Overt ethnic conflict is frequently accompanied by the observation that the conflict is not essentially rooted in ethnic differences but is primarilyeconomic in origin. Examples are not hard to come by; it has been madein regard to the American Negro situation, the Catholics in NorthernIreland and the Ugandan Asians, to name but three instances. The claim that economic differences underlie ethnic conflict raises the questions of whether all interethnic conflict can be accounted for within the framework of a conflict theory of social stratification, and this in turn raises the broader question of whether all types of interethnic relations, of conflict and harmony, assimilation, integration, separatism and segregation can be subsumed under a more general theory of stratification.

Study of charismatic movements has become an increasingly large, complex, and rather confusing field. A recent bibliography on modern religious movements in Africa, to which these considerations will be restricted, lists 1,313 items.

Since the overwhelming electoral victory of Algeria's main Islamist party, the Front Islamique du Salut (FIS), in 1990 and 1991, the annulment of the elections by the Algerian army in 1992, and a decade of apparently random killings that followed throughout the country, religion has been at stake in most contemporary debates on Algeria. Algeria has thereby entered the field of larger debates within the Western world about radical Islam, the rise of religion, the rejection of “Western models,” and other expressions of the putative “clash of civilizations.” At the same time, relatively little has been said about what “Islam” actually means in the Algerian context, even by more perspicacious authors and analysts who are keen to stress the economic and social causes for the success of political Islam in Algeria (e.g., Burgat 1988; 1995; Charef 1994; Martinez 1998). This is not to say that the variety of religious practices in Algeria has attracted no attention from researchers. Rather, it means that those writers who focus on ‘local’ religion, such as Andezian (1993; 2001) and Hadibi (1999; 2002), tend to produce local accounts of the veneration of saints and pilgrimages, without referring to broader cultural dynamics and political struggles, and without attempting to link their findings in more than superficial ways to the emergence of modern Islamism.

There has recently been an upsurge in anthropologists' interest in law, with North Africa and the Middle East taking a prominent position. One of the foci is the coexistence of multiple sets of legal practices, and the ways in which people negotiate between different legal “systems.” This emphasis closely mirrors the more general shift in anthropology from “discourse” to “practice,” and shares both its strengths and weaknesses. Among the latter is that the resulting emphasis on “legal pluralism” (Griffith 1986) runs the danger of eroding the concept of law as such, subsuming it within more general and all-encompassing notions of “conflict resolution.” Similarly, there is a risk that one of the most striking aspects of legal procedure, namely the value placed on the act of making rules, is being neglected, and the actual content of local law codes and their underlying principles are receiving less attention than they deserve. As a result, “customary law” is more often implicitly defined by what it is not. Here, my aim is not to shift the focus from “practice” to “discourse,” but rather to understand the internal logic of one such set of ‘customs,’ and to consider the act of making law in itself as a special kind of practice (see also Comaroff and Roberts 1981: 15–16).

The need for comparative studies of Jewish communities has occasionally been argued, but apart from largely typological comparisons of Jewish polities, there have been few, if any, attempts at a sociological comparative study of Jewish communities. Nearly all the sociological studies of Judaism have restricted their analysis to the Jewish community in the United States, and it is possible that their findings possess little generality beyond that society.

There are at least two reasons which might be cited for undertaking the historical and comparative investigation of revolution. The first is the desire to make a revolution, the second is the desire to prevent it. Perhaps nearly everybody is susceptible to the one reason or the other, but there is yet a third reason that gives the study of revolution an outstanding interest and significance, even though its appeal is doubtless much more limited than the first two. This is that the understanding of revolution is an indispensable condition for the fuller knowledge and understanding of society. Depending on how we define it, revolution may be common or uncommon, frequent or rare. But in the case of societies, nations, and communities that have experienced revolution, we cannot claim to understand them adequately without understanding their revolutions. In a deep and therefore a non-tautological sense, it is true that every people gets the revolution it deserves and equally true that it gets only the revolutions of which it is capable.

In the spring of 1907, the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, Herbert Asquith, was asked in Parliament for his opinion on taxing the growing number of private automobiles in Great Britain. Such a measure, Asquith replied, would be an ‘almost ideal tax, because it is a tax on a luxury which is apt to degenerate into a nuisance’. This remark was typical of the British upper-class attitude toward the motor car in theearly decades of this century: it was unlikely that the automobile would become widely owned by the middle classes, and unthinkable that it could be owned by the lower classes. Such motoring as was to be done by men of humble station would be as chauffeurs and lorry drivers. The wealthy would continue to use their new self-propelled playthings for weekend pleasure trips in the country.

In recent years I have been engaged in research in the social anthropology of religion. In the course of investigating the changing religious beliefs and practices of Jewish immigrants in Israel from rural Tunisia and Morocco I initially sought to conceptualize the phenomena encountered in terms of ‘secularization’. This study is a consequence of the problems that arose.

American and British writers have reinterpreted the English, American, French and Russian revolutions, but, since Motley,2 have had little new to say about the Revolt of the Netherlands. My hypothesis is that the Revolt of the Netherlands was indeed a revolution comparable to and deserving a place of priority in the list of great revolutions which have ushered in modern times.

Motley liked to compare the Revolt of the Netherlands with the American Revolution, but what appealed to him in both movements was that they were as he saw them really not very revolutionary. The claims of traditional states' rights were asserted against the innovations of a centralizing monarchy. Neither the Dutch nor the American movement was carried away by a Jacobin zeal for unity. Both were directed against a government which was distant and foreign: the struggle against foreign domination therefore filled the center of the picture of both rebellions, and obscured domestic changes which may have been drastic enough to deserve the term “revolutionary.”

The consolidation of China did not come immediately with China's unification. It was not fully accomplished until the middle of the Former (Western) Han. The monolithic2 nature of the political powers and a group of local elite3 were then forming. And the bureaucracy, becoming much elaborated during this era, served to link the two. The elite group functioned, on the one hand as the reservoir of candidates to officialdom, and on the other hand, as the leading element with education, prestige, and often wealth, in the community. Based on these concepts, this paper ventures to present the formation of the local elite group through the changing social base of political power during Western Han.

Much postcolonial theory assumes a continuity of both behavior and representation between colonial rule and what has succeeded it across sub-Saharan Africa. The maltreatment of political prisoners in Guinea in the wake of its brief invasion by Portuguese troops in November 1970 provides a challenging but ultimately fruitful empirical record against which to test this theory. I use an analytical approach informed by history, law, anthropology, and communications theory to explore continuities between the legal practices of French colonial and contemporary revolutionary regimes, on one hand, and Guinea's pursuit of supposed traitors, on the other. Though there is more discontinuity than direct inheritance in the administration of justice, the article argues that the representation of Guinea's colonial heritage was a central part of how President Sékou Touré legitimized his state and his own rule. I suggest that the colonial legacy operated more as a benchmark of what behavior might be acceptable in a postcolonial revolutionary state such as Guinea than as a linear precedent from French colonial rule to the Guinean revolution. The regime's representation of its colonial legacy also helps to explain the form, medium, and content of the political prisoners' broadcast confessions.

The Boy Scout and Girl Guide movements arose in the first decades of the twentieth century, an era of social and political unrest, and they were initially the center of intense controversy in Britain.Much has been written on the Baden-Powells and the Scout organization, but little has been done on either the Guides or on gender in either movement. Also, most works deal specifically with the first two decades of the movements, rather than with the interwar period. The major official histories of the Scouts and Guides include Henry Collis, Fred Hurll and Rex Hazlewood, B-P's Scouts: An Official History of the Boy Scouts Association (London: Collins, 1961); Rose Kerr, The Story of the Girl Guides (London: Girl Guides Association, 1954); and Alix Liddell, The Girl Guides, 1910–1970 (London: Frederick Muller, 1970). Robert Baden-Powell has been the subject of several biographies and the Chief Guide, Olave Baden-Powell, has written an autobiography that is quite useful. The best biography is the recent one by Tim Jeal, The Boy-Man: The Life of Lord Baden-Powell (New York: William Morrow, 1990). The analytical works on the movements are limited to work on the Scouts by Martin Dedman, “Baden-Powell, Militarism, and the ‘Invisible Contributors' to the Boy Scout Scheme, 1904–1920,” Twentieth Century British History 4:3 (1993), 201–23; John Gillis, Youth and History (New York: Academic Press, 1974); Robert H. MacDonald, Sons of the Empire: The Frontier and the Boy Scout Movement, 1890–1918 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993); Michael Rosenthal, The Character Factory (New York: Pantheon Press, 1986); John Springhall, Youth, Empire and Society (London: Croom Helm Ltd., 1977); Allen Warren, “Sir Robert Baden-Powell, the Scout Movement and Citizen Training in Britain, 1900–1920,” English Historical Review 101 (1986), 376–98; and Paul Wilkinson, “English Youth Movements, 1908–1930,” Journal of Contemporary History 4:2 (April 1969), 3–23. Allen Warren has written several insightful articles, including, “Mothers for the Empire,” in Making Imperial Mentalities, ed. J. A. Mangan (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), 96–109; “Citizens of the Empire,” in Imperialism and Popular Culture, ed. John Mackenzie (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), 232–56; and “Popular Manliness: Baden-Powell, Scouting and the Development of Manly Character,” in Manliness and Morality: Middle-class Masculinity in Britain and America, 1800–1940, eds. J. A. Mangan and James Walvin (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987), 176–98. Good studies of working-class boys are: Michael J. Childs, Labour's Apprentices: Working-class Lads in Late Victorian and Edwardian England (London: Hambledon Press, 1992) and Harry Hendrick, Images of Youth: Age, Class and the Male Youth Problem, 1880–1920 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990). For the post-World War I period, see: David Fowler, The First Teenagers: The Lifestyle of Young Wage-Earners in Interwar Britain (London: Woburn Press, 1995). Two classic studies of middle-class girls are: Carol Dyhouse, Girls Growing Up in Late Victorian and Edwardian England (London: Routledge, 1981) and Deborah Gorham, The Victorian Girl and the Feminine Ideal (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1982). For works specifically dealing with American Scouting, see Jeffrey P. Hantover, “The Boy Scouts and the Validation of Masculinity,” Journal of Social Issues 34:1 (1978) and David I. Macleod, Building Character in the American Boy: The Boy Scouts, YMCA, and Their Forerunners, 1870–1920 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983). By the 1920s, however, they had become an established part of what came to be seen as the British “way of life.” The movements also began a sustained international expansion, winning acclaim from educators, government officials, social organizations, and even the League of Nations. Yet this extension of the Scout and Guide program into other countries produced problems both abroad and at home, as contradictions appeared in the ideologies and activities of the two groups. Practically speaking, they both faced difficulties in accommodating different races, religions, languages, and nations in the new global brother/sisterhood.

The four years between the bombardment of Fort Sumter and the surrender at Appomattox comprise a period of great effort and great achievement in the life of Karl Marx. He was forty-three years old in the spring of 1861, and his intellectual powers were at their height. He was, however, destitute financially and without influence politically. His old promise of a big book on socialist ideology had not been kept, and the despised Lassalle was the acknowledged leader of the German socialists. He was soon to experience great pain from physical afflictions, and to consider declaring bankruptcy. In February 1862, he told Engels, “A lousy life like this is not worth living.” But by the end of 1865 Marx had written drafts of the three volumes of Capital, found a publisher, and attained political leadership in the newly founded International Workingmen's Association. By the time the North claimed victory over the South, Marx could claim substantial success as a socialist theoretician and as a political leader. The ordeal of Karl Marx coincided with the ordeal of the American Federal Union.

In my family, stories of our Fijian ancestors' cannibalism have been irreverently recycled in tale-telling moments laced with both solemnity and the absurd. I never seriously questioned the reality of the stories, accepting instead their mythical quality and their underlying social allegory. With almost a wink and a nudge these tales of past cannibalism come to life as fables that nearly always taper off into the redemption of being civilized. As I explore in this article, for us as for many who engage cannibal stories, cannibalism refers to more than the cultural practice of anthropophagy. In the wake of William Arens' provocative critique of this meta-myth, it has become more difficult in recent years to uncritically accept and repeat claims of other peoples' cannibalism. Studies by a generation of scholars of history and culture have ensured that the study of cannibalism now is as likely to interrogate those that view and seek it, as it is to examine those reputed to practice it. Anthropologies of tourism and cultural critiques too have cemented its conceptualization as an enduring discourse of savagery.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the U.S. government paid the economics department at the University of Chicago, known for its advocacy of free markets and monetarism, to train Chilean graduate students. These students became known as the “Chicago Boys,” who implemented the first and most famous neoliberal experiment in Chile after 1973. Peruvian, Mexican, and other Latin American economics students followed a similar path and advocated a turn to neoliberal policies in their own countries. The Chicago Boys narrative has become an origin story for global neoliberalism. However, the focus on this narrative has obscured other transnational networks whose ideas possess certain superficial, but misleading, similarities with neoliberalism. I examine Chilean and Peruvian engagements with Yugoslavia's unique form of socialism, its worker self-management socialism, which was part of a worldwide discussion of anti-authoritarian socialism. I first introduce the Yugoslav socialist model that inspired those in Chile and Peru. I then examine socialist discussions in Chile and Peru that called for decentralized, democratic socialism and looked to Yugoslavia for advice. I conclude by examining the 1990s postponement of socialism in the name of a very narrow democracy and realization of neoliberalism. The Chicago Boys story assumes the easy global victory of neoliberalism and erases what was at stake in the 1988–1994 period: radically democratic socialism on a global scale.

The effectiveness of a protest movement, such as trade unionism, depends on its ability to overcome the widespread disapproval and opposition it engenders. The worker's demands and their methods of enforcing them must somehow become egitimate in the eyes of the employers, the government, the public, and the workers themselves. The present article analyzes the British and German coal miners' struggles to overcome opposition to their endeavors to rise from traditional submission to the employer to some sort of partnership in industrial government. Its main emphasis is on the development of protest ideologies over a period of time, from the late 18th century to the first World War, which spans the industrial revolution in both countries. Although many of the aspects discussed apply to the countries as a whole, it is hoped that by focussing on a specific and rather distinct group with a long history, some of the contrasting elements will stand out more sharply. Britain will be discussed first, and then Germany, each case starting with employer-worker relations during the pre-industrial period and tracing the broad patterns of the protest movement through the period of viable unionism.

An anonymous comment on the suicidal inclinations of great men appeared among the regular articles in an 1850 issue of the highly regarded journal of mental hygiene, the Annales médico-psychologiques. “Some curious rapprochements might be drawn,” the author suggested, “given the frequency with which this thought occurs among celebrated men; but it is clear that if insanity were the sole possible explanation, only the lot of the common people would be desirable.” On one level, this statement represents an editorial contribution to an intense debate taking place in the journal's pages concerning the relationship between suicide and insanity. Although most nineteenthcentury observers associated self-destructive behavior with mental instability, viewing the individual who sought to put an end to his existence as weak, if not perverse, a certain mystique also surrounded suicide at this time. Images of Christian martyrs who willingly courted death in preference to leading lives of pagan dishonor, of the self-sacrificing heroes of antiquity, existed alongside more contemporary renderings of unrequited lovers and world-weary young men familiar to readers of Romantic novels and the faits divers. A longing for death was a sign of sensitivity and artistic promise. “Suicide,” wrote the influential critic, Saint-Marc Girardin, “is not the malady of one who is simple of heart or in mind; it is the malady of the refined and of philosophers.” Alphonse de Lamartine, George Sand, Alfred de Musset, Benjamin Constant, and the Vicomte de Chateaubriand all confessed to having been tempted to kill themselves in their youth. No less an idol than Napoleon Bonaparte was known to have entertained morbid ideas on occasion.

Shortly before Vasco da Gama returned to Lisbon in September 1499 from his great voyage to India, a Florentine merchant in the Portuguese capital reported troubling rumors that ‘certain vessels of white Christians’ had visited the port of Calicut on the Malabar coast only a couple of generations previously. If true, this would mean that some other European power had beaten Portugal in its long search for a maritime route to the Indies. After speculating that the mysterious mariners were Germans (although ‘it seems to me that we should have some notice about them’) or Russians (‘if they have a port there’), the merchant concluded that ‘on the arrival of the captain [da Gama] we may learn who these people are.’

In the first decades of the nineteenth century, when the Middle East and North Africa first began to attract the sustained attention of European imperialism and colonialism, Arab, Ottoman Turkish, and Iranian polities began a protracted experiment with army modernization. These decades saw a mania in the Middle East for the import of European methods of military organization and techniques of warfare. Everywhere, in the Ottoman Empire, North Africa, Egypt, and Iran, nizam-i jadid (new order) regiments sprang up, sometimes on the ruins of older military formations, sometimes alongside them, unleashing a process of military-led modernization that was to characterize state-building projects throughout the region until well into the twentieth century. The ruling dynasties in these regions embarked on army reform in a desperate effort to strengthen their defensive capacity, and to resist growing European hegemony and direct or indirect control by imitating European methods of military organization and warfare. Almost every indigenous ruler who succeeded in evading or warding off direct European control, from the sultans of pre-Protectorate Morocco in the west to the shahs of the Qajar dynasty in Iran in the east, invited European officers, sometimes as individuals, sometimes as formal missions, to assist with building a modern army. With the help of these officers, Middle Eastern rulers thus sought to appropriate the secrets of European power.