Fifty years ago the dreadful slaughter of Verdun and the Somme revealed to the still unsuspecting nations of Europe that the applied science of the machine gun, barbed wire and heavy artillery had changed the nature of warfare. Later on, when writers as different as Winston Churchill, Field-Marshall Lord French, Herbert Read and William Faulkner attempted to explain the general sense of stupefaction at the unprecedented massacres of the First World War, they pointed to a catastrophic gap between what had been expected and what came to pass. According to Winston Churchill, “for a year after the war had begun hardly anyone understood how terrific, how almost inexhaustible were the resources in force, in substance, in virtue, behind every one of the combatants” The military explanation came from the Commander-in-Chief of the British forces: “No previous experience, no conclusion I had been able to draw from campaigns in which I had taken part, or from a close study of the new conditions in which the war of today is waged, had led me to anticipate a war of positions. All my thoughts, all my prospective plans, all my possible alternatives of action, were concentrated upon a war of movement and manoeuvre.”.

What is meant by “patronage”? The term appears with increased frequency in anthropological analysis. Indeed, it has become a major concept in the study of peasant societies, somewhat analogous to the concept of the “big man” in certain kinds of chiefdoms, or “fission and fusion” in lineage-type societies. There is, however, considerable ambiguity in the meaning given to the term. Consider, as examples, the following three excerpts from recent anthropological studies:

Patronage is founded on the reciprocal relations between patrons and clients. By patron I mean a person who uses his influence to assist and protect some other person, who then becomes his “client”, and in return provides certain services for his patron… Patronage is thus the complex of relations between those who use their influence, social position or some other attribute to assist and protect others, and those whom they so help and protect.

The unprecedented number of young people in the world today can be isolated as one of the crucial reality factors conditioning political and cultural developments. Age distribution is only one demographic variable in the complex of social and political life, but the tremendous growth of world population in the twentieth century has magnified its dynamic potentialities. To gain perspective, it will be useful to briefly consider the role of youth in the light of historical experience.

A superficial view of what happens when a large number of people forsake their former religion for a new one is that some of the old beliefs become mixed with the new. It is a commonplace to hear that folk Catholicism is mixed with pagan survivals, or that newly converted African Christians are “not real Christians” or “have a veneer of Christianity”, because they have not totally abandoned all that they once believed. Such a judgment, however ethnocentric, would be pardonable in a European missionary who held a particular view of Christianity, which itself furnished a clear criterion of “real Christianity”. But similar opinions are often expressed by sociologists and anthropologists who profess themselves neutral with respect to religious belief. They are usually interested in “acculturation” or “culture contact” and consider it of great moment to be able to say how far any particular belief or practice lies along a continuum whose poles are marked “traditional” and “acculturated”. Such assumptions underlay Malinowski's much criticized scheme for the analysis of culture-contact in Africa and the great bulk of the work, by Linton, Wallace, Lanternari and others, on independent religious movements. This tradition of interpretation is still very much alive.

In strong contrast with twentieth-century prevailing forms of military obligation (by which service, whenever exacted, is individual, uncommutable for money, untransferable, no social status or fortune providing a legal basis by itself for exemption), nineteenth-century standards as imposed for the first time in revolutionary France after 1792–1793, were based on principles such as those stated in 1776 in Massachusetts: “That no rank or station in life, employment or office … shall excuse or exempt any person from serving in arms for the defence of his country either by himself or some able-bodied effective man in his stead … or from paying the fine.” As the brokers who made it their business to provide substitutes put it, more crudely, “le conscrit paye sa dette de sa personne ou par celle de l'homme qu'il achete”. Whatever the reasons invoked to justify “rich man's money and poor man's blood”, “l'impôt de sang pour le pauvre, impôt d'argent pour le riche“ the basis for this bastard form of equality in face of military obligation, from a juridical point of view, could be defined as a transition between Old Regime frank inequality and post-1870 personl, uncommutable, untransferable obligation. It was best summed up in Napoleon's words: “Chez un peuple dont Pexistence repose sur l'inegalite des fortunes il faut laisser aux riches la faculte de se faire remplacer.”

In the decade and a half from 1931 to 1945 Japan confronted a series of domestic and international crises culminating in the national disaster of World War II. Many authors - both Japanese and Western - have portrayed this period in terms of the labeling generalization “fascism”, suggesting that Japan's experience ran parallel to that of such European countries as Italy under Mussolini and Germany during the Third Reich. My object here, after first attempting to explain how and why this interpretation arose, is to take issue with it, but in criticizing the use of the label fascism I do not mean to fall back to the position that what happened was simply sui generis, a somehow “unique” Japanese response to the troublesome developments of the interwar world. Fascism has the virtue of being a comparative concept, and if we throw it out we need to seek other comparative concepts to test as possible replacements.

In his “Forecasts of Warfare in Fiction: 1803–1914”, I. F. Clarke considers for the greatest part English books and articles, with only a few references to the French fictional output on future wars in the nineteenth century. The most prominent place is given to Captain Danrit and his trilogy. Not a single well known French author is mentioned in the article, with the exception of Victor Hugo, who does not fit into the category of writings which interest Professor Clarke.

The years of colonial rule in Malawi (formerly Nyasaland) were characterised by the imposition of a political and social system whereby a superior European authority attempted to exercise its will over a territory already populated by Africans. This enforced colonial relationship determined the pattern of political change within the Protectorate, so that any variation in the fundamentals of the relationship was bound to have important repercussions on the total colonial situation. From the earliest years of British rule in Malawi, Africans sought to modify or alter the colonial relationship and it is this sort of African sentiment and activity in reaction to alien control and domination that has come to be regarded as manifestations of nationalism not only in colonial Malawi but also in the other ex-colonial territories of Africa. Thomas Hodgkin, for example, has lumped under the general rubric of ‘nationalism’ “any organisation or group that explicitly asserts the rights, claims and aspirations of a given African society (from the level of the language-group to that of ‘Pan-Africa’) in opposition to European authority, whatever its institutional form and objectives”. Others, however, although appreciating the deep roots of nationalism have tended to confine the use of the term to the post-1945 period with its emergence of nation-wide movements seeking self-government and independence. They have argued that to include every social movement of protest against alien rule as a part of nationalism obscures the political meaning of the concept, blurs the important distinctions that can be made among African responses to the colonial situation, and makes comparative analysis difficult.

In recent years sociological work in the field of stratification and social mobility has become, in at least one sense of the term, impressively cosmopolitan. National sample surveys which include data on inter-generational occupational mobility have been carried out in every major Western nation and in a good many non-Western societies as well, and those have inspired some ambitious comparative analyses of social mobility. This development, as S. M. Miller puts it, has had the virtue of making "the study of mobility one of the few fields of sociology which has overcome national parochialisms”. True as this is, however, it must be said that there are forms of parochialism other than national. Much contemporary research into social mobility suffers from one of these - a parochialism of time rather than of place, as it were, the parochialism of presentism. My purpose here is to suggest what is lost as a result of that parochialism, and to argue that a sense of the past, an ability to see his subject in historical depth, is not a luxury but a necessity for the student of social mobility.

This essay deals with factors that contribute to the emergence of egalitarian ideologies, tracing the social processes they entail and analysing their consequences for social life.

Must a viable nation be made up largely of one language group? If this is true, then there are almost insuperable difficulties in the way of establishing a European political community. Recent events in India, Canada, Belgium, Nigeria and several other areas give one cause to think that there may be some basis for drawing that conclusion.

The growth of the professions in the nineteenth century occurred as a process of specialization; distinct functions separated out of certain broad categories of activity. The church, the law, and medicine were the matrices from which new professions emerged and became differentiated in response to the growing needs of an increasingly complex society. The reasons for that complexity were in the main economic and stemmed from the industrialization of the first half of the century.

There is a curious awkwardness about discussions of “types” in comparative politics. Aristotle and Montesquieu taught us to proceed by classifications of regimes, and the current generation of computer enthusiasts have offered us more and more powerful tools for the handling of wide ranges of attributes of political entities and for the establishment of complex multi-dimensional typologies. Yet as soon as we are confronted with a concrete table of alternative types and look over the lists of cases assigned to each cell, our first reaction is almost immediately to add further distinctions, to reject the imposition of similarities across historically distinct units. The student of politics is torn between two sets of super-ego demands: he feels an obligation to reduce the welter of empirical facts to a body of parsimoniously organized general propositions but he also feels under pressure to treat each case sui generis, as a unique configuration worthy of an effort of understanding all on its own. This is of course a dilemma common to all social sciences but is particularly difficult to handle in the study of such highly visible, amply documented macro-units as historical polities. Students of census records, elections and survey data have an enormous analytical advantage: they deal with large numbers of anonymous units and can therefore proceed with the analysis of their data with a minimum of interference from exogenous “noise”. The student of comparative politics is roughly in the position of a social scientist asked to analyze the census records or the survey responses of a set of close friends: he cannot prevent himself from bringing into his analysis of the coded data on the punched cards a wide range of uncoded “surplus” information acquired through years of acquaintance with the subjects. The standardized sample survey derives great methodological strength from its programmatic insistence on equality, anonymity and distance in the treatment of the information collected: the data are given once and for all in the protocols or on the IBM cards and there is no allowance for fuzzy interaction with the subjects outside that framework.

This article is an attempt to survey, in a thematic fashion, the history of whiteaboriginal relations in Western Australia. Although it is based on research into the period from 1897 to 1954,1 the author believes that the more recent developments have not basically affected the validity of the comments here presented. He is also convinced that, speaking broadly, they are applicable to the Australian scene as a whole. The article should therefore be of interest to the students of white-aboriginal relations anywhere in Australia.

Authors in recent literature on developing polities have been searching for a middle class that could and, some even argue, should assume primary responsibility for all phases of development: social, economic, and political. This middle class has been identified as the New Middle Class (NMC). In contrast to the “old” middle class, the authors maintain, the NMC will create leaders; is more numerous; possesses organizational skills; is honest; develops forward-looking “new men”; in short, is shouldering, and should shoulder, social and political change.

The dramatic re-enactment of an event compresses in symbolic form psychological and social processes. For this reason, ritual dramas are useful events for the study of transmission of culture and reformulation of tradition. Dramatization as a communication strategy has a special importance for solidarity groups, as Young (1965:2) has pointed out. The potential for transforming given attitudes and values has not been explored by social scientists although playwriters, actors, and directors have consciously or unconsciously attempted this in dramaturgy.

As a major socio-political doctrine in the industrializing West, Marxism has had great impact on die research and theory of political sociology and behavioral political science. Particularly, a great deal of research energy has been expended on establishing the nature and degree of the relationship between social class and political partisanship in Western democracies.

In the thirteenth century the county of Flanders was the leading commercial and industrial region of Western Europe. It had easy access by water and overland routes to the German Rhineland and to the fairs of Champagne. As the Italians from the later thirteenth century began to use a direct maritime link with the North, Bruges, on the North Sea, became the major clearing house for goods coming from Italy and the Hanse towns of northern Germany. Flanders originally had a large wool production; this led to its early preeminence in textile manufacturing. Although the growing urbanization of thecounty soon severely curtailed facilities for grazing, Flanders easily obtained English wool, which was simultaneously of a higher calibre and a cheaper price than the native product. At a time when the towns of northern Italy were still very largely finishers of cloth brought from outside, the towns of Flanders, and particularly the five great towns of Bruges, Ghent, Ypres, Lille, and Douai, had prosperous industries in textiles of varying types, but specialized in luxury cloths designed for export.

Economic historians are concerned lest practitioners of allied disciplines draw unwarranted conclusions from the lessons of economic history. It is for this reason that it is worthwhile to examine the applicability of the American model of economic growth for developing countries.

This paper deals with some relationships between Javanese modernization, a Javanese ritual called slametan, and a Javanese folk-show called ludruk. I shall illustrate how slametan and ludruk play complementary roles with respect to Javanese modernization.