One of the most persistent of all New World dreams, El Dorado has acquired new life over the last two decades throughout much of the Amazon Basin. Many of the same golden visions that led Orellana and his men to plunge ahead down an “ocean-river” in the sixteenth century continue to prompt large numbers of people in Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Peru, and, above all, Brazil to leave their families and set out for makeshift mining camps to seek their fortunes amidst a sea of mud. This discussion focuses on representations of gold miners or garimpeiros by themselves and others. I argue that although miners unquestionably draw on a much larger oral tradition, their stories stand apart from those told by a more general population in their tendency to portray gold as an active, female agent and in their relative lack of interest in clear-cut morals. In addition, while the vision of nature and natural forces as female and the fixation on violence as a (if not the) key element of life in the garimpo would appear to corroborate precisely those images of miners that reach a national and international public, this surface agreement cloaks important underlying differences that underscore the fundamental multiplicity of metaphor.

Within nationalist movements a tension typically exists between group demands for ethnic self-preservation and the more universal demands of religious belief, professional commitment, or academic vocation which confront particularly the intelligentsia in the group. Ethnic politicians tend to argue that decades or centuries of oppression or the anticipated disastrous consequences of a loss of self-determination makes loyalty to the group and its leadership's strategies a matter of overriding importance. It is usually exceptional individuals, often poets or novelists, who in times of crisis issue the challenge that survival be reconciled with universal values and prevailing international political norms.

When Cantonese cartoonist Liao Bingxiong (1915–) mounted his show, The Cat Kingdom (Maoguo chunqiu), at the Sino-Sovfet Cultural Association (Zhong-Su wenhua xiehui) in Chongqing—China's wartime capital—in March 1946, he was prompted by more than an artistic urge: He intended to issue a strong criticism of the Guomindang (Nationalist) government for its inability to deal with the country's rapidly deteriorating situation. The show was an overwhelming success, “creating a sensation in this hilly city,” in the words of one contemporary artist. The show was greeted with equal enthusiasm when it was put on later in other cities, such as Chengdu and Kunming. Such a favorable reception reflected both the artistry of Liao's works and, more important, the relevance of cartoons as a powerful tool for airing opinion.

The decline of Iberia in the sixteenth century shook the foundations of world trade and politics, undermining Spain's Asian and American trade monopolies and creating the international opening that spurred other European states and merchants in the contest for overseas markets. After the waves had subsided in the seventeenth century, the world system had been reconfigured. The United Provinces of the Netherlands had become the first truly global commercial power—the first hegemon. The rise of the Netherlands to the position of world hegemony is at first glance startling. The seven provinces had a relatively small population (some 1.5 million inhabitants in 1600, compared to 10 million in Spain and Portugal, and 16 to 20 million in neighboring France), and had formed part of the Low Countries, an uneasily aggregated group of seigneuries, cities, and provinces under Spanish rule until the 1570s.

If the market has emerged in current Soviet and Western discourse as a notional Rosetta stone capable of deciphering the coded blueprints of post-Soviet reconstruction, its apparent destruction by the Bolsheviks during the Civil War and subsequent resurrection under the New Economic Policy (NEP) is often seen as a similarly defining element of the whole early Soviet project. As many would have it, the party's initial urge to control entirely the whole complex of economic exchange relations firmly situates Soviet totalitarianism in a Leninist political economy. The brutal repression of free traders and the mindless nationalization of production clearly evidences the calamitous utopianism of Bolshevik class-based ideology, while the reemergence after 1921 of limited market mechanisms, even if only a reluctant concession to political weakness and economic devastation, opened alternative paths to a non-Stalinist Soviet modernity involving elements of a civil social order. In a phrase, reified conceptions of the market broadly shape historical constructions of a unique and problematic Soviet past, just as they purportedly demonstrate what is peculiar about the post-Soviet present and necessary for the future.

The profusion of fresh flowers in Italian graveyards amazed nineteenth-century travellers from America used to more severe practices. In England, too, flowers were sparse. Nor was their paucity unintentional. Strong sentiments were involved, for despite the increasing pomp of Victorian funerals, much ambivalence was displayed about elaborate rituals and offerings in the Anglo-American world—“a green grassy turf is all I crave,” wrote Beattie in the Minstrel. Even Loudon, the great architect of the new rural cemeteries in England, was reluctant to make a place for flowers in his plans.

Nationalism is a kind of ideology (or secular religion) which holds that there should be congruence between cultural boundaries and political ones (Gellner 1983; Anderson 1991 [1983]). This essay discusses what such congruence should entail; notably, whether or not it necessarily means that the members of a nation ought to belong to the same ethnic group for the concept of nationhood to be meaningful. The empirical material to be discussed in some detail derives from Mauritius, a polyethnic island state which is probably less atypical, globally speaking, than European evidence on nationalism may suggest. A main contention in the present essay is that nationalisms quite different from the European ones are being developed in various countries. Particular nationalisms, and perhaps especially emergent ones, ought therefore to be examined comparatively.

On February 19, 1990 a national conference opened in Benin at the Hotel PLM-Aledjo in Cotonou. Participants included representatives of the ruling People's Revolutionary Party, trade unionists, civil servants, students, religious leaders, a few agricultural producers, elements of the military, former heads of state, as well as Beninese living and working abroad. Members of the diplomatic corps and officials from the international financial institutions (IFIs) were also in attendance. The conferees claimed to represent the nation in its entirey—toutes les forces vives de la nation, quoi quoi que soient leurs affinitées. In reality, they were drawn from the political class and the educated elites of civil society. President Mathieu Kérékou opened the conference with a call for political renewal and a pledge to implement the IMF's structural adjustment program. He focused on the country's severe economic crisis and called on the delegates to draw up a list of the problems to be addressed.