Certain analysts have argued in support of liberal democratic rule that this method of structuring political power through parliaments, mass political parties and specialized interest groups is both responsive to mass needs and imbued with high capabilities for public welfare and resource redistribution. Critics2 of this view contend that liberal democratic government merely provides a facade of mass legitimacy that obscures and masks the control of public policy and decision making by privileged and affluent classes that own or control the means of production. This paper attempts to examine these conflicting views on the policy responsiveness of liberal-democratic rule to mass welfare needs in the context of the mainly capitalist societies of Latin America.

The renewed interest in the phenomenon of charisma, which was first given coherent conceptual form by Max Weber, shows little sign of abating. It is probably the most easily comprehensible, possibly the most popular and certainly the most dramatic model which can be utilized in interdisciplinary studies. Moreover, the theory has the apparent attractiveness of enabling students to intensively study one leader and his movement and then draw more general conclusions about that leader's impact on the society in which he operated. In an article written in 1966, Claude Ake gave a timely warning to practitioners who made grandiose deductions from evidence about one leader and then drew firm conclusions about his total society. In particular, Ake, at one stage in his critique, pointed out the fallacy of assuming that charisma usually implies integration of a previously decentralized, regionalized or fragmented society. As Ake correctly noted, this is unenlightening, unanalytical reasoning since ‘the theory seeks to explain how solidarity may be forged [by a charismatic leader]; but it does so by means of a concept which assumes the existence of solidarity’, thus producing ‘a circular explanation of integration’.

To an Italian, la questione meridionale, “the Southern question,” is as inescapable as racism is to an American, or “the troubles” are to an inhabitant of the British Isles. But what do foreigners see when they look at the troubled relationship of the Italian South with the rest of the peninsula? In his interesting book, Darkest Italy, Dickie reminds us, first of all, that we face several “questions,” if we wish to use this term at all (13–14). The Mezzogiorno itself was, during the period he considers, 1860–1960, and remains to this day, comprised of diverse geopolitical, cultural, and social components. These appear to have become one in the minds of liberal modernizers, northerners and southerners alike (for example, Pasquale Villari, 55–63). They believed that building the Italian nation required changing cultural attitudes and values in the populace as much as in the elites (4–7); and they assessed the difficulty of their task in the degrees of deviance of various parts of the country from their own normative view of nationhood. “The South” was seen as highest on this scale.

Both these quotations are products of considered reflection made by men upon the “nature” and place of women within Australian society. Withnell is president of the Perth chapter of the Coffin Cheaters and currently writing a Ph.D. thesis on the “subculture” of biker clubs. Sturgess, a barrister perhaps best known for his prosecution of Lindy Chamberlain in the second inquest into the disappearance of her daughter, at the time of the newspaper article was the one-man commission of inquiry into child abuse in Queensland. Both statements express commonsense Australian cultural understandings of women, which are also available within Australian myths of national identity. My intention in exploring these myths is to elucidate a more complete range of the cultural conceptualisations of women than is provided by these statements and, at the same time, account for the prevalent limited and often negative

Professor Russell was the first historian to try to apply statistical methods to analysis of the effects of epidemic plague on the composition, not just on the total size, of medieval population. He argues now that general plagues differed from the type of the disease that became epidemic after the crop failures of 1315–1317, in sharply lowering the sex ratio and in greatly increasing the burden of child-rearing.

New interpretations constantly grow around a familiar story, like life along colonial railways. From the vast plains of America to the subcontinent of India, scholars have noted, railroads played a pivotal role in inscribing power on uncharted terrain. They facilitated conquest, opened lands for settlement, and fueled the colonial extractive economy. And railroads were more than mere “tools of empire.” From missionaries and administrators in the field to interlocutors in the distant metropole, Europeans celebrated railroads and their locomotives as vehicles of their “civilizing mission” on the benighted colonial frontier. Not only did railroads reshape local lands into well-ordered spaces of production, they also remade their non-European dwellers by uplifting them from their alleged state of cultural decline. An instrument of progress, industry, and rationality, the railroad was the personification of the model colonizer: it captured lands as well as the minds of their inhabitants, not by brute force but by the sheer power of modernity (see figure 1).

Real knowledge emerges from “impossible” worldviews. Or, put differently, it is possible to accept knowledge that is produced by people whose ontological presuppositions–their baseline assumptions about the nature of reality–one entirely rejects. How can this fact be accommodated, not by advancing a wishful post-dualism, dangerous post-secularism, or implausible ontological relativism, but by working within the tradition of secular political philosophy so that indigenous knowledge, too, can be a basis for public policy and collective action in secular societies? Via a reframing Amazonian multinaturalist perspectivism–which has so inspired post-dualist civilizational critiques–as a social theory of health and illness that informs contemporary Western epidemiology’s struggles to theorize the distribution of health and illness in mass society, this article advances a general approach to recognizing knowledge that has been developed on the other side of boundaries of ontological difference. It argues that the accuracy or efficacy of any particular indigenous knowledge-practice implies the generative potential as theory of the ontological presuppositions that facilitated the knowledge-practice’s evolution. Combining the ontological turn’s interest in the innovativeness of indigenous concepts with a proposal for superseding its incommensurable worlds and abandonment of the aspiration to more-than-local knowledge, the article shows that indigenous ideas and their underlying ontologies are more than generic alternatives to inspire Western civilizational renewal, and opens a path to their legitimization as actionable knowledge in the terms of secular public reason.