If one were to survey social movements in the last decade that were inextricably linked to global socioeconomic processes, the significant social movements that have emerged in Islamic oil-producing countries could hardly escape notice. Since nine oil-exporting states possess Muslim majorities, there appears to be an objective relationship between the global consequences of the post–1973 oil-price revolution and the socioeconomic transformation of Muslim populations. Although most Muslim states experienced social movements in this period, it is clear that in the oil-producing Islamic countries, the particular social impact and institutional location of petroleum rents greatly intensified the disruption of urban social networks. Indeed, the cases of Shi‘ite Iran and Muslim northern Nigeria indicate how this disruptive element may have contributed to Islamic revolutionary movements which, though having quite distinct goals, ideologies, and social bases, remain inexplicable without analyzing the consequences of the petroleum boom on the relationship between state and society.

This study presents an analysis of Malay peasant resistance to the Islamic zakat today and of French peasant resistance earlier to the Christian tithe, but it is offered with a larger argument in mind. Its purpose is to show that a vast range of what counts—or should count—as peasant resistance involves no overt protest and requires little or no organization.

Recent German history has produced a remarkable succession of state forms: an empire riddled with internal social tensions, brought down by external defeat in a world war for which it bore a large degree of responsibility; an unstable and ultimately suicidal parliamentary democracy; a genocidal dictatorship which eventually collapsed, totally defeated by opponents of its expansionist and increasingly radical foreign and domestic plans; and, concurrently, two remarkably stable and enduring instances of quite different political types, liberal parliamentary democracy in the capitalist west, and “actually existing socialism” based in democratic centralism in the communist east. Compared to their respective Western and Eastern European neighbours, the Germans on both sides of the inner-German border are now sustaining and reproducing their respective political systems with remarkable efficiency. Put crudely, it seems that good Nazis have been turned into good democrats and good communists, respectively.

If the expansion and consolidation of state power simply undermined, homogenized, and ultimately destroyed the distinctive societies and ethnic groups in its grasp, as various acculturation or melting-pot theories would have it, the world would long ago have run out of its supply of diverse ways of life, a supply presumably created in the dawn of human time. To the contrary, state power must not only destroy but also generate cultural differentiation—and do so not only between different nation states, and between states and their political and economic colonies, but in the center of its grasp as well. The historical career of ethnic peoples can thus best be understood in the context of forces that both give a people birth and simultaneously seek to take their lives.

It is well known that upon emerging victorious from the Mexican Revolution in 1920, the Constitutionalists confronted a dilemma. Having defeated the popular armies of Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa, they believed that they had won the right to construct a postrevolutionary state reflecting their interests. Yet the spectors of the popular armies were to haunt them. The new revolutionary elites were forced to determine how to create a state in their own Constitutionalist image and simultaneously how to avoid provoking further popular insurrection.

Spectacular events tend to capture our attention—the war in Cambodia, oil exploration and production on Malaysia's coast, the assassination of Benigno Aquino and internal strife in the Philippines, the election of two solitary opposition candidates to Singapore's parliament, the rejuvenation of Indonesia's military command structure, coup rumours in Thailand: an endless string of more or less spectacular or even decisive happenings that find themselves in the headlines of the international press.

The phrase liberal capitalism has occasionally been used in contemporary political criticism to lump together the ideological approaches of nonsocialist political parties and to suggest that there are few significant differences among those who generally support a market-based political economy. C. B. Macpherson, in an influential essay entitled The Real World of Democracy (1965), argues that “by admitting the mass of the people into the competitive party system, the liberal state did not abandon its fundamental nature; it simply opened the competitive political system to all the individuals who had been created by the competitive market society.” As a first approximation then, liberal capitalism appears to stand for a combination of rational contractualism, utilitarian individualism, and the laissez-faire economics of Adam Smith.

A perusal of the contents of any social science journal will indicate that ethnicity has been a popular topic during the past two decades. Yet despite the volume of material produced, this period has not seen a notable increase in theoretical sophistication in the field (Drummond 1983:803; Young 1983). For the most part students of ethnicity remain mired in antique arguments about motivation that obscure as much as they illuminate. The following discussion attempts to break through some entrenched conceptual blinders by drawing on the theory of practice outlined by Pierre Bourdieu (1977). This theory avoids the explanatory gaps and fallacious reasoning and at the same time allows richer interpretations of ethnic phenomena, individual and collective, than do conventional models of ethnicity. Since individual and collective expressions of ethnicity have elicited divergent theoretical treatments, the practice theory of ethnicity promises to give new unity to a fragmented field of study.

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.

It has long and widely been assumed that Afro-Americans have a special concern for African affairs, an assumption resulting from the West African ancestry of Afro-Americans. It is thought that these descendants, like other ethnic entities in the United States, desire some form of continuing linkage to the “motherland.” Historically this has been illustrated in several ways: Often descendants of Africa in America have referred to themselves as African and identified their organizations as such (Berry and Blassingame 1982:389), there are direct sociocultural “African survivals” (Herskovits 1958:7), and Afro-Americans often express sympathy for continental “African aspirations” (Hoadley 1972:490). The pinnacle of this may have been reached during the 1960s, a period referred to as the era of cultural nationalism, when African dress, inter alia, was adopted by Afro-Americans (Brisbane 1974:175).

The venerable conservative credentials of “communitye” have been challenged vigorously and often in recent years. Perhaps nowhere has its conceptual renovation gone further than in studies of peasants and social change. Where once the solidarity of peasant communities was analyzed as an impediment to economic development and societal modernization, a growing body of work now portrays such solidarity as the basis of revolutionary upheaval from eighteenth-century France to contemporary Vietnam.

Political science has become a dismal science for most of the world. In the proverbial third world, where most people live, the “physical quality of life” is often abysmal and liable to further deterioration. Steeped in “realism,” political science foretells a future of dictatorial rule for most of those who face the prospect of increasing physical misery.

The question of the conditions that must prevail before fundamentalist religion can play a significant part in politics has loomed large in recent years with the resurgence of Islamic fundamentalism in the Middle East. Protestant fundamentalism has drawn somewhat less attention, except for the case of the new Christian right in America. Nowhere in the contemporary world are the politics of conservative Protestantism more clearly visible than in Northern Ireland. Therefore, in this essay we seek to explain why Protestant fundamentalism has achieved such prominence and success in Ulster in recent years. First, we present a comparative analysis of conservative Protestant politics in the English-speaking world. Second, we offer an historically informed analysis of the rise of Ulster's most successful fundamentalist politician, the Reverend Ian Paisley.

Investigations in social history confront a fundamental methodological difficulty: How is it possible to comprehend and to present the dual constitution of historical processes, the simultaneity of given and produced relationships, the complex interdependence of encompassing structures and the agency of “subjects,” the relationships obtaining among the circumstances of life, production, and authority, and the experiences and modes of behaviour of those affected by these circumstances?

This inquiry focuses on one life stage in the life cycle of ancient Babylonia and Assyria of the first millennium B.C., specifically, the age at first marriage for men and women. I will suggest some implications to be drawn for the household and family patterns resulting from probable age at marriage, and identify native terminology employed in reference to the life stage common for first marriage.

Until fairly recently, grain riots were viewed as spontaneous reactions of the poor to hunger, not worthy of detailed analysis. Over the past twenty years, partially as a result of pioneering studies by George Rudé and Edward Thompson with reference to France and Britain, a considerable body of scholarly writing about these disturbances has appeared. Consistent cross-cultural patterns have emerged from this research. Grain riots were not necessarily a product of hunger, although they were a facet of struggles over the control of food. They have normally taken one of two forms. One was the market riot, where the crowd protested against the price or lack of availability of grain. Such disturbances often commenced with the offer to buy grain at a “just” or “customary” price. If this demand was not met, more drastic action was taken. Sometimes rioters seized grain and sold it to the crowd for a just price, and then turned the receipts over to the owners of the grain. More often grain was strewn about, destroyed, or stolen. The second main form of grain riot was the blockade. In times of shortage, people prevented the export of grain from a town or district because they believed that merchants and landlords should not benefit from scarcity and that such exports would drive up the price locally. Sometimes retributive action accompanied or followed both types of protest, meting out punishment to traders, landlords, or others who were perceived as wrongly profiting from food shortages. Such action usually took the form of wholesale looting. In general, grain rioters avoided serious violence.