It is no accident that the study of comparative politics, and especially thestudy of political development, has been dominated by scholars from themetropolitan countries, or by those trained in metropolitan universities.This interest in the politics of the subordinate world has resulted in aseries of case studies, which we have assumed have added substantially toour knowledge about these hitherto neglected areas. However, untilfairly recently, little attention has been paid to the underlying assumptionsand ideologies of these metropolitan scholars, and the distortions, consciousand unconscious, introduced into scholarship on these areas underthe guise of scientific and value-free methodologies.

The student movement of the 1960s has been characterized as the dawn of a new national consciousness and a new counter-culture, ‘the passionate revolution of creative intelligence’, and ‘the saving vision our endangered civilization required’. The New Left spokesmen for the movement have proclaimed themselves the vanguard of a unique cultural and political rebellion against what they consider the evils of capitalist-pluralist America. They present their arguments in Hegelian terms as a new and profound synthesis of the progressive elements embodied in America's political and intellectual history. Yet a more probing analysis of American history indicates that the values inherent in the New Left counter-culture are not very new at all. In fact, apart from their rhetoric, the New Left cultural and political attitudes bear a striking similarity to certain nineteenth-century Utopian outlooks. The most direct antecedent of the modern counter-culture appears to be the New England transcendental- ist movement which emerged in the 1840s. This relationship between a New Left counter-culture, credited by its supporters with messianic characteristics for national salvation, and a nineteenth-century utopianism that made no significant impact on the unfolding of history raises many questions about the credibility and future of the counter-culture.

The prologue to the great Chinese autobiographical novel of the eighteenth century, Dream of the Red Chamber, contains the following passage, in which the author sets the scene for the story:

Chen Shih-Ying was without aspirations to fame or fortune. He devoted his time to planting bamboo and watering flowers and sipping wine and writing poems. He led an idyllic life. Unfortunately he lacked one thing to complete his happiness: he was over half a hundred years of age and had no son. Only a three-year-old daughter named Lotus filled his bosom (p. 9).

The correlation between socialism and industrialism was found to be. 30. Thus, there is a small positive correlation between the two factors. That is, socialism tends to occur most strongly in industrial areas; however, the relation is not especially strong.

The correlation between socialism and fascism as measured by violence per 100,000 population was found to be. 55. Thus there is a fairly strongest.

It is an historical truism that the Reformation of the sixteenth century consisted of a unique series of events. What we don't always realize, however, is that this series of events was itself one member of a class of historical phenomena. The most direct approach to elucidating this proposition is to start with the most obvious characteristic of Luther's teaching, his emphasis on salvation through faith. It is not generally recognized that this idea can be found in other religions and that it developed in those, as it did in Europe, in reaction to religious ideas which stressed works and subtle theological knowledge as the road to salvation.

Islamic society is ever intriguing. Across broad territories and over millenia of time, it maintains a constant identity; yet it is always elusive, varied, and changing. The study of Islamic urbanism, like so many Islamic topics, oscillates between attempts to define what is fundamental and universal in Islamic city life, and what is ineffably individual about each locality; the contradictory perspectives seem equally valid. While topography, culture, and history have given each locality a unique identity, by the middle ages, Middle Eastern towns between the Nile and the Jaxartes—the core area of Islamic society—shared common features of social organization. Small communities, such as families, neighborhood quarters, and fraternities were the fundamental units of society. Town populations were gathered into loosely organized religious bodies, such as schools of law, Shirite sects, and Sufi brotherhoods, who were dominated by ethnically alien elites organized into slave armies and slave-maintained governments, and who garrisoned and extracted revenues from the towns while remaining separate from local community life. Characteristically, then, Middle Eastern Muslim cities operated on three levels-parochial groups, religious communities, and imperial regimes. Organized urban life depended on the relationships between person and groups within this three-tiered institutional pattern.

Purdah, meaning curtain, is the word most commonly used for the system of secluding women and enforcing high standards of female modesty in much of South Asia. Purdah is an important part of the life experience of many South Asians, both Muslim and Hindu, and is a central feature of the social systems of the area. The crucial characteristic of the purdah system is its limitation on interaction between women and males outside certain well-defined categories, which differ among Muslims and Hindus. Muslim purdah restrictions do not apply within the immediate kin unit,but only outside it, while Hindu purdah is based on a set of avoidance rules between a woman and her male affines. Muslim seclusion begins at puberty, Hindu seclusion strictly speaking begins with marriage.

Not long ago when the State-owned Air-India acquired its first jumbo jet, it was christened ‘Emperor Ashoka’, a two-thousand year old name for an ultra-modern technological innovation. Let us look at another event. About two months before the jumbo's arrival, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had observed, at a seminar in New Delhi, that modern India should discard the traditions and the irrelevant values, customs, conventions and social systems, while retaining the timeless values for which it had stood for centuries. I have picked up these two events to underscore the problem of harmonizing tradition with innovation, a problem confronting every society in which the elite has set out a timetable of political development through modernization. (I do not intend to engage in the rather unfruitful exercise in terminology, for the definition of these terms would demand a separate paper to satisfy a purist.)

In this paper I propose to apply the situational perspective in examiningthe interdependence between cultural values and actual conditions offamily behavior in Latin America, first by singling out significant inconsistenciesand contradictions between the cultural definition of the femalerole and social actuality and second, by identifying some of the situationalcircumstances that are responsible for this divergency.

The venerable but underdeveloped assumption that modern urbanization is comprehensible in terms of social struggles for control of great cities' dominant institutions and its corollary that these struggles, in turn, helped shape further urbanization may still bear fruitful suggestions. Abundant evidence, moreover, makes exploration of this proposition eminently feasible in respect to London, Paris, and New York while as the foremost of the world's megalopolises they were acquiring their modern technical and social characteristics between the 1850s and, let us say, 1910. Notwithstanding the uniqueness of many developments in each of them, the complex social conflicts and the roughly similar climates of opinion often marking their evolutions, encourage certain comparisons among them. Such comparisons, hopefully, may illuminate some of the lingering consequences of the megalopolitan middle classes having to protect their new power not only against the potentialities of the working classes but also against the forces of provincialism operative inside as well as outside of their urban bailiwicks.

Amongst the many problems economic historians have been studying recently in the context of industrialization, the interaction of rural industrialization and population change in a period preceding and accompanying the Industrial Revolution proper is one of the most exciting and promising ones. It is exciting because it enables us to shed light on one of the crucial questions in the whole complex of industrialization: why did some regions industrialize early and successfully and others did not? It is promising because here is a field where the employment of new methods and assiduous labor can lead to fairly exact results. Perhaps this is a point where finally a breakthrough may be accomplished which cuts the vicious circle in which much of the debate about the role of population change in the Industrial Revolution was caught for so long. Was it a precondition or a consequence, or both, and if either, in what respect?

In summarizing, the evidence suggests that during the greater part of the second millenium A.D., the trans-Saharan and western Sudanese trade was embedded in societal frameworks and integrated into existing social structures. It was a socio-economic function which benefited the entire community. Although no fixed national boundaries existed, there were created semi-permanent trading blocks or market networks, which corresponded to the area under de facto ownership or control of a dominant ethnic group or state.

This paper explores certain regularities between social-structural and historical particulars. The particulars are drawn from the society and history of Brunei, an ancient Malay state in northwest Borneo. Since the center of my attention is theory, I shall merely refer the reader to my more extensive summary of the particulars in question.

Around the Caribbean, it is commonly believed that slavery and the plantation system have been responsible for the prevalence of short-term consensual unions, matrifocal households and children out of wedlock who grow up without the authority and support of a father or definite father- surrogate. This explanation is accepted as often by social scientists as by public opinion. Of course, this is the obverse of the line of Western social thought maintaining that small holdings and independent family farming are the basis of strong patrifocal households, exclusive life-long marriages and paternal responsibility for children.

Clothing is a bundle of cultural symbols that has been dealt withsomewhat eclectically and indiscriminately in the anthropological wash.Some writers have speculated on the origins of clothing, stressing suchqualities in human nature as modesty and vanity; others, more materiallyoriented, have emphasized utility; others again have listed separategarments, the materials of which they were made, and the techniquesemployed; and some have paid attention to broader historical and sociological dimensions. In a pioneering study, Kroeber used documentary evidence to correlate fluctuations in women's fashions (using indices of skirt length, width of waist, and depth of decolletage) with major social and political upheavals (Kroeber, 1919, 1940), but perhaps because of the nature of his data, as well as his particular orientation, he made no reference to the persons involved, and overlooked internal cultural variations and conflicts of style. These issues received more attention from scholars trained in the Malinowski tradition of fieldwork, and they described clothing worn by different persons in different situations; those who worked in areas where people of different cultures were brought in contact in the colonial situation indicated the meaning of changes in style of clothing over time. General textbooks draw attention to the correlation between clothing and social status and to such facts as the cost of clothing, its technology and its aesthetics.

In each of the three cases presented, the changing role of the folk saint as well as the development of the movement indicate that a four-stage transformation is in operation:

(1) The ‘call’ by means of a supernatural experience or ‘vocational struggle’ occurs in the future folk saint's life and initiates his career.

(2) Offering a practical religion with solutions to physical and personal problems, the saint attracts individuals who are seeking such solace and remedy. Common purpose, journey and encampment near the curer foster group identity.

(3)Myths about the miracle worker grow in the group and circulate abroad, intensifying group solidarity and attracting new adherents. Administrators and would-be exploiters enter. A transcendent ideology is introduced with social, political, and religious ramifications. These may be at once restorative and innovative. The success of the folk saint spawns other saints who also attract followers.

(4) External, traditional power structures are threatened, and retaliate by applying political pressure, so that the last stage sees the decline and eclipse of the movement, and the loss of its innovative elements. The saint, no longer a potential secular power, devotes himself to curing, thus reemphasizing the culturally defined, traditional role of curandero or hitolio.