At the turn of the century, when lynching, Jim Crow laws, and disfranchisement were at their worst, black fraternal organizations offered Afro-Americans a place to preserve their self-respect. Scholars have studied these organizations little and understood them less. One early study dismissed them as merely parodying white organizations, but hardly resembling them, while the blacks, it claimed, exaggerated both regalia and ritual. When Noel Gist published his Study of Fraternalism in the United States, Carter Woodson charged that Gist failed to understand the importance of fraternal orders to blacks and that, indeed, Gist barely mentioned the black orders. After a detailed analysis, W. E. B. DuBois found that even black and white orders that shared a name might not resemble one another. He found similarities only in Pythians, Odd Fellows, and Masons. He thought the other black societies were “Negro inventions” and “curious and instructive” organizations. “Invention,” “curious,” “exaggeration,” “parody,” “importance to blacks”—these are the key phrases. All attempt to describe an amorphous quality of black fraternal orders that makes them unique. Yet while failing to define that quality, its would-be describers avoid the issue.

Like other dramatic and discontinuous historical processes, the Meiji Restoration of 1868 possesses the inherent fascination to sustain yet another rehearsal of its basic course of events. The present one differs from others in several ways. It does not center on samurai heroes and villains contesting foreign incursion. Instead it identifies fully four groups that acted during the late Tokugawa era, the years 1850–68, known by the generic periodizing word bakumatsu—“the end of the bakufu,” that is, of the shogun's government situated at Edo. It presents each group according to the experiences and motives of its members. It points to the interactions between the four narrative structures, the plots or mythoi, but without homogenizing them into a unitary historiographical line. It also recognizes the necessary prefiguration of the historian's field but tries nevertheless to convey the perceived intentions of the four groups of historical actors.

The Iranian revolution of 1979 presents a case in which religion has stimulated profound social change, rather than serving only as a basis for social integration. Although scholars have recently been reminded of the revolutionary potential of religious commitments, the view that religion tends to inhibit large-scale social change continues to enjoy currency. It may be that, in the light of events in Iran in the last five years, observers of Islamic societies will now be tempted to overstress the revolutionary tendencies of that great world religion. Yet it is difficult to exaggerate the force and depth of feeling which Shi'i belief and practice has generated in Iran for the purpose of the structural transformation of society.

In the nineteenth century the Germany university was the most admired institution of higher education in the western world.1 Much of this admiration arose from the widespread assumption that Germany's universities exemplified the ideal of pure learning, the disinterested pursuit of truth, knowledge for its own sake. German contemporaries saw the university in these terms, contemporary observers elsewhere agreed, and modern historians have accepted this statement of purpose.

In a manner somewhat unusual in anthropological discourse, most writers on the Maa-speaking peoples of Tanzania and Kenya include an early section or chapter on what is often called “Maasai traditional history.” For example, in his pioneering work, “An Administrative Survey of the Masai Social System,” Henry Fosbrooke (1948) devotes a leading and major section to Maasai history and, in a later publication, he deals explicitly with what he calls a “tribal chronology” of the pastoral Maasai (Fosbrooke 1956a). Similarly, Thomas Beidelman, in an equally pioneering article, pays considerable attention to the historical connections of the Ilparakuyo (Baraguyu) section of the Maasai peoples of Tanzania (1960). It is among the Ilparakuyo that I have carried out most of my work in Maasai studies, and they are the primary focus of the present discussion (Rigby 1977, 1979, 1980, 1981).

A marriage expresses a mutual recognition of some degree of shared identity. The wedding ceremony confirms these links and creates new ones, although to an extent variable with the culture and the specific case. The affinity can be between individuals acting for themselves, for families, or for larger social or national groups. At one extreme would be the temporary liason, stemming from personal whim or passion, between individuals who share little more than common acceptance of the culture which recognizes the form. A Las Vegas marriage followed by a quickie Mexican divorce, a Hindu Gāndharva marriage consummated without any ceremony, or a Shi'i mut 'ah (marriage of pleasure) of contractually stipulated length might typify this end of the continuum. At the other end would be the purely political marriage that links social groups, parties, or even nations together but which disregards the desires of the principals. Richard II's diplomatic marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine, a Kulin Brahmin's ritual marriage with dozens of women, or Asaf al-Daula's apparently unconsummated marriage with Shams al-Nisā' Begum (discussed later) exemplifies this extreme. Between lie a diversity of forms within a variety of cultures.

Historians who have studied French primary education during the nineteenth century, Maurice Gontard, Jacques and Mona Ozouf, and Peter Meyer, have noted the great gains made by the instituteurs and their growing professional-ization from the time of the law of 1833 to the law of the 1880s. Improvements in the quality of teaching derived mainly from the introduction of a national system of normal schools (écoles normales primaires) by the Law on Primary Education of 1833. This article will discuss the history, programs, and organization of these schools and the origin and backgrounds of their students. It will also examine 280 essays written by schoolmasters in 1861 on the state of primary education in the towns and villages of France; these mémoires, written for the most part by graduates of the normal schools, provide first-hand insight into the teacher himself, his professional goals and sense of mission, and how he viewed the world around him in the middle of the last century.

The Hutterites are an Anabaptist sect that was founded early in the sixteenth century. Their society today is characterized on the one hand by a traditional social order and on the other by the pursuit of rationally structured economic activities. How is it possible to combine these seemingly contradictory characteristics in the daily life of communities whose populations hardly exceed 140 members? Would it not be much more reasonable for Hutterites not only to uphold their traditional social order, but also to follow conservative economic practices as some of the Old Order Amish do? How is it possible that a Hutterite individual can at one moment give detailed technical instructions for repair of a complicated machine over shortwave radio and an hour later expose himself to a religious sermon, the text of which has not changed for 350 years?

Voluntary associations of one sort or another were clearly an important component of traditional Chinese society. Their importance for the economy has long been recognized, and their potential political efficacy was acknowledged—albeit negatively—by the government, which prohibited gentry from forming study associations (xuehui). An earlier generation of Western observers was quick to note this facet of Chinese life. The French social scientist, Maurice Courant, declared that “the fact that dominates the Chinese life is the existence of associations,” and E. T. C. Werner, in a less scholarly vein, commented on “the tendency of the Chinese to act not singly but in groups.” As early as 1803, the American missionary S. Wells Williams had observed in a manner reminiscent of Tocqueville that the natural tendency of the Chinese people to “crystallize into associations” provided a “stimulus to activity,” which he credited with “quickening the vitality of the mass.”

The nature of the relationship between ideas and the social conditions in which they develop has long been among the central concerns of fields like the sociology of knowledge, the sociology of intellectuals, and the social history of ideas. For generations, scholars in these areas have hotly debated the proper way of characterizing the form of this relationship and how it should be conceptualized and studied. With few exceptions, however, there has been an astonishing consensus on one matter: fundamental intellectual reorientations have almost invariably been seen as the product—whether simple or complex—of one or more major social changes. As far as it has gone, this perspective has led to extremely important conclusions, but except among the psychoanalytically inclined, it has remained strangely and regrettably silent on the specific micro-level processes by which macro-level social changes actually translate into changes in ideas.

Early on the cold morning of Wednesday, December 2, 1885, a crowd beganto gather in the forecourt of a handsome brick church on the outskirts ofDetroit. The church, only recently blessed, was the Polish Roman Catholicchurch of Saint Albertus; the crowd, eventually numbering perhaps eighthundred, were Polish immigrants. Most of them were women. Shortly after 6:00, seven policemen marched into the convent opposite the church and soon emerged escorting two Polish priests. The group moved toward the church, but at the church steps the crowd—“the women,” according to witnesses—began to jeer at and jostle the priests, and even pelted them with gravel. The police responded vigorously, but they and the priests were pushed from the door several times before they were finally able to enter.

Amidst the disruption of rapid social and economic change in contemporary developing nations, political order has been a fragile commodity. The simultaneous, urgent demands of integrating nations, constructing states, institutionalizing participation, and satisfying revolutionary expectations have overwhelmed most third world regimes, and liberal democratic ones in particular. The dependence of constitutional democracy on moderation, tolerance, and restraint in political behavior has been especially difficult to reconcile with the desperate, consummatory character of politics in nations where public agendas and personal expectations grossly exceed available resources and rewards.

Because in retrospect we know that fascism never took in the United States, we are likely to overlook aspects of the American experience that nurtured what might well be described as protofascist proclivities: our hardy nativist tradition, from the Know-Nothings to the second Ku Klux Klan, cultivated attitudes that strikingly paralleled many of the characteristics of European fascism during the interwar period. American nativism, one would have been tempted to argue, should have served as a seedbed for the growth of an aggressive American fascism during the crisis of the 1930s. Yet it did no such thing.

The expansion of Western influence during and after the fifteenth century was a pervasive phenomenon. European seamen, traders, and settlers set off one of the most widespread and complex processes of cultural contact and transfer in human history. Students of acculturation are thus presented with a unique opportunity for controlled observation, that of keeping one variable—the culture of Western Europe—relatively constant while allowing others to range widely. European traders carried much the same cultural baggage, material and conceptual, whether they travelled to the Americas, Asia, or the East Indies, but the cultures they encountered and with which they interacted covered a wide spectrum of human conditions.

Among the various weaknesses that characterize much of the literature concerning political phenomena in Latin America, there are a few that appear to be fundamental. One serious criticism that could be made concerns the marked ahistoricity of many studies, exemplified by the tendency to take certain social structural features as given in this context, such as the existence of an oligarchy, a more or less undifferentiated impoverished mass, and a weak and politically insignificant middle class. This static and ahistorical consideration of structural phenomenon is directly related to a further weakness of such literature, this being the tendency to isolate political processes from what is in fact a dynamic socioeconomic reality, and thereby reduce the former to the interplay of more or less circumstantial factors.

The prevalence and attraction of dissident sectarian movements today raises anumber of significant questions about both their participants and their role incontemporary society. The present study examines one such group, the Spiritualistsof Mexico, who form not only a dissident religious movement butalso provide an important health care delivery system (Finkler 1980b, 1981a,1981c, 1983). While the Mexican example is the focus of our attention, the discussion has broader implications because movements of the Spiritualist type exist in many cultures (e.g., Berger 1969; Burridge.1969; LaBarre 1971; Lanternari 1963, 1974; Lewis 1971; Wilson 1963).