Assessing anthropology's relation to the powers external to it requires not merely a history of anthropological ideas, but also an appraisal of the changing political economic arenas within which the discipline developed. That field was structured by capitalist development and the formation of nation-states and their rivalries in imperialism and colonialism, as well as by the rise of new educational regimes, institutions and disciplines. Anthropology was shaped not only by the growth of professional clusters within it, but also by the often contradictory demands generated by the interplay of elements in the field of forces that surrounded it.

This paper considers the connections between religion, ritual and politics in the works of Clifford Geertz and Maurice Bloch and confronts their approaches with some examples of ritual from Nepal. lt is suggested that both writers have great strengths, often not those conventionally ascribed to them, but both attempts to put forward a theory of ritual are undermined by the assumption that ritual is just one kind of thing in all the contexts in which it appears. The Nepalese examples are set out in line with a schematic typology, which, it is suggested, provides a possible basis for a historically grounded and generalising approach to the anthropological study of ritual.

In the west of Ireland, fosterage and adoption are correlated with illegitimacy. No one would be so cruel or foolish as to abandon one's own child unless there was a powerful reason for doing so. Conception out of wedlock is one such reason. This article attempts to carry out an analysis which is not theoretical but contextual or situational. It examines the ideology of kinship and family relationships and their associated social values in rural western Ireland. The aim is to bring meaning to the life and experiences of a particular individual, an illegitimate child fostered on a family farm in the west of Ireland, by means of an exploration of the ideology of blood and its social reverberations.

This paper discusses the author's fieldwork experiences in the 1980s and subsequently in the 1990s after the collapse of state socialism. The analysis compares young workers of Csepel, an industrial district of Budapest, to Hungarians of Transylvanian Romania. In seeking to understand the changes that have been taking place in these communities and their implications for anthropologists, the author explains why the self-reflective analyses of previous fieldwork achieved within state socialist societies are now lacking and often showed scholarly bias. As ideologically unattractive as this statement may appear, it has to be acknowledged. And moreover, since post-communist social forces bring in different types of power relations, a new departure for studying East and Central Europe is here advocated.

Is Mauss so original that nobody before him had opened an anthropological way to study the gift? A philosopher of Hungarian Law, Somlò published in 1909 ‘Der Güterverkehr in der Urgesellschaft’ (The circulation of valuables in primitive society). In one of the numerous footnotes of his essay on the gift, Mauss mentions this book, stating that Somlò: ‘inaugurates the path we shall ourselves undertake’. In spite of this remarkable acknowledgment, Somlò seems to have left no trace in a domain where Malinowski, Thurnwald and Mauss himself among many have become classical references. How then to account for Somlò, a possible predecessor of Mauss?