly aimed at the financial institutions.

Social mobility in traditional China, particularly during the last two dynasties, Ming (1368–1644) and Ch'ing (1644–1911), for which ample data are available, deserves systematic study by both Chinese and Western historians and social scientists. It is remarkable to observe that in a meticulously “regulated” society such as traditional China's, there was probably a greater amount of vertical mobility, both upward and downward, than is usually found in pre-modern and modern societies of the West. What makes this more striking is the fact that it occurred in a society which for twenty-five centuries believed in the inequality of men. For this reason alone the question of social mobility in traditional China should be of more than usual interest to theoretical sociologists with a comparative approach to their subject. Owing to the author's limited knowledge of Western sociology and also because of limitations of space, this article deals mainly with China, although brief comparisons with pre-modern and modern Western societies will be attempted at certain points.

On the face of it, civil marriage represents both the most typical and most anodyne aspect of modern law. One might say that by instituting civil marriage, a bureaucratic, enumerative, and secularized state permits its subjects absolute individual choice of marital partners, and concurrently, by refusing to take into account the religious affiliation of any party, grants total freedom of religious faith. As such, it may be seen as a quintessentially modern phenomenon, connected through the adjective “civil” with other distinctively modern concepts such as civil society, all of which point to a notion of individual liberty, predicated upon a modern state guaranteeing the autonomy of large arenas of social life.

This article uses the death and burial of one of the most important political leaders in twentieth-century Africa, and Nigeria's first and only ceremonial president, Rt. Hon. (Dr.) Nnamdi Azikiwe, to reflect on how and why the deaths and burials of significant persons in Africa represent occasions for the (re)production and management of cultural crises. It argues that the extant literature on the death of consequential persons in Africa either understates or overlooks the generalizability of the “essential contestability” of the material and immaterial relations of the past, present, and future provoked by such deaths. This is particularly visible when these relations are disturbed or challenged by the absence of the person and the process of their burial or reburial.

Students of modernization commonly assume that, whatever else from the West may be rejected or modified to fit particular cultural and political preferences, science and technology are essential for any conscious effort to transform a traditional society. Indeed, despite the Western origins of modern science, would-be modernizers in Asia and Africa can reasonably claim that science is now universal. The degree to which it is possessed and practiced in various countries may differ, but in principle the spirit, methodology, and fruits of modern science are cosmopolitan, not bound to any particular culture. They are the legitimate property of all men aspiring to be modern. And from Tokyo to Nairobi all such men have passionately sought to possess them.

Among French scholars and administrators during the French Protectorate of Morocco (1912–1956), especially prior to World War II, there was both a great belief in, and widespread suspicion of, a group's language as a reliable indicator of its ethnicity. Legend among the Ida ou Zeddout Berber people of southwestern Morocco holds that Captain Ropars, who ran the French Protectorate's Anti-Atlas mountain military post in Igherm from 1949–1954, not only spoke the Tashelhit Berber language, but also ordered the local men to do so under threat of imprisonment. “You're Ishelhin (Tashelhit speakers),” he allegedly told people in this collective memory as recounted to me. “You should speak Tashelhit, not Arabic.” The widespread eighteenth- and nineteenth- century idea of Volkgeist (‘soul of the folk’) that Ropars evoked has become commonplace today. A group's language is often considered to function as what Herder called the “treasury of the thought of an entire people” and “the mirror of its history, its deeds, joys and sorrows” (in Bauman and Briggs 2003: 169–70; see also Lorcin 1999: 44), and even what Abbey Condillac earlier called the “genius of each people” (Steedly 1996: 447). Captain Ropars followed Samuel Johnson's claim that identifying languages was the same as identifying “nations,” and, as Irvine and Gal paraphrase, “a logical first step in comparing, understanding, and ordering [nations'] relations to each other and to Europeans” (2000: 50). Yet, other French Protectorate administrators and scholars saw the link between language and primordial ethnicity as false, since histories of language use may be obscured or simply uninterrogated by a group's members.

Once it was thought that kinship was the preeminent subject of anthropology, one about which considerable progress was possible. “Kinship” itself was, for some, fairly unproblematic. Thus Radcliffe-Brown (1952: 46) asserted that, “if any society establishes a system of corporations on the basis of kinship … it must necessarily adopt a system of unilineal reckoning of succession,” and Fortes (1959: 209) announced that, “Kinship, being an irreducible factor in social structure has an axiomatic validity.” However, in the late 1960s and early 1970s one leading figure of anthropology after the other declared that there really was no such thing as kinship. “The process of making kinship into a single theoretical entity seems to me no better than the invention of ‘totemism’” (Terray 1969: 135–36; 1972: 140–41). “There is no such thing as kinship, and it follows that there can be no such thing as kinship theory” (Needham 1971: 5). “‘Kinship,’ like totemism, the matrilineal complex and matriarchy, is a non-subject since it does not exist in any culture known to man” (Schneider 1972: 59). “The whole notion of ‘a kinship system’ as an isolable structure of sentiments, norms, or categorical distinctions is misleading because it assumes, or seems to assume, that the ordering principles of a society are partitionable into natural kinds only adventitiously connected” (Geertz and Geertz 1975: 156). For various political and intellectual reasons, “kinship” appeared to many to have died out as an area of analytic interest within anthropology during the 1970s and 1980s, despite many indications to the contrary. Now Godelier has made a major effort to revive attention to matters usually bunched under the phrase “kinship,” and, at least as concerns French popular taste, seems largely to have succeeded. For him kinship has not died, but instead transformed itself both in fact and “theoretically.”

My goal in this paper is to revisit a classic text that raises the most contemporary of issues: Marco Polo's stereotyped, highly influential, and highly prejudicial description of the “Old Man of the Mountain,” a text of virtually mythic status and power. Having invoked the category of “myth,” however, in a context where it is not commonly applied, it is useful to indicate how I use this term and why it seems appropriate. To begin, I would reject three widely accepted notions. First, myths are not sacred narratives. Although many myths claim sacred status, in this they misrecognize their own nature, for they are human stories, like any other. They simply make more exaggerated claims to a more elevated kind of authority. Second, myths are not collective narratives or the speech of any group as a whole. Rather, they are stories that are told and retold in countless variants. Often the authorship of these variants is unacknowledged, forgotten, or deliberately hidden, but in its details each variant advances the specific interests of those responsible for its production, revision, and circulation. These anonymous agents and absent authors misrepresent themselves—and those for whom they speak—as the group as a whole. Third, myths are neither false stories, nor true, but simply stories that claim to speak with authority about issues of deep importance. Sometimes these claims succeed and sometimes they fail, and the same story can change its status over time from myth to fable and back again, since such status is a function of reception.

In recent years, eugenics has emerged as a major topic in the history of science. As a mixture of science and policy, as a discipline and social movement, eugenics lies at the interface of biological science and society. The primary feature of “eugenics,” a term coined by Francis Galton in 1883, is the conviction that human traits of character, for good or evil, are genetically transmitted. This so-called science, therefore, seeks to regulate human procreation by encouraging the fecundity of allegedly genetically superior groups in society, while discouraging “defectives” from producing children since they would replicate their deficiencies.

The expansion of Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries had brought Europeans, primarily English, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, and French, into contact with the lands, peoples and civilizations of Africa, Asia and the Americas. In Asia the effects of the European discoveries had been less far-reaching than had been the case in Africa and the Americas where barter had soon given way to slavery, peaceful proselitization to forced conversion, trade and commerce to extortion and monopolies, and coexistence to armed domination by the European intruders. Whereas in New France, Brazil, and the British colonies agricultural and commerical considerations had predominated, in counterdistinction to Spanish America where the initial emphasis had been militaristic, nevertheless the results of European settlement had been remarkably similar throughout the Americas.

Although wage work has been present in the third world for some time, more people in that world are selling more of their labor today than ever before. Anthropologists and other social scientists have dealt with this increase in the amount of wage labor by using a variety of concepts, including urbanization, migration, and proletarianization. Recently, the concept of the peasant-wor-ker has appeared in the literature with greater frequency and a new meaning. This study examines one current use and discusses some of the problems associated with it.