French literature has specialized, almost since its beginning, in accounts of eroticism and courtship. During the twelfth century, Northern romance and Southern lyric described an idealized heterosexuality and its role in honing the aristocratic individual. In the thirteenth century, a new genre appeared that dealt with sexual encounter in more materialistic terms. The new form, the fabliau, added to literary language a vocabulary of vulgarisms from the spoken vernacular. At the same time, it gave European literature a new theme: sexuality that betokens not personal fulfillment, but rivalrous interpersonal struggle.

The effort to implant secular science in Spain was stymied throughout the nineteenth century by a ruling conservative elite which held that “science without religion is blind” and viewed the practice of science divorced from an explicitly Catholic, Thomist philosophical framework as being the equivalent of civil subversion. Medical doctors, in particular, were held to be subversive; in the aftermath of the conservative overthrow of the liberal government in 1824 all professors of the Madrid Medical College were either imprisoned or removed from their chairs. The liberal revolution of 1868, which briefly overthrew the Bourbons and their conservative supporters and installed the short-lived First Republic, was universally regarded by Spanish scientists as having opened the door to new ideas. Chief among these was Darwinism, anathema to Catholic conservatives because of its challenge to Biblical dogma. There had been virtually no discussion of this heretical idea before the revolution, and it was freely discussed in its wake.

The qadi, or Muslim judge, strikes one as an anomalous figure in the contexts of colonial Algeria and Senegal, areas better known for their mahdi-like resistance leaders, quietist Sufi shaikhs, and strongly assimilationist colonial regimes. In both cases, there were in fact attempts to eliminate the Muslim courts–in Algeria in the 1880s, and in the communes of Senegal in the early 1900s. While the two court systems were rather different, it is striking that the eventual crises had similar dynamics and that both occurred just as indigenous urban elites were beginning to seek an active role in politics. A comparative study of the two cases should not only help to put the problem of Islamic law in colonial settings into wider perspective, but also shed light on the antecedents of some well-known twentieth-century political developments.

The plurals in my title carry two implications, neither of which I take to be controversial, if they ever were: first, that there is more than one kind of “original” state; second, that there is more than one way in which states originate. There is, admittedly, continuing controversy over the definition of “state.” But for the purposes of this article, I assume that there are four necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for the emergence of a state from nonstate or stateless forms of social organization: specialization of governmental roles; centralization of enforceable authority; permanence, or at least more than ephemeral stability, of structure; and emancipation from real or fictive kinship as the basis of relations between the occupants of governmental roles and those whom they govern. All four admit of differences of degree. But they furnish an adequate framework within which the different processes by which different states have come into being can be analyzed and compared.

The process whereby political independence came to the Spanish and Portuguese colonies in America has been the object of a rich body of scholarly interpretation. Although most of this literature concentrates on the causes of independence, several authors, particularly those concerned with the Brazilian case, have tried to explain also the reasons for the differences in the political evolution of the two colonial empires. Without denying the value of some of these explanations, this essay argues that they are not entirely satisfactory and that an alternative, or at least supplementary, explanation can be found in the nature of the political elites that emerged in the two colonies as a consequence of differing colonial policies.

In this article I will first investigate the response Freudian psychoanalysis received in the Netherlands from 1905, when the first Dutch analyst began to practice psychoanalysis, until the beginning of World War II. Then I will briefly describe the development of psychoanalysis after the war.

In the Netherlands as elsewhere Freudian psychoanalysis was transmitted first to the medical profession, that is to say, to a segment of the Dutch social elite. From there, Freud's ideas spread to other parts of the elite, especially the intellectuals and the religious leaders, after which psychoanalysis was filtered down to the public at large in a form the elite thought appropriate to it.

Traditional European values of noncapitalist wealth preferred “rent to profit, security to risk, tradition to innovation, and, in terms of personal goals, gentility to entrepreneurial skill and renown.” Both in the dynamic, expansive sector of the international economy and in marginal, “retrograde” economies, nonpecuniary values based upon kin, custom, religion, law, and politics openly contradicted the utilitarian assumptions of our contemporary economic theory, spurned reinvestment, and worked against development. How can we balance such premodern conceptions with economic forces that may have been imperfectly understood or not even perceived and, at the same time, give both early modern rationale and economic rationality a place in our descriptions of the old order in Europe? In other words, how can we account for the role of culture in economic decision making?

In elections that offer genuine choices the individual eligible voter is confronted with having to make decisions. But such decisions are rarely based on a dispassionate weighing of all relevant issues and circumstances; on the contrary, most decisions result largely from the socioeconomic and cultural influences of the milieu in which the individual moves, and most people are content to vote with those of their fellow citizens with whom they share basic social and ideational orientations (cf. Jaros and Grant 1974:177; Parsons 1967:239). So far, the most reliable predictors of voting behavior appear to be structural factors such as group affiliation and its concomitant sharing of values and, although there is no compelling need to restrict explanations of voting behavior to factors of group affiliation and social structure (Iwand 1972:14), attempts to broaden the base underlying voting theory by including psychological processes seem to suffer from fundamental inconsistencies (Abrams 1973:47). It need hardly be mentioned that even at the “safer” level of social processes, any study that hopes to explain voting behavior must deal with a number of methodological problems such as the reliability of questionnaire and interview responses, or the choice of an optimum aggregate level for most fruitful analysis of election returns (see, for example, Feist 1976; Hartenstein 1976).

Households everywhere are staging areas for social life: places where individuals sleep, store personal belongings, and refurbish themselves, physically and psychologically, for the day ahead. The fire and simple shelter of the Australian Mardudjara (Tonkinson 1978), the sections within farming compounds of the Ghanaian Tallensi (Fortes 1949a), and the rooms in Manhattan hotels rented by poor, elderly, or mentally disturbed men and women (Sokolovsky et al. 1978) are each examples of this basic aspect of household life. How then should households be compared in order to understand the ways in which ethnographic cases differ?

Historians and anthropologists in Sri Lanka have tended to migrate in opposite directions, but away from the multiethnic confusion of the port cities. Typi- cally, the heterogeneous, semi-Westernized, postcolonial urban society of Colombo and the larger towns has been only a transit point on intellectual journeys outbound to European archives or inbound to “traditional culture.” This was certainly my viewpoint as I arrived “inbound” in Sri Lanka for my first anthropological fieldwork. I took only passing notice of the clerks of mixed European and Sri Lankan descent who sold me stationery supplies at Cargill's and mosquito nets at Carvalho's. These people are given the official designation of Burghers in the government census: they are the racially mixed descendants of the Portuguese, Dutch, and British personnel who occupied the island during four and a half centuries of colonial rule.

This essay deals mainly with the factors influencing the reception of psychoanalysis in Germany. However, I will preface my discussion with two brief sections describing the events of the reception. Please note that as used here, Germany refers specifically to the state, and not to the German-speaking areas of central Europe.

The domestic and global forces that shaped Mexico's revolutionary struggle of 1910–17 continued to shape its state-building conflicts during the 1920s. Recent revisionist historiography underscores this point by emphasizing the bitter irony of the Mexican revolution. This literature contends that, despite the revolution's populist and nationalist aura, by the late 1920s it had done little more than subordinate the masses to an even more centralized state and deepen Mexico's dependence on United States governmental and capital interests. The revisionists argue, then, that the revolution had basically reinforced the country's old regime legacies and created a more institutionalized version of the Porfiriato's authoritarian state.

This essay examines the sociocultural mechanisms which preserved the Jewish ethnic identity in Yemen over the centuries. The Jewish community of Yemen existed continuously as an ethnic minority for over 1,500 years, dating back to the mid-fifth century and ending with the establishment of the state of Israel, when the Jews were declared persona non grata by the Yemeni government and were forced to leave en masse in 1948 (Ratzaby 1978).

This essay presents a study of the influence of certain cultural, social, and architectural factors upon the meaning and use of domestic space. It attempts to promote an understanding of the history of the kinds of ideas which are invested in the spatial form and use of houses. In addition, it establishes the principle that the meaning and use of domestic space are not intrinsic to a set of physical characteristics, nor the nomenclature applied to rooms and their facilities.

In a letter addressed to the medievalist Ferdinand Lot and dated June 1941, Charles Seignobos, hereditary enemy of the Annales, declared, “I have the impression that, for approximately the last quarter-century, the effort to think about historical method, which was vigorous in the 1880s and especially so in the 1890s, has reached a stalemate,” and noted that, as a sign of the times, “the Revue de Synthese Historique … has changed its name.” Seignobos, then only a year before his death, was writing a book on “the principles of the historical method.” His letter alluded to American and German output (“a mediocre American, Barnes, published a fat book in 1925 in which he summarized a large number of works….”), but made no mention of Lucien Febvre, Marc Bloch, or of the Annales, then in its twelfth year. To choose to ignore the Annales while discoursing on historical method is of course unjust and absurd. But aside from this omission, Charles Seignobos's remarks are not without pertinence. It is true that France at the turn of the last century and particularly during the first decade of the twentieth century, had been the center of a passionate and fascinating debate on the nature of historical knowledge, on the legitimacy of its pretensions to be a science, and so forth, and that by the 1940s this debate had ceased.

The foregoing histories of the reception of psychoanalysis in Germany, the Netherlands, and Spain offer illuminating comparisons not only with each other but with the well-known histories of psychoanalysis in Austria, the United States, and, known to a lesser extent, England. Both parallels and divergences appear, suggesting cultural variation as well as some underlying commonalities in all of Western culture.