In Australia, applicants for native title—legal recognition of proprietary interest in land devolving from traditions predating colonization—must meet a stringent standard of continuity of social identity since before the advent of Crown sovereignty. As courts and the legislature have gravitated toward an increasingly strict application of the continuity doctrine, anthropologists involved in land claims cases have found themselves rehearsing an old debate in Australian anthropology over the degree to which post-contact patterns of subsistence, movement, and ritual enactment can support inferences about life in precontact Australia. In the 1960s, at the dawn of the land claims era, a handful of anthropologists shifted the debate to an ecological plane. Characterizing Australia on the cusp of colonization as a late Holocene climax human ecosystem, they argued that certain recently observed patterns in the distribution of marks of social cohesion (mutual intelligibility of language, systems of classificatory kinship) could not represent the outcome of such a climax ecosystem and must indicate disintegration of Aboriginal social structures since contact. Foremost among them was Joseph Birdsell, for whom linguistic boundaries, under climax conditions, would self-evidently be congruent with boundaries in breeding pools. Birdsell's intervention came just as the Northern Territory Supreme Court was hearing evidence on the value of dialect as a marker of membership in corporate landholding groups in Yolngu country, and offers an object lesson in how language, race, mode of subsistence, and law come together in efforts to answer the questions “Who was here first?” and “Are those people still here?”

Since 1967 when Guy Swanson's challenging book, Religion and Regime, was published there have been several reviews attacking it on fairly specific points, but none of these reviews seems really to examine his basic premises and means for testing those premises. While the present reviewer has neither the space nor in some instances the knowledge to deal with all aspects of this comprehensive book, she has examined in some detail Swanson's basic thesis and model in order to show where they need modification. With greater care and flexibility in categorizing individual political units and by modifying Swanson's idea of immanence, his model could indeed help explain more than the official position on religion in a given state during the Reformation period. It could also be used in explaining the spread of Protestantism, whether or not it was officially accepted, and it could even be applied to the spreading of medieval heresies.

Like Dr. Zenner, I have carried out field research in the Galilean region of Israel, and like him have had to rely mainly on older respondents—in my case, exclusively Druze—for basic data. But where Dr. Zenner is an anthropologist with historical interests, I am a psychologist; as such, my thoughts on the kinds of materials that we both collected may provide a worthwhile complement to his. Faced with the fact that memories of Aqiili Agha continue to echo through the Galilee long after his death, the historical scholar asks, ‘what manner of man engendered these accounts?’ while the psychologist asks, ‘why do these memories persist, and in what ways are these memories distorted by the same motives that keep them alive?’. Accordingly, Dr. Zenner uses his subjects as informants on an historic figure, Aqiili Agha, a person external to themselves. As a psychologist I use equivalent materials, from a similar respondent group, as projective data.

Thus far, two quantitative studies of Catholic sainthood have been attempted. Altruistic Love by Pitirim Sorokin,1 which deals with the entire history of Christianity, established the patterns of saintly behavior over a two-thousand-year period. Although many of Sorokin's analytical categories are useful, his conclusions are rather broad and do not take sufficiently into account changing conditions in church history. His geographical subdivisions, for example, which are based upon the twentieth-century nation-state, are anachronistic when applied to a medieval context. No distinctions are made between the various genres of freeman, e.g., the old feudal aristocracy and the urban-dwelling nobility, although their interests were often in conflict. Nor does Sorokin consider the role of the papacy and the political crosscurrents-Guelph vs. Ghibelline, Englishman vs. Frenchman, heresy vs. orthodoxy-which determined the function of a saint's cult and the likelihood of his being venerated in any particular epoch. Frequently these saints became the objects of cults not so much because of their personal piety but rather as a result of their political activities, family connections, or membership in an aggressive religious order. Nor does Sorokin consider the many local saints, whose worship was restricted to one or several dioceses and who failed to gain international recognition. Such relatively obscure individuals, the sources of much local pride, were often the objects of more active and long-lasting cults than their well-known confreres.

Black electoral leaders in the post-civil rights South have exhibited broad agreement on the nature of the political task of displacing unresponsive white elites from power and directing attention to the previously excluded black constituency. There are a few cases, however, in which the commonly expected solidarity and consensus among the black elected leaders has not occurred, despite intensified hostility from the white elite. In this analysis these circumstances are explored from one small town in Mississippi where blacks won nearly total administrative control in 1977. However, the apparent leadership consensus, though fragile, quickly evaporated, due to conflicts of ideology, class, idiosyncrasy, and racial invidiousness. This ultimately led to administrative paralysis in the allocation and management of scarce political goods. In this town where there were broad disagreements between three sets of political contenders, each sought to dominate the policy process by staffing various public positions. The scarcity of these positions, the diametrically opposed goals of the contenders, and the precariousness of the control exerted even by the administrative leadership produced a hopeless struggle. Eventually the government crumbled. Analysis reveals that the complex sociopolitical environment and certain aspects of the political structure contributed to this breakdown. The rapid development of a tripartite leadership cleavage was hardly accommodated by political structures designed to serve the ends of a racial caste system. The fragility of the political environment and the absence of structural mechanisms for conflict resolution severely diminished the ability of the new leaders to perform.

Since the Second Vatican Council opened in 1962, several changes have occurred in the Society of Jesus. The Jesuits have suffered a drop in manpower: Membership in the international order peaked at over 36,000 men in 1965 and had fallen by 1988 to below 25,000. Another change has been ideological: The Jesuits seem to have shifted from a conservative or disengaged posture toward a progressive and occasionally radical stance on social and political matters, and they have struggled to implement this orientation by abandoning some of their routine commitments and taking on new ventures in “faith and justice.” Finally, the Society of Jesus has deregimented its procedures in the areas of training and governance. It would appear that the liberalization that took place in mainline Protestant denominations over several decades was recapitulated by the Jesuits in a shorter period.

The expansion of Europe has been a much-discussed process. Unfortunately the publicists' and historians' interest has commonly been limited to surface aspects of power, to political, economic, and intellectual penetration. Yet a closer acquaintance reveals the existence of a yet deeper layer of hostile infiltration, a subtler and more subversive onslaught on native values and traditions. The “underground” portions of western expansion have hitherto rather escaped notice, let alone analysis, although among their victims their force was felt deeply if confusedly. Thus an anonymous journalist writing in Russia late in 1896 pointed to that melting away of native guideposts under the western impact when he lamented that “under the influence of historical conditions and progress many phenomena which distinguished Russian nationality are now changing and therefore prove no longer to be genuine and unchangeable…” No hallowed custom, no authority remained unimpaired, even though the surface structure of society and government was preserved and the sovereignty of the state untouched. The termites of western influence were eating away the substance and left only facades. And the invisible portion of western power, its ability to serve as a universal model, proved in the long run even more devastating than armies, battleships, or stocks and bonds.

If I have understood Obeyesekere correctly, his paper on the ritual of the Sanni demons has two major concerns: to describe and interpret the dynamics of a dramatic healing ritual and to identify the symptoms represented symbolically by the Sanni demons. The ritual of the eighteen demons is presented as a dramatic confrontation between the forces of good, the gods, and those of evil, the disease-causing demons. The story line is provided by texts recounting original mythic encounters between the Buddhas and the demons. A degree of abreaction is achieved by the patient who is drawn into the drama as well as by the audience for whom the drama acts as an alleviator of tensions and reinforcer of religious values. After observing that each of the eighteen demons represents a discrete set of symptoms and that the system of Ayurvēdic medicine currently popular in Ceylon is a naturalistic one, Obeyesekere uses comparative linguistic and myth materials from other parts of India to demonstrate that the demons once represented physical rather than psychological symptoms and that psychological content has gradually come to replace an earlier set of organic, naturalistic representations.

All major Swiss cities are located north of the Alps. Their development can be understood best as part of the development of the North European cities—those of Germany, Flanders and France—and as part of the communal movement as it developed in those areas. Yet the cities that eventually became Swiss are those that accepted more of the characteristic institutions of Italian city-states than did the rest, and it is this acceptance of certain Italian practices—particularly the creation of a rural territory and thus eventually of a territorial city-state—that made those cities into city Cantons, able to take part in the formation of Switzerland.

Since the end of the first world war scholars have intensified their research on the Cistercian movement and its 12th-century architecture. In this note dealing with the building code and the structures of a minority group an attempt will be made to analyze the historical and theoretical bases which were responsible for the austerity of the Cistercian oratories. The question will have to be asked if and for how long the community was able to achieve and to maintain an ideally neutral type of monastic architecture, which was intended to be of such simplicity that it would not impose any emotions on the viewer.

The priorities of British and American trade unions center predominantly on the economic rewards received by union members. Collective bargaining and strikes typically focus on how much employers must pay for labor (in wages, pensions, and other benefits) rather than on how the labor, once purchased, may be used. Basic decisions regarding the organization of production are not considered by most unionists as legitimate issues for negotiation. Disputes over working conditions do arise, of course, but rarely concern securing for labor the rights of management. They involve instead efforts to protect jobs and work practices from encroachment by employers or poaching by other unions. In short, labor's goals are largely economistic, defensive, and sectional.

British Cochin was a port in southwestern India surrounded by princely states. This article uses a dispute surrounding its limits to interrogate the role international law played in generating novel forms of political claim-making among European and non-European powers at the turn of the twentieth century. Cochin was located in an area where both physical and political boundaries were hard to define. Situated at the tip of a narrow coastline surrounded by water, it was also lodged amid territories belonging to two princely states—Cochin State and Travancore. Its ever-shifting coastline and proximity to princely states forced colonial authorities to adopt a flexible approach to the port’s boundaries, allowing the tiny princely state of Cochin to become progressively more involved with the British port’s development over the nineteenth century. The article starts by examining the forces that shaped these entanglements, and then explores a territorial dispute involving British Cochin to illuminate the ways in which, during the twentieth century’s first quarter, both the colonial administration and the Cochin State deployed the language of international law to try to extend their powers over the port. By highlighting the Cochin State’s partially successful attempts at claiming sovereignty over the waters surrounding the harbor in order to become involved with the development of a port in British India, this article shows how international law emerged as a site through which semi-sovereign territories began testing and even extending the limits of their sovereignty.