Before Denmark finally achieved parliamentary democracy in 1901, it was already well on the way to becoming a thorough-going welfare state and was, until about the Second World War, a leader in developing the institutions and ideology of welfare capitalism. The contrast with the United States, where democratic political institutions are much older, but where welfare institutions have developed more slowly and in very different form, is striking. The two countries, of course, vary enormously in size and circumstances, but as with any industrializing nation, they have some things in common: cities, an urban poor, an organized demand for the passage of social welfare legislation. A comparative view may reveal aspects of each country in sharper perspective than an examination of either in isolation. The question is: How is it that welfare institutions were so much more intellectually available in Denmark than in the United States? The conclusion is that institutions of modern welfare capitalism in Denmark were designed to resemble as much as possible traditional pre-democratic—and pre-socialist—Danish institutions, and that the institutions were successful precisely because they did not require any break with historical continuity and fit so well into long-familiar traditions and habits of thought.

This article examines the relationship between the Catholic Church's self- image and the way its leaders and organizations perceive the world around them and act within it. By focusing on the development of central religious concepts, (most notably ‘authority’ and ‘the Church’) and their changing expression in organizational structures and patterns of behavior, a first step is taken toward a more complete and adequate analysis of the Church's evolving role in Latin American society and politics.

During the years of independence India saw the development of a modern criminal underworld in the large cities. The country has its Chicago-style gangsters, ruffians and teddy boys who kill, rob and intimidate in the same manner as their opposite numbers in the West do. However, the largest section of India's criminal activities is still committed by the most traditional and the most romantic type of criminals, the age-old terrors of the countryside, the dacoits.

For comparison of the fates of kings reflect on the misfortunes of Saul. Mired in political chaos and beset by foreign kings, Israel came to perceive an advantage in monarchy. Accordingly the people asked the prophet Samuel to find them a king so that they could be like other nations. The Lord, through Samuel, fulfilled this desire, and (Yahweh being a jealous God) the people were warned of the consequences: “This will be the sort of king who will govern you”—he will take your sons and daughters, the best of your cornfields, vineyards, and cattle— “when that day comes, you will cry out against the king you have chosen; but it will be too late” (I Samuel 8:11–19). Yet there was also to be a constitution of a sort: “Samuel … explained to the people the nature of a king, and made a written record of it on a scroll which he deposited before the Lord” (10:24–25). Royal power, though great, was still M have its limits

In an age of crumbling empires, when many former colonial territories are becoming politically independent, it may still be instructive to study the processes by which empires and nations have been built up. What political forms have been involved and how have they been modified and developed? The new nations of Africa and Asia now emerging have political structures that bear a generic resemblance to the established democracies and dictatorships of Europe. These forms of organization seem to be a necessary requirement for membership of the United Nations, and are widely held to be essential if there is to be a flexible industrial and commercial economy, centralized administration and widespread literacy. None of the United Nations enjoys an entirely subsistence economy or relies only on communication by word of mouth. They all have courts of law, standing armies and at least the beginnings of a bureaucracy.

This essay is concerned with value perceptions of populations marginal to development. In accord with the usage found in United Nations documents, development here designates the move by a society toward self-sustaining economic growth and institutional modernization. Our interest centers on how marginals view the relationship between their own values and the images they have of visible benefits ordinarily associated with development—better housing and nutrition, easier access to jobs, schooling for all, and the like.

The religions of contemporary Middle American Indian communities fall neatly enough under the descriptive category we call ‘syncretic’. Myths and rituals, integrated experiences for the participant believers, betray to the outside observer their Spanish and Indian antecedents. This indicates a methodology of analysing the ongoing flow of religious life into its smallest constituent parts—colours and gestures, sacred objects and sacred locations, the structure and language of invocations—the more precisely to identify the ingredients of the ‘mixed’ religion we see being lived out. When enquiry moves to the process of imposition and selection by which the mix was initiated, in the early days of Spanish-Indian contact, the same familiar methodology lies ready to hand: Spanish Catholicism, and what is known of the traditional Indian religion, can be analysed into elements, those elements arranged in parallel, and the likely ease of transferance inferred, being judged to be the highest where a match seems good and where evidence from the ethnographic present appears to offer confirmation.

The impact of Christianity on the functioning of the later Roman empire has been examined by historians ever since Gibbon published his Decline and Fall. Had the Christians hastened the decline and fall of Rome? Outlining some themes of his projected work, Gibbon suggested before 1774 that indeed they had. In 1776, when publishing the first volume of his history, he touched on this same issue with considerable circumspection; but five years later, his earlier opinion appeared in print under the heading of “General Observations on the Decline of the Empire in the West” by way of concluding the third volume of the work. Here, Gibbon stated:

As the happiness of a future life is the great object of religion, we may hear, without surprise or scandal, that the introduction, or at least the abuse, of Christianity had some influence on the decline and fall of the Roman empire. The clergy successfully preached the doctrines of patience and pusillanimity; the active virtues of society were discouraged: and the last remains of military spirit were buried in the cloister; a large portion of public and private wealth was consecrated to the specious demands of charity and devotion; and the soldiers' pay was lavished on the useless multitudes of both sexes, who could only plead the merits of abstinence and chastity.

In a recent CSSH article, Jutta Sperling argued that in early modern Venice, political theory was a hermetically enclosed linguistic system, characterized by paradoxes and tautologies.J. Sperling, “The Paradox of Perfection: Reproducing the Body Politic in Late Renaissance Venice,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 41 (1999), 3–32, at p. 16. I am uneasy when historians (or anthropologists for that matter) insist that the “real” significance of what people said and did was inaccessible to them at the time, a position that might be described as methodological atheism and which is generally associated with functionalism (although Sperling's analysis is more like “dysfunctionalism”). By contrast, like Clifford Geertz, I would argue for methodological agnosticism. I do however entirely agree with Sperling that the “second serrata . . . institutionalized tensions between mutually exclusive requirements” (5), and that the paradoxes of Venetian political discourse were “both constitutive and destructive of the political system” (32). Sperling's approach can also be contrasted with S. Chojnacki, “Identity and Ideology in Renaissance Venice: The Third Serrata,” in Venice Reconsidered: The History and Civilization of an Italian City-State, 12977mdash;1797, (J. Martin and D. Romano, eds., Baltimore, 2000, 263–94), which sees patrician marriage legislation as part of a positive programme of self-definition. In what we might describe as a “deconstruction” of the so-called “myth of Venice,” Sperling argued that it collapses under the weight of its own internal contradictions, which reveal it to be “non-sensical.”Sperling's article includes full bibliographic references to the literature on the “myth of Venice.” The insistence that Venice was a perfect state not only prevented nobles from dealing effectively with conspicuous consumption and electoral corruption but made it impossible for them to admit to the real source of their problems without destroying their claims to legitimacy. In particular, Sperling singles out the demographic and social consequences of a commitment to lineal purity among nobles, resulting in limited marriage, inflated dowries, the enforced placement of women in nunneries, and increasing economic divisions within a nobility whose official ideology remained one of Republican equality.

It is a distinguishing feature of modern Western historical thought that it has striven self-consciously to free itself from the use of non-historical categories of explanation in order to consitute itself as an autonomous, self-explanatory and self-justifying form of thought. Croce believed this movement to be a late phase of humanism and identified it as the main ingredient in the Western intellectual tradition. In his view, the history of historiography in the West has been one long struggle to expel the category of transcendence from historical analysis, that is, a struggle of history against philosophy of history.

Unlike modern historical thought with its value free orientation, most previous historiography has been informed, either consciously or unconsciously, by a specific set of social values and has used historical materials as either a mine of examples for support of the position pre-chosen (like Cicero) or as evidence for the study of phenomena the noumena of which lie just outside the range of history proper (like Marx). The former approach never really arrives at history, the latter passes through it too rapidly to the goal which it believes lies beyond it. In so far as most previous historiography has been governed by these two tendencies, it has always been philosophy of history rather than history proper.

This article juxtaposes representations of Indonesia’s tobacco control as temporally backwards with a counter-discourse defending its clove-laced cigarettes—called kretek—as a form of distinctive cultural heritage. These opposing discourses, which I characterize as public health evolutionism and commodity nationalism, structure clashes over Indonesian tobacco regulations. Public health evolutionism can take the form of voyeuristic, exoticizing, and Othering representations, but it can also be used to argue for more equitable access to global tobacco control knowledge and practices. Commodity nationalists insist that the kretek industry should be a source of pride rather than shame, depicting tobacco control as a neocolonial plot to destroy an indigenous industry that benefits small farmers, factory workers, and home industries. This subaltern emphasis obscures the fact that a few large companies dominate the industry, which is increasingly foreign-owned and mechanizing to increase production while reducing employment. The cigarette industry takes advantage of both discourses by marketing supposedly safer products to consumers alarmed by public health messaging, while also promoting the cigarettes-as-national-heritage narrative and undermining regulations. The stakes of these debates are high in the world’s second largest cigarette market, with over three hundred billion sticks smoked each year and more than two hundred thousand tobacco-related deaths.

Based on a historical study of older and newer visual regimes in Gabon, Equatorial Africa, this paper examines spectacles as world-manufacturing processes that produce and circulate assets. Visual and aesthetic strategies have often been analyzed as technologies of the self that transform and manifest people's identities. I show here that they also work as a means to create resources and put them into motion. The notion of “aesthetics of acquisition” helps to capture the dynamic energy of visual events and reinsert them into the realms of economic production and material exchange. If spectacles allow people to acquire riches, produce new statuses, and circulate resources, I argue, the process through which this occurs cannot be analytically reduced to a mere commodification of the person. Instead, I explain how aesthetics of acquisition enable institutional and social actors to assume temporary commodity status, a moment and a strategy that I call “transactional life.”

The South African state at the height of apartheid depended upon two kinds of borders. Firstly, there were the boundaries between South Africa and what was tellingly referred to then as “the outside world.” These were, like all such borders, highly porous when it came to the movement of migrant laborers from poorer adjoining countries. But in most other respects, they were impermeable. Indeed, the South Africa of the 1960s and 1970s must have been one of the least “globalized” states of the time. Economically it had pursued a protectionist policy. Flows of even mildly controversial or subversive ideas, of illegal commodities, and of people deemed “undesirable,” were strictly forbidden, and their entry from outside made difficult. Television was banned; books were subjected to rigorous censorship, and radio broadcasts were regulated and often manipulated by the state-controlled broadcasting corporation. The opposition African National Congress (ANC) and a variety of other movements were in exile and their members harassed, jailed, or worse. Physical and cultural borders were well-patrolled by censors, state bureaucracies, customs officers, immigration officers, spies, and police.

Decades after the Chinese Communists successfully ousted their Nationalist Party rivals and radically remolded the political economy of the countryside, an elderly resident of Guangdong's Zhongshan municipality recounted the onerous burden of taxes imposed under Nationalist rule. In addition to the twenty-six types of taxes exacted from residents by central state authorities, and the twenty excises collected by the provincial administration, he recalled that the local tax office levied fourteen taxes, including a commodity tax imposed on human excrement.

Overwhelming evidence from many sources, which covers diverse periods and aspects of life, suggests that the record of status attainment of Mexican Americans is unique among national groups in the United States. The variety of theoretical perspectives which has been used to explain the pattern of progress experienced by various national groups is not helpful in explaining why Mexican Americans depart from this pattern.

The dramatic re-enactment of an event compresses in symbolic form psychological and social processes. For this reason, ritual dramas are useful events for the study of transmission of culture and reformulation of tradition. Dramatization as a communication strategy has a special importance for solidarity groups, as Young (1965:2) has pointed out. The potential for transforming given attitudes and values has not been explored by social scientists although playwriters, actors, and directors have consciously or unconsciously attempted this in dramaturgy.

The prevalence and attraction of dissident sectarian movements today raises anumber of significant questions about both their participants and their role incontemporary society. The present study examines one such group, the Spiritualistsof Mexico, who form not only a dissident religious movement butalso provide an important health care delivery system (Finkler 1980b, 1981a,1981c, 1983). While the Mexican example is the focus of our attention, the discussion has broader implications because movements of the Spiritualist type exist in many cultures (e.g., Berger 1969; Burridge.1969; LaBarre 1971; Lanternari 1963, 1974; Lewis 1971; Wilson 1963).

In February 1989, in Pune, a city of a million people in the western Indian state of Maharashtra, I visited a simple outdoor pottery workshop. It consisted of a shallow pit kiln surrounded by eleven spaces shaded by gunny sacks on a flat area at the top of stairs leading down to a large river that ran through the city center. The families who used this space were kumbhars, members of a Hindu caste group found throughout the subcontinent. In India to teach, I thought that time spent with these potters might provide a perspective on Sinhalese potters I had known in a Sri Lankan village in the 1970s. The Indian potters were willing, so this first visit was followed by many more over the next four months.

One morning in the middle of May 1558, the chief constable of the Governor of Rome led a detachment of his police to Monte Rotondo, a rural town some twenty miles north of the capital. There was nothing unusual in his mission, which was to capture two outlaws, who, though banished from the papal states for homicide, had returned to live under the shelter of the local lords. Nor was there anything extraordinary in the first response of the villagers, who, caught between their signori on the one hand and the state on the other, did their best to lend the police a very feeble hand. What was more unusual was what happened next, when, half by design and half by mischance, the village rose up in arms against the police and, for much of the day, held them hostage. In this essay, we will study the tangled events of that day, not so much as an example of a rural insurrection as, rather, a handsome illustration of a particular style of negotiation. Thus, settlement as much interests us here as does conflict, for it illustrates well the dense interplay of liberty and constraint. The burden of our exposition is that, to extricate themselves from a perilous impasse, the villagers, their magistrates, and the city's police could all bargain cannily with all sorts of risks, not only their adversaries', but also their own. Not only did they threaten one another, but, to their own profit, they pointed out external dangers and cited the perils they themselves faced.