SPIRIT MATTER The first two essays show that the great unanswerable questions—in this case the relation of spirit to matter—can be rich terrains for investigation of the beliefs of those who struggle to answer them.

The theological period of humanity could begin no otherwise than by a complete and usually very durable state of pure Fetichism [sic], which allowed free exercise to that tendency of our nature by which Man conceives of all external bodies as animated by a life analogous to his own, with differences of mere intensity.

Auguste Comte, Cours (1830Ð1842)

In the late thirteenth century, Ida of Louvain scandalized her community. The daughter of a prosperous wine merchant, Ida already had refused marriage and become a recluse in a small cell within her parents' home. One day, however, it seemed that she went mad. Casting aside even the simple clothes she now wore, Ida wrapped herself in a dirty rag and draped a mat over her shoulders for warmth. Aggressively seeking out the most crowded plazas and market places, she preened and “strutted about if mad or a fool, offering a monstrous spectacle of herself to the people.”Vita Venerabilis Idae Virginis. In Acta Sanctorum. (Paris and Rome, 1865) vol. 11 (13 April): 163. Hereafter cited as AASS. Townspeople murmured that Ida was in a frenzy, out of her mind; eventually she was tied up to prevent her from harming herself or others.

The Conquest of Everest, the official film of the first ascent of Mount Everest, opens with the famous summit photograph of Tenzing Norgay holding aloft his ice axe, from which the flags of Britain, Nepal, India, and the United Nations flutter in the wind. Tenzing, a Sherpa raised in Nepal but for twenty years a resident of India, reached the summit with Edmund Hillary, a New Zealand beekeeper, on 29 May 1953, in a British expedition led by Colonel John Hunt. In the film, the summit photograph is followed by the opening credits and the scene in London on 2 June 1953, when news of the ascent was announced on the same day as Queen Elizabeth II's coronation. As crowds wave British flags to the beat of military bands, the Queen's gilded carriage rolls through ceremonial archways on the streets of London. The narrator then announces: “And to add to the cheers, the newspapers reported an extra of extras. Britain had one new victory: Men had climbed Mount Everest.”The Conquest of Everest, (1953), National Film and Television Archive, British Film Institute, London.

In October of 1899, General George W. Davis of the United States military government in Puerto Rico issued General Order No. 160. By that time, General Davis and his forces had been occupying Puerto Rico for over a year. The war with Spain which had initially brought them to the island was finally over, and they now claimed complete control over the territory. General Order No. 160 thereby called for the establishment of municipal governments in Puerto Rico. It established municipal elections with a restricted suffrage, and empowered the newly-elected officials to carry out various duties, from policing to taxation to basic administration. Of course, the Puerto Ricans already had municipal governments, established by the Spaniards during their three hundred year reign over the island. But General Order No. 160 was supposed to mark something entirely new in that it manned the municipal governments exclusively with elected Puerto Ricans. The idea was that the Puerto Ricans, “for the first time in their history,” should be given an opportunity to manage their own affairs and acquire practical education in modern liberal governance. As General Davis stated, the new municipal governments were to serve as “a sort of kindergarten” in which Puerto Ricans could learn the ways of “popular government,” Anglo-American style.Headquarters Department of Porto Rico (1899a); United States Congress (1904: 222).

This paper is a revisiting of the question of contemporary Islamism in Egypt. Its purpose is to rethink the main arguments and explanatory frameworks relating to Islamist activism in general and the militant and violent type in particular. It presents some new propositions about the phenomenon and provides elements for a deeper understanding. This revisiting is undertaken in light of certain developments over the last decade or so, which may be summarised as follows: 1) the heightening of Islamist violence, marked by confrontations with the government in and around Cairo and in the provinces of Upper EgyptThe 1990s have seen an intensification of violent clashes between the Islamists and the government, claiming over one thousand lives. The Islamist attacks have been aimed particularly at the tourism sector and the police. More than a hundred police officers and soldiers have been killed. For more details, see the annual reports of al-Taqrir al-Istratiji al-Arabi (The Arab Strategic Report). See also Nabil Abd al-Fatah and Diya' Rashwan, Taqrir al-Hala al-Diniya fi Misr 1995 (Report on the State of Religion in Egypt 1995) (Cairo: Centre for Political and Strategic Studies, 1997).; 2) the emergence of clear socio-spatial dimensions to Islamist activism. For the purposes of this article, my analysis pertains to these developments in the greater Cairo area.The rise of al-Jama‘a al-Islamiya in the Upper Egypt governorates of Qena, Asyut, Suhaj, Minya and Aswan must be examined in relation to the social fabric and spatial organisation of their cities and towns. The complexity of social organisation based on tribe and family and the hierarchies characterising social, economic, and political positions in the various provinces have yet to be studied in a comprehensive manner, and are beyond the scope of this paper. See Nazih Ayubi, Political Islam (London: Routledge, 1991), and Mamun Fandy, “Egypt's Islamic Group: Regional Revenge,” Middle East Journal 48, 4 (1994): 607–25.

The past thirty years in Latin America have produced tremendous transformations of the state's role in society, both in the scope of its activities and the extent of its presence. Sometimes this has led to the state's unprecedented expansion into the far reaches of economic and social life, other times to its retreat from direct institutional presence in favor of indirect market-mediated linkages to society. The impact of these transformations on associational life and the quality of political participation has to some extent been obscured in recent scholarly work on democratic transition and consolidation, important as these issues are.There is an extensive literature that examines the ways in which the institutional organization of democracy shapes the stability and character of post-transition politics. See, for example, Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and Post-Communist Europe. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Juan Linz, “The Perils of Presidentialism.” Journal of Democracy 1 (1990), and contributions to Scott Mainwaring and Timothy Scully, eds., Building Democratic Institutions: Party Systems in Latin America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); and Jorge Domínguez and Abraham Lowenthal, eds. Constructing Democratic Governance: Latin America and the Caribbean in the 1990s (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). This paper explores how the transformations in the deeper “structural linkages” between state and society have affected political organization and mobilization in rural Brazil and Chile. In so doing, we contend that institutions not normally seen as central to democratic politics are in fact crucial to understanding political participation and mobilization.

The late colonial period was generally an era of anxiety for royal officials in Spanish America and its neighboring areas. To the turmoil caused by massive rebellions, especially in the early 1780s, was added the volatile political atmosphere resulting from the French Revolution. Several “seditious” incidents occurred subsequently throughout the colonial landscape. Both the popular rebellions prior to and the plots following the French Revolution were compounded by an increasing “public” awareness and discussion of politics and modern ideas.

One of the great virtues of Charles Tilly's Durable Inequality is that it might be wrong. So often attempts at constructing grand theories in sociology turn out, on close inspection, to consist largely of tautologies and vacuous propositions—conceptual frameworks that are so flexible and indeterminate that no empirical observations of the world would ever count as surprising. This is not the case for the central arguments in Tilly's book. Consider, for example, a claim that the author makes early in the book about the relatively limited significance of beliefs in the explanation of durable inequality:

Durable Inequality is a very ambitious work of social theory by one of our foremost sociologists. In many ways, it builds upon the grand master theorists of the nineteenth century through a language of the present. It is like the more structuralist versions of Marx. For Marx, however, class relations and class inequality have different dynamics and different characteristics, depending on historically variable modes of production. For Tilly, inequality refers to relations between paired and unequal categories that have differential access to value- producing resources. And for Tilly, again in contrast to Marx, categorical inequality is perpetuated—is durable—in large measure because of various specified organizational properties and dynamics. There are no contradictions for Tilly, no dynamics of change that are internal to his model or vary by the specific historical conditions that one is attempting to analyze. This is, indeed, surprising for a scholar so identified with historical sociology. In Tilly's formulation, the characteristics and dynamics through which categorical inequality creates durable inequality appears transhistorical. It is not inequality under capitalism that seems to be Tilly's focus, but, rather, a universal theory of inequality across time.

Durable Inequality is an important and insightful book. In this work, Charles Tilly links organizational needs to the production and reproduction of social inequality. For some time now, organizational theorists have demonstrated that formal organizations are central actors in modern society, and that the significant environment of formal organizations are other formal organizations. Durable Inequality demonstrates how social inequality is directly tied to solving organizational problems. His four master mechanisms—exploitation, opportunity hoarding, emulation, and adaptation—tell us a great deal about how inequality is produced and maintained. The argument about categorical pairing and how such pairing is used by organizations to generate inequality is plausible and seductive.

Social life consists of making mistakes, then correcting them. The big questions do not concern who makes the fewest mistakes and why, but whether the mistakes are fruitful, how fast people recognize them, and how well they correct them. The same principles apply to writing books, even if the interaction and error-correction take longer to operate than in everyday conversation. This symposium's vigorous, vital critiques of Durable Inequality establish that my book is no exception to the rule. Clearly in writing the book I made mistakes of at least four kinds: