The history, philosophy, sociology and even the science of science are by now thriving activities. This is in no way surprising; indeed if one examines the development of each of these approaches to the study of sciences, the surprising thing is that it emerged so comparatively recently. The history of science as an academic discipline tends to begin with a reference to Comte's grand scheme of the mid-nineteenth century, passing through Sarton's great pioneering work of the first half of the present century, largely embodied in the volumes of Isis (1913- ), founded, edited and in no small part written by Sarton himself. At present, so far as one can see, many historians of science are rethinking the great and fairly continuously progressive features of Sarton's account, and the emphasis is turning more and more to the discontinuities.

We are often told, and it is easy to believe, that the images of abstract art are not drawn from the real world. In the most conventional view of the modern school, abstract painting is a search for free expression of the artist's own vision. The non-representational painter works as he pleases and is pleased by little that he sees. A humorous drawing in a sophisticated magazine shows a studio full of wild canvases, with the artist gazing through the window at a magnificent sunset. He says to a friend, ‘Yes, old man, I admit that it's beautiful. Sometimes I'm sorry it's not the sort of thing I do.’ Authority for the establishment of a public attitude that makes such a joke possible is to be found in the writings of many critics and in the words of artists themselves. Harold Rosenberg: ‘The big moment [in art] came when it was decided to paint—just to paint. The gesture on the canvas was a gesture of liberation from value, political, aesthetic, moral.’ André Malraux: ‘What then was painting becoming, now that it no longer imitated or transfigured? Simply—painting.’ Sheldon Cheney: ‘I cannot do better, in trying to help you to an understanding of modernism, than to point out the devastating effect the realistic movement had on the arts as a whole.‘ Piet Mondrian: ‘In order that art … should not represent relations with the natural aspect of things, the law of the denaturalization of matter is of fundamental importance.’ Clive Bell: ‘Creating a work of art is so tremendous a business that it leaves no leisure for catching likenesses.’ Kasimir Malevich: ‘From the supremist point of view, the appearances of natural objects are in themselves meaningless. … The representation of an object … is something that has nothing to do with art.’ Laurence Binyon, in 1911: ‘The theory that art is, above all things, imitative and representative, no longer holds the field with thinking minds.’ Ortega y Gasset: ‘Painting completely reversed its function and, instead of putting us within what is outside, endeavored to pour out upon the canvas what is within: ideal invented objects.’

In the seventeenth century America escaped from the world, in the twentieth century it has been forced to return to it. This cycle contains the drama of the American historical consciousness which protected America's provincialism in the past but is bound now, in the age of the reverse migration, to serve as an instrument of its dissolution.

Poverty in Southeast Asia has been analyzed in numerous ways (squatters, high population densities, dietary deficiencies, war, disease, etc.) though there has been no single systematic work which attempts to delineate all socio-economic and political forces which create the evolution of rural poverty. Although rural poverty in Southeast Asia is widespread and in most ways represents poverty in its most acute form, I am purposely not dealing with poverty per se. My aim is to discuss how regional, economic and population factors such as types of cultivation and labor requirements influence the variety and intensity of rural poverty in the rural Philippines. In particular the hypothesis under investigation is that where a landscape is economically committed to a single cropping activity (such as an export crop) which is highly labor intensive, the worse aspects of rural poverty commonly emerge. Furthermore, where a regional landscape is characterized by a diversity of agricultural patterns—some labor intensive crops, some capital intensive crops—the scale and character of rural poverty is of a different order or at least of a different magnitude.

The preceding article by William A. Green does not make clear the basis upon which he criticizes my October 1981 comparison of Belize and the British sugar colonies. He begins by saying that the “phenomena compared must possess important and comprehensive unities of character” and writes later that “it is the presence of similar people performing similar functions under similar circumstances that renders comparative analysis valuable. These identities did not prevail between Belize and the British sugar colonies.” Belize, he writes, had a “unique system of domination” (his emphasis). Is the problem, then, that there are no “unities of character,” that “identities did not prevail,” or that Belize was “unique”? Every case is unique, surely, yet comparisons are made in social, as in natural, science between selected common factors which appear under similar, but not identical, conditions. There exists a range between John Stuart Mill's formulae called The Method of Agreement, in which one compares two situations which differ in every respect save one, and The Method of Difference, in which one compares two situations which are alike except in one respect, but Green seems to think only the latter is acceptable.

I. Some recent essays on the relationship between history on the one hand and anthropology and/or sociology on the other concentrate on the differences in the material with which the typical practitioner deals and the types of issues likely to be addressed (Thompson 1972, 1976, 1977; Davis 1981). They have tended to compare the perspectives that anthropologists1 and historians bring into their work. And both E. P. Thompson and Natalie Z. Davis advocate increasing mutual borrowing from each discipline: they wish the one discipline to deepen its sensitivity and to avoid the usual pitfalls by drawing on the strengths of the other. Thus, by way of illustration, one finds Thompson arguing that historians tend to be more attentive to the paradoxes and ambivalences of actual men, and that they are attuned to the discipline of context because of this attentiveness to heterogeneity, a strength which sociologists—who, he says, tend to overgeneralise and to swallow heterogeneity through the manufacture of neat typologies—would be well advised to draw upon (1976:387,394).

Like women in many parts of the world whose husbands predeceased them, widows in China were free electrons, unbound elements in the social chemistry. Economically vulnerable, ritually superfluous, and at the same time socially destabilizing and sexually threatening, they were archetypal liminal figures—marginalized, caricatured, and feared. This has made the widow a good subject for literary critics, anthropologists, and historians interested in the way that societies treat women and in the way that treatment of widows in particular is intended to ward off or contain potential disturbance to the status quo. For China, as pioneering work by Mark Elvin and Susan Mann has shown, examining changing attitudes toward widows can illuminate larger social, political, and economic shifts in the late imperial period, roughly the thirteenth through the early twentieth centuries.Mark Elvin, “Female Virtue and the State,” Past and Present 104, 111–52; and Susan Mann, “Widows in the Kinship, Class, and Community Structures of Qing Dynasty China,” Journal of Asian Studies, 46:1 (February 1987), 37–56. Among newer work, see the excellent discussion in Bettine Birge, “Levirate Marriage and the Revival of Widow Chastity in Yüan China,” Asia Major, 8:2 (Fall 1995), 107–46. By focusing on Manchu widows, the present essay attempts to improve our understanding of widowhood in late imperial China and at the same time shed light on the role of widows, and women generally, in the construction of ethnicity in the Qing period (1644–1911), when the alien Manchu dynasty ruled the country.

The time seemed propitious for the establishment of a government of law in Serbia at the beginning of 1830. Between the end of 1828 and the autumn of 1830 Prince Miloš of Serbia created a so-called “legislative commission” to translate the Code Napoléon into Serbian and codify the laws and customs of the country. In January 1830 he solemnly advised a great national assembly that he had obtained an imperial edict from the Sultan ending all direct obligations of Serbian peasants to their former Turkish lords, guaranteeing Ottoman recognition of Serbian autonomy in most matters of internal administration, and offering Serbia the prospect of territorial aggrandizement, as well as the express right to institute schools, courts, and a governmental administration of her own. Shortly thereafter the Serbian envoys to St. Petersburg returned to Serbia and made it known that the Tsar-Protector had supposedly expressed the view that every state should have an “organic charter”. The able and enlightened Count Paul Kiselev, Russian Governor of the Rumanian principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia, had moreover just endowed these provinces with “Organic Statutes”

Almost on the eve of the Iranian revolution, the shah's regime adopted a policy of daylight-saving time to cope with a chronic power shortage in Tehran, a densely populated city of more than four million people. The clock was moved ahead by an hour in the spring and set back again in the fall. Few decisions of the old government evoked as much public criticism and outcry as this one. Thousands of complaints were registered against the plan. The Department of Energy was swamped by daily protest letters and phone calls. Iran's daily newspapers printed hundreds of letters and editorials decrying the idea as absurd and futile. Comedians capitalized on the arbitrary nature of the official time as they sought to mobilize public ridicule of the government. Many people rejected the plan outright and adhered to the old time. Others kept both times. When you asked someone for the time of the day, the immediate response was “which time do you mean, the old time or the new time?” For some people, the rejection of daylight-saving time became a symbol of opposition to the shah's regime—it was at least justified as such.

I am a professor of the history of Africa. I have spent four decades researching and writing about the historic West African forest kingdom of Asante (or Ashanti, now in Ghana), the most richly documented and most complex state and society in all of sub-Saharan Africa. In recent years I have become intrigued by the ways in which African histories authored by academic practitioners have been subjected to an ever-rising tide of readings, and misreadings, by interested publics and partisan propagandists. This paper addresses the problematic but understudied interaction between practitioners, publics, and propagandists in the understanding of history today. However, it is not about Africa.

Despite its title this article does not pretend to be or to offer a study in comparative ethnography, since my expertise in the cultures to be discussed is limited and uneven. I know somewhat more about the rural Irish of the Dingle Peninsula, among whom I lived during 1974–75, than I do about the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico, among whom I spent the greater part of the summer in 1979 and again in 1985. Nor do these remarks have any pretense to social history, although it is to these peoples' collective responses to aspects of their histories that the article is addressed. Rather, it should be taken as a critical reflection on the vulnerabilities of the human spirit and on the vulnerabilities of a science that tries to pierce the meanings of that spirit. It is a tale of two cultures, and of the ethnographer as a teller of tales, and of the pitfalls of cultural interpretation.

The history of women is different from that of men. Women's history is the highlighting of the cultural construction of gender, the ways in which “men” and “women” are defined in considerable autonomy from biological males and females. The culturally constructed gender system interacts with a society's political system in ways that are just beginning to be explored.1 At the same time, scholars also find their definitions of national states to be in flux. Criticizing both Weberian and Marxist traditions of analysis of the state, Charles Bright and Susan Harding have stressed the open-ended, continuous, and contingent interplay between state structures and initiatives on the one hand, and social movements on the other.2 It is an auspicious time to reconsider the relationships between women and the state in cross-cultural perspective. Here I will examine the women's suffrage movement in Japan (1919–31 ) in its political context in order to encourage comparison with other women's suffrage movements, and to re-examine the interwar Japanese state from the viewpoint of one of its least-studied challengers.

A historical survey of social scientific literature would undoubtedly disclose a tendency (analogous, perhaps, to that evident in popular fiction) toward faddishness. From time to time certain topics enjoy great popularity and seem to attract more than their share of investigation and debate. Such is the case with the study of revolution, which is currently deemed a quite ‘fashionable’ object of scientific research.

Around the Caribbean, it is commonly believed that slavery and the plantation system have been responsible for the prevalence of short-term consensual unions, matrifocal households and children out of wedlock who grow up without the authority and support of a father or definite father- surrogate. This explanation is accepted as often by social scientists as by public opinion. Of course, this is the obverse of the line of Western social thought maintaining that small holdings and independent family farming are the basis of strong patrifocal households, exclusive life-long marriages and paternal responsibility for children.

The economic activities of Buddhist monasteries have frequently been noted. In regard to Tibetan Lamaist monasteries some writers have assumed that these activities indicate the “corruption” or “degeneration” of pure Buddhist ideals. On the other hand many have expressed wonder at the generosity with which Lamaist laymen will give, sometimes impoverishing themselves, to support their religion. Attention too seldom has been drawn to the means by which gifts are translated into religious merit for the donors, whether these be monks or laymen. It is the mechanism of translation that explains the universal economic success of Buddhist monasticism.

A marriage expresses a mutual recognition of some degree of shared identity. The wedding ceremony confirms these links and creates new ones, although to an extent variable with the culture and the specific case. The affinity can be between individuals acting for themselves, for families, or for larger social or national groups. At one extreme would be the temporary liason, stemming from personal whim or passion, between individuals who share little more than common acceptance of the culture which recognizes the form. A Las Vegas marriage followed by a quickie Mexican divorce, a Hindu Gāndharva marriage consummated without any ceremony, or a Shi'i mut 'ah (marriage of pleasure) of contractually stipulated length might typify this end of the continuum. At the other end would be the purely political marriage that links social groups, parties, or even nations together but which disregards the desires of the principals. Richard II's diplomatic marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine, a Kulin Brahmin's ritual marriage with dozens of women, or Asaf al-Daula's apparently unconsummated marriage with Shams al-Nisā' Begum (discussed later) exemplifies this extreme. Between lie a diversity of forms within a variety of cultures.

The rich body of literature on the cultural legacies of East Germany has privileged white German perspectives on material culture at the expense of non-white and non-European encounters with socialist things. In shifting the spatial lens to the global South, and to the foreign students and workers who lived for extended periods in East Germany, I trouble the implicit whiteness in the study of GDR cultural memory. Popular identification with GDR goods extended beyond the borders of Germany to newly decolonized countries that were the beneficiaries of the GDR’s solidarity policies. Using the example of Vietnam, I challenge formulations of Ostalgie as a site of white German memory production only, highlighting consumption of East German products by racialized foreign Others. In examining the objects that Vietnamese migrants amassed and transported back to Vietnam, and their subsequent use and circulation through today, I offer a different take on the temporal and spatial relationship between people and commodities, one that assigns value and agency to imported socialist things. In contrast to reunified Germany, where socialist-era goods were deemed disposable and obsolete, in Vietnam, East German products did not lose their utility and associations with modernity. The essay argues for a more inclusive exploration of memory and approach to Ostalgie that takes seriously the alternative logics of time, space, and materiality that informed the circuits of consumption, trade, and meaning of GDR things.

What little has been written about Chinese immigrants in the British Empire has focused mainly on laborers, commonly known as “coolies,” and their roles in imperial society, culture, and industry. Chinese commercial immigrants, though they loomed large in public dialogues about race, migration, and empire, have been virtually ignored. This article examines how such immigrants were represented, and how two prominent individuals represented themselves, in London and metropolitan Australia, respectively, during a high tide of British imperialism and Chinese global migration. By the 1920s, the ardent pro-British sentiment expressed by Mei Quong Tart, the de facto representative of the Chinese merchant class in Australia, had been superseded by the anti-colonial critique of Lao She, one of China's foremost modern novelists. Lao She's semi-autobiographical depiction of Chinese life in London condemned the violent and emasculating character of British imperialism, while also excoriating Chinese society's failure to modernize, cohere as a nation, and overcome internecine class conflicts. Both authors were concerned with social relations between Chinese men and white British women, as were British commentators throughout this period, and with differentiating themselves from laboring Chinese immigrants. Contrary to Stuart Hall's famous assertion that “race is the modality through which class is lived,” for these Chinese commercial immigrants class and gender proved to be more essential than were crude concepts of race to their experiences and self-identification, and ultimately to British society's rejection of their attempts to assimilate.