In his acclaimed synthesis of the Mexican Revolution of 1910, Alan Knight observed that “the social bandit's career in Academe has somewhat paralleled his life under the greenwood tree. Introduced by Professor Hobsbawm, he was initially welcomed, even feted, and he put in many appearances in academic company; but then (inevitably, after such uncritical acceptance) some academics grew leery, and the recent trend-especially among experts—has been to qualify, de-emphasise and even deny his role.”

The political tensions surrounding economic stabilization in revolutionary Nicaragua between 1979 and 1988 will be examined in this article. A review of the Nicaraguan case reveals that the Sandinista model of a mixed economy (presupposing at least simple reproduction of the capitalist, small producer, and state sectors) with multiclass “national unity” created a series of demands that were increasingly difficult to reconcile with defense priorities and longer-term goals for socioeconomic transformation. After 1981, access to external finance became more restrictive, the payoff horizon for investment projects began to lengthen, and destabilization intensified. Failure to assess these internal and external tensions realistically contributed to inflationary pressures and de facto shifts in income distribution, which at times undermined the consolidation of revolutionary hegemony and required reconsidering alliance strategies.

The issue to be addressed in this article is the limited exploration thus far of how rural women in Latin America themselves define and interpret the world around them and what meaning, if any, they attach to key terms employed by researchers concerned with development issues. A review of the literature reveals that despite the great strides made in the last two decades in understanding Latin American women as rural producers, research to date has dealt with the questions of gender ideology and identity in an extremely limited way. Two potential directions for future research will be suggested here: a critical reassessment of some of the analytical categories that have been taken as givens, and a focus on the social-political construction of gender identity and experience from the point of view of rural women. To explore the possibilities of these suggestions, the phrase “division of labor by sex” will be analyzed in light of recent anthropological and feminist contributions to other (primarily non-Latin American) areas of the literature. A second point that will be discussed is how life stories, when collected self-critically, can reveal the potential tension between the active negotiation of meaning by analysts and by the rural women they interview. I will argue that these new directions in research are essential if scholars are to appreciate varying interpretations of development.

Attempts have been made at Latin American regional integration since the late 1950s, but on each occasion, high expectations have met with disappointing failures. In July 1986, however, a new phase began in the history of Latin American integration as Presidents Raúl Alfonsín of Argentina and José Sarney of Brazil signed the Argentina-Brazil Economic Integration Pact (ABEIP).

For most of the past decade, Central America has been wracked by revolution, counterrevolution, military repression, and massive dislocation that have affected the lives of millions of people. Yet despite these dramatic events, little anthropological research has been directed toward Central America in the 1980s. Analysis of the contents of seven major cultural anthropology journals from 1980 to 1986 shows no increased attention to the area over a previous period, 1970 to 1976. Research published in the 1980s has been emphatically non-policy-based, even when fieldwork was conducted in the midst of crisis. This research report will analyze the underrepresentation of Central America in anthropology journals and possible reasons for it. I will suggest that the reticence of anthropology as a discipline to legitimate policy-based research in Central America stems from a tendency that has characterized the field since its beginnings: studying communities as isolated, timeless cultures that are unaffected by regional, national, and international events taking place outside their borders. This bias causes practitioners who wish to advance their careers to turn their backs on what may be considered controversial policy analysis and write instead about subjects endorsed by the discipline.

Colombian sociologist Orlando Fals Borda's recently completed major work, the four-volume Historia doble de la costa, presents historians and social scientists studying Latin America with what the author calls a “revolutionary challenge.” In Fals's view, the Historia doble offers a way of researching, writing, and disseminating a history capable of stimulating the democratic transformation of Third World societies. This essay will take that challenge seriously and explore its implications from the perspective of the discipline of history. The first section will survey Fals Borda's intellectual and political development and his evolving critique of his own methods and results. The second section will develop a critique of the Historia doble in terms of the “internal logic” of history as a discipline. The essay will conclude by arguing that Fals's democratic goals are paradoxically subverted by his chosen means and that historians would do well to reconsider the democratic promise of their own methodology.