“This consuming cancer”, wrote Governor-General Camba of gambling in the preamble to an edict dated 7 March 1838, “that destroys the fortune of many families, encourages sloth, hinders the sources of public wealth, perverts good faith, corrupts the people's morals and leads them to degradation and misery. Unfortunately the vice has spread prolifically in this rich soil”. Spanish authorities held gambling to be both morally reprehensible and economically detrimental, yet official recognition was extended to an activity that could not be eradicated and from which the colonial state derived considerable financial benefit. The definition of criminality in respect to gambling, therefore, became dependent on the inability of the state to enforce its own regulations and the exigencies of financial demands. This article will examine the popularity of cockfighting and other forms of gambling in the Philippines, the extent of official ambivalence towards these sports, and the motives behind colonial policy. In the process, Gusfield's concept of the “moral passage”, whereby once tolerated behaviour is redefined as deviant and treated as criminal, will be shown to have application in reverse. Gambling was progressively legalized during the late 18th and 19th centuries as the state profited from such activities.

In traditional societies, a sense of the “sacred” is often inherent in the form of the urban built-environment, which, in turn, cannot be understood apart from the “mythical-magical concern with place”. According to Mircea Eliade, the act of settlement itself is perceived as a re-enactment of the mythical creation of the world. Ancient Indian cities were designed according to a mandala replicating a cosmic image of the laws governing the universe and, similarly, Chinese cities were conceived as “cosmo-magical symbols” of the universe. These cities were laid out as terrestrial images of the macrocosmos, distinct spaces sacralized for habitation within a continuum of profane space.

In selecting the “village community” as focus for an analysis of the social organization of relations between agents of the state and its subjects I bridge two distinct and sometimes contradictory themes. The first is the manner in which social connections within the countryside and with the state are handled in practice. The second is the way the concepts of “community” and, more specifically, “village community” are used to represent and sometimes misrepresent both how these relations are formally structured and what actually happens. Evaluation of these concepts is thus an important and necessary part of any interpretation of rural society and culture. Perceptions of community underlie and affect not only academic analyses but the actions and attitudes of officialdom and those experts who are involved with the administration and development of the countryside. They are intrinsically connected with matters of policy and administration, and the village — as we now observe it — is a consequent outcome.

In September 1945, the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS) headquarters in Kunming dispatched a mission to Laos. The purpose and composition of the mission were described on the first page of the mission's report as follows:

The Raven Mission was put on by OSS in cooperation with AGAS [Air Ground Aid Section], and parachuted near Vientiane, French Indo-China on 16 September 1945 for Prisoner of War relief work. This mission was activated following a request by G-5 SOS. The mission was composed of the following personnel: Major [Aaron] Bank, Mission Leader; Major [Charles] Holland, Executive Officer; Lt. [Alger] Ellis, Asst. Executive Officer; Lt. Phelan, AGAS Representative; Lt. [B. Hugh] Tovar, Reports Officer; Lt. Reese, Reports Officer; T/5 McKowan, Radio Operator; T/5 Blandin, Medic; Lao Trug [Luu], Interpreter.

In recent years, North-South patterns of domination and neo-colonialism have occupied the field of social studies. One can argue that theories of modernization such as Lerner's The Passing of Traditional Society bear a certain similarity with dependency theories. Although these later writers formed their theories as a critique of modernizing theories, both perspectives are similar in that they analyze “traditional” or underdeveloped societies from a North-South point of view. Thus, if modernizing theories were criticized by neo-Marxists and Marxists alike as “ethnocentric” because they ignored non-Western types of development and praised Western history as an ideal type and a global model, in the discourse of dependency theories, the North was more than ever present in shaping and influencing the underdevelopment of the South. The impoverishment of the South was analyzed as a direct result of the enrichment of the industrialized North. Although diametrically opposite in ideological aims, these two theoretical perspectives share a common denominator in that they accept the predominance of Western culture and analyze the reaction of the Third World in relation to it. In other words, they both implied that all dynamics originate, and move mainly from the North. This paper will attempt to take a different perspective by looking into the different patterns of exchange on the South-South axis. In analyzing a particular set of networks and cultural exchange which was established through religious scholarship, this paper attempts to follow up Roffs study on “Indonesian and Malay Students in Cairo in the 1920s”. It will shed some light on the significance of al-Azhar in particular, and Cairo in general, as a centre of religious learning which attracts until today students from all over the Muslim world.

With the emergence of “new Protectionism” and the resurrection of international political economy as a legitimate field of international relations, international trade and trade relations have, once again, become the focal points of political science inquiries. Given its varied intellectual attractions, the central theme of international trade remains constant: What are the causes of trade relations? Specifically, what factors determine a flow of commodities from country A to country B? There are basically two major types of answers to this question.