The Hellenization of ancient Rome is not a rare kind of event in history; “outer” India or the Chinese world have offered several other different examples. Roman civilization was an important part of Hellenistic culture much like present day Japan participates in Western civilization. Our purpose is not to recall this evidence nor to argue for Roman originality. (Where has an acculturation ever been total?) We shall not allow either the forest or the trees to hide thi other and shall ask ourselves rather what “ acculturation” might mean in the case of Rome. For the question of acculturation, which describes so well the present condition of the Third World, is inapplicable to other historic situations. The richness of the past is such that our sociologies or our praxeologies are often nothing other than rationalizations of a particular case in history.

Socialism was born in the West in the 19th century, be it the Utopian visions of Saint-Simon, Owen or Fourier, or the system, at once theoretical and militant, founded by Marx and Engels. It was the heir not only of the philosophers and economists of the modern age, Diderot, Hegel and Ricardo, but also of a more ancient egalitarian and Utopian tradition, which constitutes its “prehistory” and its “proto-history”: social movements such as the Bohemian Taborites, the Münster anabaptists or the English diggers; and similarly the Utopian outlooks like those of Thomas Moore or Campanella or, still more ancient, Plato himself.

Homer, the first and greatest of Greek poets, depicts a society which may be loosely described as feudal. Power is in the hands of kings, who are bound to each other by ties of marriage and traditional friendship. Their nobles are men of equally good blood and high repute; the common people appear to have no function but to serve their lords and masters. The operation of the government is but sketchily indicated. The kings and princes meet in council, decisions are taken and are reported verbally by messengers. There is not the slightest hint that administration involves paper work, nor is there anything that can be called a “civil service.”

The status of the blacksmith in tribal societies poses one of the most puzzling problems of anthropology. By a strange paradox, this noted craftsman, whose bold and meritorious services are indispensable to his community, has been relegated to a position outside the pale of society, almost as an “untouchable.” Regarded as the possessor of great magical powers, held at the same time in veneration and contempt, entrusted with duties unrelated to his craft or to his inferior social status, that make of him performer of circumcision rites, healer, exorcist, peace-maker, arbiter, counsellor, or head of a cult, his figure in what may be called the “blacksmith complex,” presents a mass of contradictions. These contradictions are to be met with wherever, as in the case of barbarian societies and archaic civilisations, iron ore is smelted and iron is worked, even though it is in black Africa that the enigmatic character of the blacksmith is most clearly delineated.

Over the last few decades the biological sciences have developed a strong new branch which lays down certain important prerequisites for any conception of human nature. This is the science of behavior which has found a place half-way between its sister sciences, morphology and physiology, who are often very far apart from one another. The new science has given some of its representatives the will to try out new conceptions of the organism. “Behavior” combines structure and function in a new whole, and it promises to overcome the separation between individual and environment, for a larger synthesis brings more comprehensive phenomena into view. It also promises to overcome the isolation of the individual, for it makes it possible to comprehend the individual as an integral part of a whole which is of necessity supra-individual.

The multiculturalism and multilingualism typical of Moroccan society not only act as a backdrop to women's participation in the public and political arena, but also provide a grid to analyse it. Upper-class women, whose level of education contrasted with very widespread illiteracy among the female population, were responsible for the birth of the modern feminist movement in Morocco in the 1940s. The heirs to historical figures who were prominent in building the nation, they fired the starting gun for women's emancipation. Moroccan women have struggled against colonialism and contributed to the progress of society. Their participation in politics is still limited mainly because of conservative ideas that stand in the way of their entry into political life.

All in all women's emancipation in Morocco has advanced since independence. Because of their fight women's associations, and democratic forces in general, succeeded in bringing about reform of the Mudawana (family code) in 2004. However the choice between modernity and tradition remains a big challenge.

If we wish to discuss mysticism and society in their mutual relationship there is one astonishing fact which should be pointed out from the outset. In the infinite welter of literature on mysticism which, especially during the last two generations, has taken on quite extraordinary proportions, the problem of mysticism and society has received but scanty attention. The way of the mystic in trying to attain his goal of union or communion with God or however we may define his goal, the peculiar spiritual universe in which he lives, the intricacies of mystical theology, which has the formulation of mystical experience in a conceptural framework and the establishment of an acceptable connection between these experiences and traditional forms of theology—all these have been discussed in full detail. Even the history of such developments in different systems and religions has always aroused the interest of the historian. The social context of mysticism and its implications, however, have, as far as I am aware, only a marginal place in these discussions.

Informed Christians have learned in our day that Islâm is not a primitive desert religion spread by the sword, for which faith is reduced to fatalism and women have no souls. Yet Christian historians of religion who avoid such gross errors still tend to present Islâm as at best an imperfect and parochial version of Christian truth, lacking any distinctive genius truly worthy of its independent dignity among the world religions. But until modern times, when the Christianity (and Judaism) of Europeans has been radically transformed along with their secular life, Christianity must long have struck an observer from Mars as, compared to Islâm, the relatively localized faith of largely backward lands. Islâm was the vehicle of a complex and sophisticated sense of social order in a varied and highly creative civilization which was expanding continuously until its field of action encompassed half mankind; it was the only one of the major historical religions which had successfully displaced in large areas other major faiths such as Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism. The Martian observing human history in the later Middle Ages might find it easier to understand why Muslims have looked on Christianity as merely an abortive form of Islâm, as for instance in the approach of those Şûfîs, Muslim mystics, who see the perfection of Islâm in its uniting at once the dispensation of Law, which reflects the Majesty of God, and the dispensation of Grace, which reflects his Beauty, whereas Judaism and Christianity are limited to only the one or the other. This Muslim conception is as inadequate, however, as its Christian counterpart. Probably any widespread religious system will find a place for all major types of religious insight and practice and is in its own way complete. Yet, as each system has matured, it has revealed a characteristic persistent pattern of norms in the interrelation and subordination to one another of all the elements embodied in it. If Christians are to perceive the genius of Islâm, it must perhaps be through the comparison of such persistent patterns.

Among the many problems suggested by the theme of the symposium, there is one in particular which seems capable of shedding light on the fundamental attitude of Chinese historians to their documents : On what foundations does the notion of the Middle Empire—the counterpart of the Greek ombilikon—rest?

This notion is certainly familiar to anyone who examines the documents and who knows that a historian always attributes peculiar features to his own country. Basing himself on a long tradition, he sometimes contrasts the civilized with the barbarians, and sometimes he distinguishes the strong from the weak, arguing from ephemeral junctures of circumstances.

The confession quoted above by way of introduction reveals with tragic sincerity the fatal passion of an overly avid reader, unlimited in curiosity certainly but fully conscious of the demanding finality of the work he had to accomplish: the scientific critique of an international system of social organization, “in which man is a humiliated, enslaved, abandoned and scornful being” (1844). Cultivating poetry and philosophy in a world felt to be unlivable meant becoming an accomplice of those individuals and institutions principally responsible for the barbarity called modern civilization. But to combat this, it was necessary to scour the murky historical horizon issued from a distant past where only great social revolutions marked the stages of a progression seen as ambiguous because realized by means of unspeakable phenomena of regression. Only one revolution took place under the contradictory sign of an emancipation with universal ambitions and of a decline with indelible consequences: the French Revolution. Conclusion as well as beginning, it was studied by Marx as a unique event, both in relation to its antecedents as well as its liberating promises. Although it is true that Marx “never wrote a history of the ancien régime”, a hardly significant remark, it is no less true that he studied and compiled, with the eagerness of a schoolboy enthralled by history, an enormous mass of documentation that can “help understand how (the ancien regime) gave birth to the Revolution”, despite what François Furet might think (Marx et la Révolution française, Paris, 1986, p. 79). Moreover, the author of Das Kapital drew from the revolutionary history of France the inspiration for a “poetry of the future” in which the following vision was designed:

“The old bourgeois society, with its classes and its class antagonism, gave way to an association in which the free development of each individual is the condition for the free development of the whole” (1848).

When placed into longer historical perspective using an interdisciplinary approach that fuses historical anthropology, history and political science, as well as hitherto unutilized primary sources, it can be demonstrated that the newly independent Indian Union right from the start under Nehru used constitution and law as instruments of subjugation that, since the latter remained incomplete, have prepared the ground for a war without end in the Naga Hills of Northeast India. Moreover, its history since the 1820s shows that constitution- and law-making are in essence shaped by power politics only to be countered by force, leading in this constellation to an unending guerrilla war transforming ever larger circles of terrain into a low-level war-zone and firmly enthroning a culture of violence with all its concomitants.

Cultural pluralism generally signifies three things:

1. 1) the fact of cultural plurality, considered as the co-existence of cultures which, in principle at least, belong to different geographical areas;

2. 2) the acknowledgement of the fact of this plurality;

3. 3) the affirmation that this plurality is a good thing, and the desire to make something of it in one way or another, either by preserving the various cultures in an individual sense in order to avoid any kind of reciprocal contamination, or, conversely, by organising between them a kind of peaceful dialogue, with a view to their mutual enrichment.

Anthropologists customarily use the term ‘tribe’ to designate two realms of different yet connected facts. On the one hand, nearly all of them make use of it to distinguish one type of society among many, one specific mode of social organization which they compare to others—’bands,’ ‘States,’ etc. There is, however, a lack of unanimity on this point, an outcome of the imprecision, the haziness of the criteria selected to define and to isolate these various types of society. But the discord is deeper yet with respect to the second use of the term ‘tribe,’ when it is used to designate a stage in the evolution of human society.

Johann Galtung in one of his lectures talks of a painting that hung in the ante-room of the late Ghanaian leader Kwame Nkrumah. It was a giant picture of Nkrumah himself struggling loose from his chains. There is thunder and lightning in the air, and in one corner of the picture are three men, three white men. The first is a capitalist and he carries a briefcase. The second is a missionary and he clutches a Bible. The third, the meekest looking carries a book whose title can be barely read. It is African Political Systems, and the third man is an anthropologist.

The European community that is in the process of being created is still searching for its history. For a few years now, the publishing market, which has been attempting - under the heading of ‘European history’ - to construct a shared past for a present that we now have in common, has been mushrooming. This communal experience is indisputably gaining ground (though more slowly and controversially than some well-known optimists hoped): it is promoted by freedom of movement within the European Union, by the effect of tourism, which some time ago ceased being reserved only for the elite, by the availability everywhere of products that, a few years back, typically represented a certain type of national styles of consumption, and finally by the unifying influence of the media. To the extent that closer relations between the inhabitants of the ‘old world’ run in parallel with the attempt to create institutions to regulate these common goods, and to protect against movements of people from other areas with their own sets of values, a combination of powerful ingredients is in place that leads one to anticipate a strengthening of ‘European’ identity. It is well known in research into identity that history plays an important part in its construction. And indeed historians from European countries have set themselves the task of jointly putting together a school textbook in which presentations that might otherwise focus on national character and be likely to offend neighbours will be harmonized. Others are looking at ways of celebrating memory (places of memory) that are intended to stimulate European rather than national memory. In addition, German and French historians met a while ago, in the little place of Genshagen near Berlin, with the intention of identifying events that would be suitable for European celebrations, in that they would not be connected with events that one of the participants might be ashamed of, or refer directly to a victory of one over another. But to anyone who studies the history of the two neighbours separated only by the Rhine, it quickly becomes clear that there is not a lot of space left in the calendar for activities that would found a common tradition.

Consecutive waves of paleolithic migrants crossing the Bering land bridge from Siberia to North America between 80,000 and 7,000 b.c. brought with them the shamanic way of harnessing supernatural powers. This way prevailed until the White intrusion 400 years ago, into the living space of the aboriginal peoples of North America. Wherever European political, religious, and economic dominance was established, shamanic institutions became the focus of negative attention. The shamanic practitioner was variously depicted by governmental and ecclesiastic authorities as a charlatan and imposter or a purveyor of evil influence. Some well-known ethnological and medico-psychological experts have until very recently portrayed the shaman as a mentally deranged person whose “primitive” culture permits the acting-out of psychopathology in a prestigious role, a eurocentric and positivistic fallacy rooted in Western misinterpretations of learned behavior manifested during shamanic rituals involving altered states of consciousness. Legal measures to suppress shamanic ceremonials were taken in the United States, especially in the aftermath of the Ghost Dance. This shaman-inspired movement, originating in the Prophet Dance of the Pacific Northwest (Spier 1935), sent waves of hectic sacro-nativistic ceremonial activity through many Amerindian tribes, and finally culminated in the Sioux uprising of 1890 which ended in the tragedy of Wounded Knee (cf. Mooney 1896).

The greater interconnectivity and interdependence unleashed by globalization are not creating a more harmonious, cosmopolitan humanity. On the contrary, the more global the world becomes, the more insistent particular differences, especially of the nationalist kind, are being articulated around the world, often leading to tension and conflict. This seeming paradox cannot be reconciled through simple mantras of ‘unity in diversity’. Rhetorical references to ‘a single humanity’ to overcome structurally entrenched divisions (as institutionalized in the world system of nation-states) are not sufficient for the attainment of greater pan-human solidarity. In response to this predicament this paper argues for a processual cosmopolitan perspective, in which a humanistic universalism should not be seen as a static moral ideal, but as a social and political horizon that must be worked towards, but probably never achieved, through a painstaking and continuing process of cosmopolitanization against the grain of powerful modes of particularist closure.

A dialectical interaction exists between cultural unity and diversity. These two factors can operate for good or ill. In order to strengthen the positive factor and limit the negative, it is important to have a good conceptual grasp of the basis of the unity, as well as of the diversity of cultures. Such an understanding should facilitate dialogue in intercultural relations, dialogue that is the most rational of all ways of coexistence. This article aims to explore the underlying conceptual themes.

There is nothing to suggest academic exercise in attempts to define sport. A politics of sport which expects coherence presupposes such definition, and behind this definition stands a whole conception of man. What is sport? The question is well worth being asked, for it is thrust upon us.

As I have pointed out in a series of papers, which appeared about fifteen years ago in the Revue de l'histoire des religions, there are numerous resemblances between the ancient myths of the Indo-Europeans, on the one hand, and those of Japan, on the other. These resemblances, relating both to the fundamental structures of the two mythological systems and to a number of curious details, constitute an assemblage which seems too conspicuous to be regarded as either accidental or the result of a similitude of human mentalities, manifesting itself, so it seems, through the creation of a great many similar myths and legends throughout the length and breadth of the surface of our planet.