The impact of European habits and customs on the culture and structure of society of undeveloped peoples, particularly those of countries affected by the slave trade, has been the subject of intensive study by historians and sociologists. In fiction too, it has provided popular material at all levels. Now, young writers in Africa, South America and the West Indies are beginning to write on the subject to make their own experience coherent and significant. Although they have treated the theme in different ways according to thenown environments, and although their methods of approach have varied from the symbolic to the satiric, it is substantially the same. It deals with the complete dislocation of life in simple communities, either on account of the rape of their people and their resettlement in exile, or to the insidious destruction of a way of life by the imposition of alien, and inferior, modes of thought and conduct.

Officers in active military service engaged in administrative tasks in the civil service, in the management of economic enterprises, in farming estates, teaching, bank management and other “civilian” tasks are not an unusual phenomenon in countries where the military is the exclusive ruler, or a direct and active partner in the government. The number of officers in this category is increasing also in those countries where the military is only a latent and unofficial partner in the regulation of the different sectors of political, economic and social power. However, even in countries where it is excluded from power, the military as an organization (as opposed to individual officers) takes charge of services which in Western countries are regarded as the domain of the civilian administration, or of other civilian bodies. This issue has received only partial and incidental treatment in the literature devoted to the subject of modernization. The “infiltration” of various military branches into different sectors of society is generally explained, if the issue arises at all, in terms of the conflict preceding the coup, or through other political events. Although this method of explanation is perfectly legitimate, it does narrow the discussion to the political sphere. This results in the neglect of highly significant material for the analysis of what may be termed “improvised” processes of modernization and nation-building. “Improvisation”, in this context, means the utilization of unorthodox means and routes to accelerate the modernization process. Infiltration and usurpation of non-military roles by officers is a case in point, although one should acknowledge that modernization is not always desired by the “infiltrators”.

The search for a conceptual framework for interpreting the political evolution of the new states has led to a renewal of interest in charisma. Some writers, such as Shils, have used the concept of charisma to explain the problem of political integration; others, such as Wallerstein and Apter, have used it to indicate how political integration may be furthered. The use of charisma as a conceptual tool for illuminating the problem of political integration is taking on the character of a theory, which we call the theory of charismatic legitimation. This paper attempts an evaluation of this theory. Charismatic legitimation is the process of creating loyalty for the new state through the personal influence of the charismatic leader. This crude definition could bear further clarification. But we shall seek clarification by examining the theory of charismatic legitimation rather than by framing more abstract definitions.

The cartoon had a considerable influence on the political life of Mexico in the period immediately prior to the Revolution. This influence continues in contemporary Mexico, but with a completely different character. This brief essay proposes to examine the causes of this change of attitude in the Mexican cartoon, for its measure reflects the transformation of the country. To do this, let us begin with a summary analysis of the nature of the cartoon in independent Mexico.

Nikolai Alexandrovich Mel'gunov, the son of a well-to-do landowner, was born in 1804 in the province of Orel, south-west of Moscow. He was educated largely at home by private tutors and was well read at an early age. When Mel'gunov was still a boy the family moved to Kharkov and soon thereafter their home became a center of intellectual and social life. Among those who participated in the gatherings at the Mel'gunovs were professors from the newly-established University of Kharkov as well as government officials.

The Company of the Apostles at Aiyetoro is a settlement unique in Nigeria. It is a prosperous community with a high standard of living and excellent amenities. Its reserves of capital, or rather cash, are obviously very large indeed. The people look healthy and content. Their way of life is wholly communal and they claim that it is based on the precepts of the early Christian Apostles. The varying views expressed about it by visitors have contributed to the great interest which it undoubtedly rouses.

Social reality which is remote in time or in space has a charm of its own. A desire to escape one's own time and environment, the longing for the exotic and bygone (a longing that, at times, is reinforced by the spirit of the time, as during the romantic movement), residual dreams of adolescence, the lure which distance offers to the freely roaming fantasy, the urge for new experience, the turning away from daily and trivial matters, the tendency to criticize oneself through the foreign — there are many and subtle motivations that make the distant and the foreign fascinating. Novalis did not only state that everything becomes romantic and poetic “when it is moved into remoteness”; he also spoke of the “dignity of the unknown”.

The year 1848 witnessed the first great outburst of German political caricature in modern times. In imitation of more illustrious French and English examples, a host of satirical journals sprang up, most of which sought to spice their collections of anecdotes, topical poems and witticisms with at least one full-page cartoon of political content. The treatment of political topics varied considerably from journal to journal, but generally speaking the tendency is to “play it for the laughs”, and it is not so much to the satirical journal as to the satirical print, which in its frequent anonymity and its lack of editorial restrictions enjoyed a freedom undreamed of by more sophisticated publications, that we must look for really uninhibited political comment. Numerically, these prints far exceeded anything the previous centuries had brought forth and in their numbers and in the opinions they express they provide the historian with valuable insights into the climate of public opinion in the “Year of Revolutions”. Individually, however, referring as they often do to otherwise forgotten events and personalities — who are mostly not named but simply represented — these prints can present the historian with almost insuperable problems of interpretation. Presumably for this reason, they have never, so far as I am aware, been subjected to detailed examination and evaluation. Veit Valentin, one of the few men who would have been fully equal to the task, did promise to give an account of them in the third volume of his Geschichte der deutschen Revolution von 1848/9, but so far as I have been able to ascertain, this promised third volume never appeared, and such information about the cartoons of 1848 as is available is largely restricted to the honourable mentions recorded in general histories of caricature and the two short studies produced by the prolific, but somewhat erratic, Eduard Fuchs, 1848 in der Karikatur (Berlin, n.d. [1898]), and Ein vormärzliches Tanzidyll, Lola Montez in der Karikatur (Munich, n.d. [1904]).

In his article on “Respect for Work and Cleanliness,” Nikolai A. Mel'gunov touches on themes which are largely associated in our minds with the work of Max Weber. The aristocratic contempt for manual work and more broadly for any kind of specialization, the association of industriousness with religious dissent and with Protestant dissent particularly, the general view that labor is a burden which in Russian culture as in Catholicism is related to the frequency of holidays, the observable differences between Protestants and Catholics in the Rhineland — these and other themes can be found in Weber's work. Yet Weber himself considered these notions a commonplace in the literature. He believed that his own study offered a more probing analysis of the relation between the Protestant Ethic and that complex of attitudes towards economic activities which he designated as “innerworldly asceticism”.

The Latin-American Wars of Independence realized the long-standing hope of the criollo gentry to rid themselves of Spanish limitations on their economic and political activities. From the beginning of the New World colonies, the Spanish rulers had labored diligently to check the aspirations of the colonial gentry by limiting their access to both land and status. Grants of encomienda had yielded up to the colonists use rights to Indian labor and produce, but not the ownership of land. At the same time, the Crown had curtailed the ability of criollos to obtain titles of nobility. These limitations had been supported by the prowess of Spanish arms, effective perhaps even more in keeping potential competitors at bay in Europe than in exercising viable military control in the New World. The failure of this ultimate means of control during the Napoleonic wars finally called into question also continued Spanish dominance over the American colonies.

Dr. McClelland's account of the communal settlement of fishermen at Aiyetoro, with its moving tribute to “the strength of purpose” and “fortitude”of “simple uneducated men”, brings to mind some lines by the Nigerianpoet, Gabriel Okara, in which he attempts to show something of the religious force behindan older group of African Christians on the West African coast, members of what is now known generally as the “Aladura” movement, the praying people, with their emphasis on the Holy Spirit:

They pray, the Aladuras pray

to what only hearts can see while dead

fisherman long dead with bones rolling

nibbled clean by nibbling fishes, follow

four dead cowries shining like stars

into deep sea where fishes sit in judgment;

and living fishermen in dark huts

sit round dim lights with Babalawo

throwing their souls in four cowries

on sand, trying to see to-morrow.

Still they pray, the Aladuras pray

to what only hearts can see behind

the curling waves and the sea, the stars

and the subduing unanimity of the sky

and their white bones beneath the sand.

And standing dead on dead sands

I felt my knees touch living sands -

but the rushing wind killed the budding words.

There has been an unending debate in American historiography about the distinctive features of the ante-bellum South. One widely shared view is that the South, by virtue of its dominant agricultural character, was committed to a set of values “inconsistent with a high rate of industrialization”. Writers in this tradition have assumed that agrarian interests entail an anti-industrial bias. They look upon the civilization of the ante-bellum North as “coarse and materialistic” and that of the South as highly refined and aristocratic. The opposite view is that ante-bellum Southerners were no less commercial capitalists than their Northern brethren. Agrarian capitalism, these critics assume, has conflicts of interest with industrial capitalism, not cultural conflicts. The question this essay seeks to answer is whether Calhoun, admittedly a prominant spokesman of agricultural interests, was thereby committed to either an anti-industrial bias or a conventional capitalist position.

How conservative a force is Islam in Africa?

The experience of Northern Nigeria would seem to suggest that Islam is indeed basically conservative. Yet, if that is so, there are other factors on the African scene which need to be explained away. When a few years ago Africa was divided into the Casablanca and the Monrovia groups, the radicals were the Casablanca states. Yet of the six countries which constituted the Casablanca group, five were Muslim countries: Guinea, Mali, the United Arab Republic, Morocco and Algeria (then represented by a Government-in-exile). Nkrumah of Ghana was the odd man out at Casablanca.

The Brazilian historian, Gilberto Freyre, has stated that only the Portuguese had the innate adaptive capacity which enabled them to stay in the tropics and, through intermarriage with indigenous people and imported slaves, create a new culture suitable to the challenges of an underdeveloped tropical environment. He emphasized that it was particularly Northern Europeans who were incapable of adjustment. They returned home after their tours of duty, and those few remaining invariably degenerated. Yet many Dutch and other Europeans stayed on in Batavia (present-day Djakarta), and through intermarriage with Indonesians helped create a new Indonesian-European culture. Admittedly this resulted initially through imitation of the Portuguese style of life, but it is nevertheless evident that the new Indische culture became in many ways as adaptive to local conditions as the mestizo culture of Brazil, and as much a channel for the introduction of new cultural elements.

The Rastafarians have been a social problem for Jamaica ever since 1933, when one of their earliest leaders, Howell, sold 5000 postcards of the Emperor Haille Selassie at a shilling each making them out to be passports to Ethiopia. They gained greater publicity in 1941 when the police raided Howell's community at Pinnacle and arrested seventy of his followers on charges of growing ganja (marijuana) and of violence. In the 1950's many more were arrested, and - Rastas assert - flogged and forcibly shaved by the police; some were imprisoned on charges of rioting, and there were two separate cases charging that children were sacrificed by fire in Trenchtown, a slum area of the capital.

My original idea was to discuss, in the group of sociologists from different Asian countries, the applicability of Western sociological concepts in an Asian environment. After thinking it over, I decided to tackle the problem the other way around and to ask myself to what extent a sociological study of Asian societies could contribute to general sociological theory, and perhaps even to a deeper understanding of Western society. As a matter of fact, such an approach will automatically amount to a better understanding of some of the defects, lags, and gaps in general sociological theory, as current in some of the literature.

Phenomena identified as spirit mediumship seem to be world wide and to be recognizable from an early period in human society. Attention has been paid to them by writers of classical antiquity of whom, from an anthropological point of view, Jane Harrison was one of the most noteworthy. Influenced by Durkheim and by Rivers, she recognized the importance of collective elements in religion and of the need for a knowledge of the social structure to gain an understanding of any particular cult. Robustly she argued, “What a people does in relation to its gods must always be one clue, and perhaps the safest, to what it thinks.” Knowing that her attempt to build a bridge between anthropology and the classics was viewed sceptically in some quarters, she countered trenchantly “It is only a little anthropology that is a dangerous thing.”

Modernization is a term which became fashionable after World War II. It is useful despite its vagueness because it tends to evoke similar associations in contemporary readers. Their first impulse may be to think of “the modern” in terms of present-day technology with its jet-travel, space exploration, and nuclear power. But the common sense of the word “modern” encompasses the whole era since the eighteenth century when inventions like the steam engine and the spinning jenny provided the initial, technical basis for the industrialization of societies. The economic transformation of England coincided with the movement of independence in the American colonies and the creation of the nation-state in the French revolution. Accordingly, the word “modern” also evokes associations with the democratization of societies, especially the destruction of inherited privilege and the declaration of equal rights of citizenship.

The Kraton religion of 15th century Java is complex, sophisticated and syncretic, and is generally characterised by the name Shiva Buddha, an expression implying a syncretic blending of Shivaism and Buddhism. Within less than two centuries, however, this religion had been displaced from its dominant position, many of its holy books were destroyed, and Java was under the exclusive rule of Muslim kings. A study of this period of transition from one dominant religious tradition to another involves the consideration of many important questions, perhaps the most significant of which is: how much was involved in the change of religion?