When Dutch rule in Indonesia came to an end in 1950 the new Republic inherited a complex legal system whose main component parts were Dutch criminal and civil law, Adat or customary law and Islamic law. The Dutch legists had been divided in their ideas about what the proper content of “Indies” law should be. Until the latter part of the nineteenth century most jurists favoured the establishment of a positive, unified legal system throughout the Netherlands East Indies, based on modern Dutch law, modified where necessary to suit local conditions. It was anticipated that as education, effective administration and new legislation progressed the authority and operation of the “irregular” or non-Western legal systems would diminish. The non-Western systems of law encompassed regional and tribal customary law, often combined with Islamic law, and the legal usages and practices of the “foreign oriental” minorities, mainly Chinese and Indian.

The Hebrew Bible contains a thrice repeated prohibition against the taking of interest on loans. For many centuries, these injunctions exerted a profound influence on the life and thought of the Western World. However, they have never been significantly observed or consistently enforced in their original, categorical terms. From an absolute prohibition, which treated all interest (of any kind, in any amount) as usurious, we have developed, through economic revolutions and moral transvaluations, a quantitative morality which determines legality by the rate of taking, rather than by the fact of interest. Today, these laws lack force either as social legislation or as religious command. They are virtually ignored and forgotten by men of affairs of all stations, Jewish and Christians alike. Only the social and religious philosophers, historians and other scholars of the past are still excited by the moral implications of this prohibition.

Comparison is an indispensable technique of analytic scholarship. No analytic statement about empirical observation can be made without at least one comparison providing the contrast that permits either inductive generalization or deductive proof. Comparison is used for these purposes in all disciplines, but not always in the same way, or for the same reasons. Anthropology came to comparison because comparison was thrust on it by the rediscovery of classical antiquity and the opening of Africa, Asia, and the New World to a previously more isolated Europe. Indeed, anthropology was born as a response to the great cultural contrasts thus exposed. This philosophical child of comparison, however, pursued it in some very special ways. In the first place, the initial interests of anthropology lay in the reconstruction of an unknown human past, attempting to explain cultural variety through the reconstruction of events leading up to the present. In the second place, the comparisons drawn by anthropologists were usually extreme, prompted as they were by the shock value of new discoveries.

The opening of the formerly closed, state socialist societies of East Central Europe has provided the opportunity to bring new empirical evidence to bear upon models of profession-state relations developed in pluralist western societies. The classic view of Tocqueville and Durkheim has been that professions are an intermediary group linking individuals and the state. Although not always explicitly stated, this model served as the basis for scholarly work on the professions in the post-World War II period, where it (more or less) fit the image of a differentiated pluralist society. Most work on the professions was based on the Anglo-American case.

But even in the United States, state support was more central to maintaining professional authority than was originally thought. Without explicitly discarding the model, Freidson (1970) introduced a distinction between corporate and technical (clinical) autonomy that provided a way out of the paradox he identified, that both aspects of professional autonomy are protected by the state. Corporate autonomy refers to the political power of the organized profession to define the social and economic context of professional work, and clinical autonomy, to the control of decision making in the workplace. Testing his hypothesis on the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union, Freidson argued that despite differing degrees of corporate autonomy, the medical profession retained clinical control of decision making, the core of professional autonomy, even in the extreme case of the former Soviet Union.

The aim of this paper is to discuss how in the wider context of capital expansion and accumulation in the late twentieth century development initiatives in general, and family planning in particular, have helped to train and produce new bodies and selves.Development projects are primarily geared toward changing the traditional practices and habits of the people in the developing world, in order to help them make the transition to lifestyles of the globalizing model of the West. The “West” here is used as a historical term rather than a geographical construct. It is, as Akhil Gupta (1997:321) argues, a conjugation of place, power, and knowledge (Gupta 1997:321) that has historically imposed its rationalities onto other societies. Using the Egyptian case as an example, I argue that family planning programs do not just reduce the number of children and regulate reproduction; they also introduce or foster notions of individual choice and responsibility, risk aversion, and personal independence. In short, they help to construct a new kind of individuality which is guided by legal constructs of citizenship rather than by communitarian and familial control. Such a construction must be further situated within the global political economy that reorganizes markets and labor relations, and subsequently requires individuals to abstractly self-regulate themselves and respond to the pressures of want and self-interest (Scott 1995:211).

Categories of ‘belonging' and ‘owning' have reflexes in both linguistic and broader social spheres, in which the same cover terms lead a curious double life in both linguistic and social scientific terminology. For example, the opposition between ‘inalienable' and ‘alienable' possession exists both as a linguistic category and a category relevant for exchange (gifts versus commodities), and has generated immense parallel and unrelated literatures in both linguistics (e.g. Chappell and Mcgregor 1996, and references there) and anthropology (e.g., Carrier 1995 and references there). This paper explores the changing pragmatics of a single Welsh linguistic form which indexes ‘belonging,' to understand which, I argue, one needs to understand broader changes in the way that social and political-economic categories of belonging and ownership are differentially infused with affect from the nineteenth to twentieth centuries.

Most of the literature concerning traditional African medical practice has dealt with aspects often deemed ‘irrational,’ such as the role of priests, shrines, magic and religious ritual. M. J. Field's work demonstrates convincingly that these aspects of medical treatment in Ghana are essential in mitigating and curing psychosomatic illnesses as well as controlling neuroses. The emphasis on religious and psychological methods of treatment, however, can often lead to less perceptive conclusions, such as those of U.S. doctors visiting Ghana in 1960 who stated flatly that traditional medical practices there consist solely of ‘ignorance and superstition’ and that ‘witchdoctor … medicine man and native doctor are synonymous terms.

Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires, the leading cities of the South Atlantic, experienced substantial growth in wealth holding during the first half of the nineteenth century. In this article, we argue that this growth is best interpreted in a broad, comparative framework, which examines these cities in relation to their internal demographic and institutional arrangements and to their external links to the Atlantic World. Our research emphasizes three major comparative findings. First, according to our samples, both Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires experienced substantial growth in wealth holding from the 1820s through the 1850s, well before their participation in the better-known global economic expansion of the late nineteenth century. Second, residents of both South Atlantic cities held wealth broadly similar in scale with their counterparts in comparable cities in North America. And third, wealth inequality was probably no greater in Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires than in contemporary cities in the United States. Moreover, we believe that these increases in average wealth holding, as well as changes in the allocation of wealth across sectors, suggests economies that were growing rapidly while becoming more complex.

The modern history of Asians in the New World is a long and complex one beginning with South Asian indentured laborers brought to the West Indies in the early decades of the nineteenth century and continuing into the present, when, in recent years, wholly apart from Southeast Asian refugees, Asians have amounted to about one in four of the legal migrants to the United States. Almost all of the literature about these immigrants and their descendants has been particularistic, focussing on one particular ethnic or national group residing within a limited geographical area, often as narrow as a particular city. This being the case, the articles in this journal by Stephen I. Thompson (1979) and Bernard Wong (1978) about the degree of relative assimilation of East Asians in Peru and the United States should be welcomed by all scholars interested in comparative ethnicity. Although the comments to follow are largely negative they should not be considered as dismissive of the value of the empirical research of either scholar; I have learned from each and hope to continue to do so.

Notwithstanding the wide currency of the concept of charisma in contemporary social science, considerable confusion exists in regard to its employment. While some authors insist that the concept should be used in the Weberian sense, others advocate its emancipation from the ecclesiastical context in order to render it suitable for use in the modern secular context. I will argue that “charisma” is ultimately a product of social structure and hence its nature and content will undergo a transformation as the society itself changes.

One of the recent attempts to formulate a general theory of nationalism has been Deutsch's approach to the question. This aims to show that a correlation exists between changes in the process of social communications and the rise of national consciousness. A considerable number of studies based on this approach to nationalism will have to be carried out before its contribution to the identification of the elusive “essence” of nationalism can be evaluated with any amount of fairness. In the meantime one tentative procedure which might be used to assess its usefulness is to try to fit this model to the evolution of social communications in a number of countries which the author has not included among his illustrations.

The contents of sacred texts are not simply reproduced in the doctrines of the religions which venerate them; there must be interpretation and selective emphasis. This is most obviously true when the corpus of sacred literature is large, as in Christianity and Buddhism. Historians of these religions may therefore ask why certain doctrines and certain scriptures have been emphasized at the expense of others.

The Quincentennial of Columbus's Discovery of the Americas has come and gone. Some people celebrated, others protested. The Discovery has been called either “The greatest event since the creation of the world, save the incarnation and death of Him who created it” (Francisco Lopez de Gomera writing in 1552), or the greatest disaster in world history. Columbus is either a saint (who was actually proposed for canonization), or he is a sinner responsible for genocide. Can one even say that Christopher Columbus discovered America when there were already millions of people living in these lands? Did he discover America when he thought he had found a new route to Asia? The debates are interminable and the issues have become so politicized that an informed and informative discussion has been all but impossible; one steps warily into the fray. Yet, despite the voluminous literature by and about Columbus, Americans outside the rarefied circle of Columbus scholars still know little about the man and his mission. In this paper I discuss some of the little known religious beliefs that underpinned the “Enterprise of the Indies,” for I think they have the potential to change fundamentally our assessment of Columbus and relocate some of the responsibility for the consequences of the encounter.

At the turn of the century, when lynching, Jim Crow laws, and disfranchisement were at their worst, black fraternal organizations offered Afro-Americans a place to preserve their self-respect. Scholars have studied these organizations little and understood them less. One early study dismissed them as merely parodying white organizations, but hardly resembling them, while the blacks, it claimed, exaggerated both regalia and ritual. When Noel Gist published his Study of Fraternalism in the United States, Carter Woodson charged that Gist failed to understand the importance of fraternal orders to blacks and that, indeed, Gist barely mentioned the black orders. After a detailed analysis, W. E. B. DuBois found that even black and white orders that shared a name might not resemble one another. He found similarities only in Pythians, Odd Fellows, and Masons. He thought the other black societies were “Negro inventions” and “curious and instructive” organizations. “Invention,” “curious,” “exaggeration,” “parody,” “importance to blacks”—these are the key phrases. All attempt to describe an amorphous quality of black fraternal orders that makes them unique. Yet while failing to define that quality, its would-be describers avoid the issue.

The museum has become disputed terrain in the closing years of the twentieth century. Not that there has been any unanimity of opinion about these institutions at any time in their history, but until relatively recently the disputes were often among insiders. These disputes were conducted within Western culture, within the professional world of specialists, and within a universe of agreed upon and accepted ideas about a viewing public and the objects they viewed. Karp and Lavine locate this debate and its dimensions succinctly: “whether to privilege context or object… aesthetics of objects or prepositional knowledge about them… [and] whether a curator's message… is more authentic than the provenance of the object itself” (1991:12)

Urban troubles were endemic in early modern Europe. Not only did cities undergo sieges, conquests, and epidemics, but the rapid spread of rural protoindustrial manufacturing threatened established markets and employment patterns. The acute problems of Antwerp, captured by Spanish troops in 1685, or of Como, whose textile industry collapsed in the early seventeenth century are not isolated examples of cities in trouble. Many more could be offered. Indeed, descriptions of cities in the seventeenth century, particularly those of the Spanish Empire, stress depopulation and decay. Contemporaries saw around them scenes of urban desolation. Sir Thomas Overbury, travelling in the Spanish Netherlands around 1610, wrote of the “ruinous” towns, while visitors to Ciudad Real in Spain around 1620 noted vacant, tumbledown houses, unemployment, and urban land gone to waste (Parker 1977:253; Phillips 1979:29). After several years in which Spanish Lombardy was devastated by wars, famine, and plague, the Milan City Council complained of “the destitution of all sorts of persons and the threat of impending ruin.” Moreover, throughout the state, values of houses and landed property had allegedly plummeted (Sella 1979:57,63).

Linguistic conflict between French and English-speaking Canadians has been an enduring feature of Canadian society since the British conquest of New France (Quebec) in 1759. This conflict has taken a variety of forms and revolved around a number of issues in the past two hundred years, ranging from the question of religious and linguistic civil rights to economic inequality and economic dominance. The latest and most significant manifestation of English-French conflict has been the emergence in the mid-1960s of a viable movement for political independence for the predominantly French-speaking province of Quebec.

This article analyzes the introduction of police dogs in early twentieth-century Paris, which formed part of the transnational extension of police powers and their specialization. Within a context of widespread fears of crime and new and contested understandings of animal psychology, police officers, journalists, and canophiles promoted the dogs as inexpensive yet effective agents who could help the police contain the threat posed by criminals. This article responds to a growing number of studies on nonhuman agency by examining how humans in a particular place and time conceptualized and harnessed animal abilities. I argue that while nonhuman agency is an illuminating and important analytical tool, there is a danger that it might become monolithic and static. With these concerns in mind, I show how examining historical actors' conceptualizations of animal abilities takes us closer to the historical stakes and complexities of mobilizing purposeful and capable animals, and provides a better understanding of the constraints within which animals act. Attitudes toward police dogs were entwined with broader discussions of human and animal intelligence. Concerns that dogs' abilities and intelligence were contingent and potentially reversible qualities resembled contemporary biomedical fears that base instincts, desires, and impulses could overwhelm human intelligence and morality, resulting in individual and collective degeneration. To many, it seemed that police dogs' intelligence had not tamed their aggressive instincts, and these worries partly explain the demise of the first wave of police dogs in Paris after World War I.

The primary interest in this study is to make some contribution to the elaboration of a theoretical problem: What are the relations between certain forms of ideology and the social formations in which they are, or can be, realized? The consideration of ideology as a sociological category is of continual and growing concern (e.g., Moskvichov 1974; Bétaille 1978; Gellner 1978), despite the attempts of bourgeois social science to kill it off during the 1960s (cf. Lipset 1960; Bell 1960; Waxman 1968). But my present interest in it arises out of a particular historical question: Why did the Christian missions fail so signally in their efforts to evangelize and convert East African pastoralists, most conspicuously the various sections of the Maasai peoples of Tanzania and Kenya?