bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Death of an Uncrowned King—C. R. Das and Political Crisis in Twentieth-Century Bengal
Authors: Greenough Paul
Published: June 2009

These observations, which open a widely read essay on primitive religion, might with equal profit be applied to the comparative study of complex societies. They suggest an unusual descriptive project: to catalog the threats to social order in particular cultures in order to make revealing comparisons. They also imply that, armed with such a catalog, unusual meanings might be wrung out of recurrent disasters and common dilemmas. Such a project has not been ventured for South Asia, and I should like to begin with modern Bengal, but the embarassment arises that I am not confident I possess the “active principles” of Bengali culture. It is only by taking up acknowledged instances of “dangers,” “cataclysms,” and “disasters” that I expect to be able to reason back to ordering concepts and thus to complete the catalog. In the course of this short essay, however, only one specific calamity—the death of C. R. Das, a charismatic Indian politician—can be examined in detail. If I succeed in showing that this one calamity has a hitherto unrealized significance in modern Bengal, perhaps the reader will grant that the role of relatedcalamities in Bengal, and even in the whole of modern India, has not been insignificant.
Toward a History of Revolution
Authors: Gates John M.
Published: June 2009

Revolution, like war, is an historical phenomenon of great importance, and no scholar is likely to argue that revolutions have not had a significant influence on the history of nations and regions, even on the history of the entire world. Unlike war, however, revolution has no coherent chronological history, andthere are no studies of the phenomenon comparable to William McNeill's recent workThe Pursuit of Power, or to Theodore Ropp's older but equally importantWar in the Modem World.Despite volumes written on the subject of revolution by historians, political scientists, sociologists, and others, one searches in vain for a comprehensive history.
Two Paths of Agrarian Capitalism, or a Critique of Chayanovian Marxism
Authors: Lehmann David
Published: June 2009

In the ideology of “dependency” and the “world system” the preservation of a comprador bourgeoisie highly dependent on its control of the state apparatus perpetuates the condition of underdevelopment to the benefit not only of that class but also of the world capitalist system, and obviously to the detriment of the remainder of the population of poor countries (Wallerstein 1984). According to these theories, the condition of dependency is sustained also by the perpetuation of petty-commodity production and other precapitalist relationships. In his enumeration of the implications of accumulation in “socially and sectorally disarticulated economies” (that is, third world countries), Alain de Janvry, who places himself, with some reservations, in the world-system school, states that “subsistence agriculture becomes the ultimate embodiment of the contradictions of accumulation in the disarticulated economies; … the peasant household constitutes an articulated-dominated purveyor of cheap labour and cheap food [even though] subsistence agriculture slowly disintegrates under this domination as it performs its essential structural function under disarticulated accumulation” (1981:39). For Immanuel Wallerstein, the state-class relationship and the persistence of pettycommodity production are both features of the “peripheral condition” and explain why it is so difficult (though not absolutely impossible) in his schema for countries to graduate from his periphery and semiperiphery to the core of advanced economies. The argument runs as follows: in its expansion across the globe the capitalist world economy creates social structures and state structures that fit the needs of the core economies by establishing a ruling class in control of the state and holding monopoly power within the national economy.
The Household and Relations of Production in Southern Peru
Authors: Collins Jane L.
Published: June 2009

The household as a unit of analysis has achieved wide currency in social science circles in recent years. Researchers have shown that in many contexts, both rural and urban, the household is the locus of important productive processes. It has also been demonstrated to be the context within which many decisions related to productive strategies are made and where income is pooled and then allocated. Testimony to the growth of interest in household-based analyses is provided by the recent appearance of a number of edited volumes (Nettinget al.1984; Smithet al.1984) and review articles (Yanagisako 1979; Guyer 1981; Schmink 1984) on the topic.
Women's Rights and Society's Needs: Japan's 1931 Suffrage Bill
Authors: Nolte Sharon H.
Published: June 2009

The history of women is different from that of men. Women's history is the highlighting of the cultural construction of gender, the ways in which “men” and “women” are defined in considerable autonomy from biological males and females. The culturally constructed gender system interacts with a society's political system in ways that are just beginning to be explored.1 At the same time, scholars also find their definitions of national states to be in flux. Criticizing both Weberian and Marxist traditions of analysis of the state, Charles Bright and Susan Harding have stressed the open-ended, continuous, and contingent interplay between state structures and initiatives on the one hand, and social movements on the other.2 It is an auspicious time to reconsider the relationships between women and the state in cross-cultural perspective. Here I will examine the women's suffrage movement in Japan (1919–31 ) in its political context in order to encourage comparison with other women's suffrage movements, and to re-examine the interwar Japanese state from the viewpoint of one of its least-studied challengers.
“Missionaries in the Row Boat”? Ethnological Ways of Knowing as a Challenge to Social History
Authors: Medick Hans
Published: June 2009

Investigations in social history confront a fundamental methodological difficulty: How is it possible to comprehend and to present the dual constitution of historical processes, the simultaneity of given and produced relationships, the complex interdependence of encompassing structures and the agency of “subjects,” the relationships obtaining among the circumstances of life, production, and authority, and the experiences and modes of behaviour of those affected by these circumstances?
The Rise of Conservative Capitalism: Ideological Tensions within the Reagan and Thatcher Governments
Authors: Hoover Kenneth R.
Published: June 2009

The phrase liberal capitalism has occasionally been used in contemporary political criticism to lump together the ideological approaches of nonsocialist political parties and to suggest that there are few significant differences among those who generally support a market-based political economy. C. B. Macpherson, in an influential essay entitled The Real World of Democracy (1965), argues that “by admitting the mass of the people into the competitive party system, the liberal state did not abandon its fundamental nature; it simply opened the competitive political system to all the individuals who had been created by the competitive market society.” As a first approximation then, liberal capitalism appears to stand for a combination of rational contractualism, utilitarian individualism, and the laissez-faire economics of Adam Smith.
Religious Elites in Advanced Industrial Society
Authors: Hunter James Davison
Published: June 2009

In primitive and nonindustrialized societies the typical (and in many cases, the exclusive) tasks of religious elites have revolved chiefly around the creation, modification, and maintenance of the symbolic universe of society. Such work invariably implied privilege and various kinds and degrees of political power. But with the expansion of the modern world order, the situation of religious elites has altered dramatically. For one, religious-knowledge workers make up a very small percentage of the ranks of a much larger knowledge sector. For example, while the percentage of religious-knowledge workers (including clergy) relative to the entire economically active population in the United States has remained relatively constant since 1870, the percentage of religious workers to the knowledge workers has declined by one half in the period between 1950 and 1970—a period of dramatic growth of the knowledge sector (see Table 1). By 1970, the percentage of religious-knowledge workers to knowledge workers generally had shrunk to one sixth of its proportionate size a century earlier. Between 1970 and 1984, this proportion has leveled off somewhat. In Western Europe and Japan the same patterns have become firmly established as well.
Resistance without Protest and without Organization: Peasant Opposition to the IslamicZakatand the Christian Tithe
Authors: Scott James C.
Published: June 2009

This study presents an analysis of Malay peasant resistance to the Islamiczakattoday and of French peasant resistance earlier to the Christian tithe, but it is offered with a larger argument in mind. Its purpose is to show that a vast range of what counts—or should count—as peasant resistance involves no overt protest and requires little or no organization.
The 1866 Grain Riots in Sri Lanka
Authors: Rogers John D.
Published: June 2009

Until fairly recently, grain riots were viewed as spontaneous reactions of the poor to hunger, not worthy of detailed analysis. Over the past twenty years, partially as a result of pioneering studies by George Rudé and Edward Thompson with reference to France and Britain, a considerable body of scholarly writing about these disturbances has appeared. Consistent cross-cultural patterns have emerged from this research. Grain riots were not necessarily a product of hunger, although they were a facet of struggles over the control of food. They have normally taken one of two forms. One was the market riot, where the crowd protested against the price or lack of availability of grain. Such disturbances often commenced with the offer to buy grain at a “just” or “customary” price. If this demand was not met, more drastic action was taken. Sometimes rioters seized grain and sold it to the crowd for a just price, and then turned the receipts over to the owners of the grain. More often grain was strewn about, destroyed, or stolen. The second main form of grain riot was the blockade. In times of shortage, people prevented the export of grain from a town or district because they believed that merchants and landlords should not benefit from scarcity and that such exports would drive up the price locally. Sometimes retributive action accompanied or followed both types of protest, meting out punishment to traders, landlords, or others who were perceived as wrongly profiting from food shortages. Such action usually took the form of wholesale looting. In general, grain rioters avoided serious violence.
Feudal Relationships and the Law: A Comparative Enquiry
Authors: Saltman Michael
Published: June 2009

This essay is no more than a preliminary endeavor to examine analogies between principles of land tenure in the recent history of an East African society and what appear to be strikingly similar principles that obtained in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in England. If these analogies are demonstrable with a reasonable degree of plausibility, a useful framework of reference may be established within which some broader theoretical issues can be discussed. One such issue is that, given a degree of structural similarity between two or more social systems, there might be a corresponding equivalence in the logic of legal thought in response to a common object of litigation—in this particular case, the subject of land tenure.
Remembering the Future, Anticipating the Past: History, Time, and Cosmology among the Maya of Yucatan
Authors: Farriss Nancy M.
Published: June 2009

This essay is about concepts of time and the past among the Maya Indians of Yucatan in southeastern Mexico. It explores how these concepts fit into the Maya's general view of the way the world works and how they relate to certain dynamics of Maya history—as we define history—during their pre-Hispanic and colonial past. One inspiration has been the often baffling written records the Maya have left, from which we try to quarry historical facts without always enquiring what the records meant to the people who produced them. The other is the reminder, provided by recent historical work from anthropologists, that people do not record their past so much as construct it, with an eye to the present, and at the same time use that past in molding the present.
Age at Marriage and the Household: A Study of Neo-Babylonian and Neo-Assyrian Forms
Authors: Roth Martha T.
Published: June 2009

This inquiry focuses on one life stage in the life cycle of ancient Babylonia and Assyria of the first millennium B.C., specifically, the age at first marriage for men and women. I will suggest some implications to be drawn for the household and family patterns resulting from probable age at marriage, and identify native terminology employed in reference to the life stage common for first marriage.
How to Make a National Cuisine: Cookbooks in Contemporary India
Authors: Appadurai Arjun
Published: June 2009

Cookbooks, which usually belong to the humble literature of complex civilizations, tell unusual cultural tales. They combine the sturdy pragmatic virtues of all manuals with the vicarious pleasures of the literature of the senses. They reflect shifts in the boundaries of edibility, the proprieties of the culinary process, the logic of meals, the exigencies of the household budget, the vagaries of the market, and the structure of domestic ideologies. The existence of cookbooks presupposes not only some degree of literacy, but often an effort on the part of some variety of specialist to standardize the regime of the kitchen, to transmit culinary lore, and to publicize particular traditions guid- ing the journey of food from marketplace to kitchen to table. Insofar as cookbooks reflect the kind of technical and cultural elaboration we grace with the term cuisine, they are likely, as Jack Goody has recently argued, to be representations not only of structures of production and distribution and of social and cosmological schemes, but of class and hierarchy (1982). Their spread is an important sign of what Norbert Elias has called “the civilizing process” (1978). The increased interest of historians and anthropologists in cookbooks should therefore come as no surprise (Chang 1977; Cosman 1976; Khare 1976a, 1976b).
The Segmentary State in Africa and Asia
Authors: Southall Aidan
Published: June 2009

Segmentary state was the concept coined to fit Alur society into the theory of political anthropology of the 1940s. Fortes and Evans-Pritchard made the first giant step in the comparative analysis of African political systems, but supposedly centralized states and stateless segmentary lineage systems were the only ones to receive full consideration. Nadel had already distilled the voluminous Eurocentric literature on the theory and philosophy of the state, overburdened as it was with Hegelian growth, to produce a precise empirically oriented and workable definition of the state for anthropologists. Alur society did not fit or even approximate anywhere within the range of the model provided. But the model formulated in 1956 under Alur inspiration was an awkward and cumbersome derivation of Nadel's rather than a clear model in its own right. It would be simpler and better to define the segmentary state as one in which the spheres of ritual suzerainty and political sovereignty do not coincide. The former extends widely towards a flexible, changing periphery. The latter is confined to the central, core domain.
Speaking, Writing, and Authority: Explorations in and from the Kingdom of Taqali
Authors: Ewald Janet
Published: June 2009

Segismundo's services [as notary at the registry office] had, indeed, been admirably suited to the time and place. … He cheerfully registered all the children that ap-peared before him as having been born in the County of Ilheus, State of Bahia, Brazil. … How could one be bothered with such miserable legal details as the exact place and date of a child's birth when one was living dangerously in the midst of gun fights, armed bandits, and deadly ambushes? What did it matter, really, where the little Brazilian about to be registered was born? … He simply took the word of these friendly immigrants and their witnesses—respectable men whose word was worth more than any legal document—and accepted their gifts. … By that venerable hand, on a certain afternoon many years ago, little Nacib [a Syrian immigrant] was turned into a native-born Brazilian.
Hinduism and Scriptural Authority in Modern Indian Law
Authors: Fuller C. J.
Published: June 2009

Contemporary Indian law is, for the most part, palpably foreign in origin or inspiration and it is notoriously incongruent with the attitudes and concerns of much of the population which lives under it. However, the present legal system is firmly established and the likelihood of its replacement by a revised “indigenous” system is extremely small.
The Missionary Syndrome: Crusader and Pacific Northwest Religious Expansionism
Authors: Burns Robert I.
Published: June 2009

The search for medieval parallels and for medieval roots in New World history has become a fascinating genre. My own university has produced one of the major figures in this field, Lynn White, Jr., and has recently honored another, Luis Weckmann. With the Columbus centennial rushing toward us, we may expect more exercises in their spirit. Such an approach is not farfetched or whimsical. We are the heirs of medieval technology and mentalities. In both, as White has reminded us, the United States may be “closer to the Middle Ages than is Europe.“ And the great historian Shelomo Goitein, after spending most of his working life in pre-Nazi Germany and then in Israel, upon moving to the United States was startled to recognize the medieval flavor of our social structures and mentalities; as a lifelong student of the Middle Ages, he found that “one feels quite at home“ here.
Funeral Conflicts in Nineteenth-Century France
Authors: Kselman Thomas
Published: June 2009

The French celebration of the centenary of Victor Hugo's death in 1985 included new editions of his works, biographies, an exhibit at the Grand Palais in Paris, all that you would expect in honor of his life and art. But Hugo's death and funeral also drew the attention of some scholars, and forgood reason. Beginning on 18 May 1885, when what proved to be his final illness was announced, the newspapers were filled with reports and rumors about Hugo's condition. Following his death on 22 May journalists concentrated on what has been called the funeral of the century. Two million peoplecame to see Hugo's body lying in state at the Arc de Triomphe, and anenormous crowd viewed the procession to the Panthe on where he was buried.
Conceptualisations of Women within Australian Egalitarian Thought
Authors: Barham Susan Baggett
Published: June 2009

Both these quotations are products of considered reflection made by men upon the “nature” and place of women within Australian society. Withnell is president of the Perth chapter of the Coffin Cheaters and currently writing a Ph.D. thesis on the “subculture” of biker clubs. Sturgess, a barrister perhaps best known for his prosecution of Lindy Chamberlain in the second inquest into the disappearance of her daughter, at the time of the newspaper article was the one-man commission of inquiry into child abuse in Queensland. Both statements express commonsense Australian cultural understandings of women, which are also available within Australian myths of national identity. My intention in exploring these myths is to elucidate a more complete range of the cultural conceptualisations of women than is provided by these statements and, at the same time, account for the prevalent limited and often negative
Disaggregating the Sexual Division of Labour: A Transatlantic Case Study
Authors: Parr Joy
Published: June 2009

Sexual division has been an obvious and enduring characteristic of wage work, much studied on both sides of the Atlantic. Gender roles, household forms, and community welfare have been made and remade by changing access to paid work. The theoretical literature on gender segregation in the labour force is rich, but economists and feminist theorists have been interested in sexual divisions as general features of the economic or sex/gender system rather than as boundaries between tasks forged in defined contexts by particular clashes of interest. Whether in specifying the social groups that benefited by gender division, the systematic relationships that generated the boundaries, or the traits upon which lines of partition were drawn, most analysts have dealt with gender division as a characteristic of the work force as a whole.
Women and Capitalism: Oppression or Emancipation? A Review Article
Authors: Thomas Janet
Published: June 2009

In the last few years, work in social history and the history of women has centred on the transition to capitalism and the great bourgeois political revolutions—also variously described as industrialization, urbanisation, and modernisation. Throughout this work runs a steady debate about the improvement or deterioration brought about by these changes in the lives of women and working people. On the whole, sociologists of the 1960s and early 1970s and many recent historians have been optimistic about the changes in women's position, while feminist and Marxist scholars have taken a much more gloomy view.1 There has been little debate between the two sides, yet the same opposed arguments about the impact of capitalism on the status of women crop up not only in accounts of Britain from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, but also in work on women in the Third World, and cry out for critical assessment.
History and the Rhetoric of Legitimacy: The Ma Tsu Cult of Taiwan
Authors: Sangren P. Steven
Published: June 2009

Worshippers of the goddess Ma Tsu constitute Taiwan's most encompassing ritual community. The cult's close association with Taiwanese history and cultural identity is well known to Sinological anthropologists. Every year pilgrimage groups (usually organized by local territorial cults) converge on cult centers at Pei-kang, Hsin-kang, Chang-hua, Lu-kang, T'u-ch'eng, and Tainan, among others (see Figure 1). These centers compete actively for cult supremacy, and the arguments invoked in this rivalry are mainly of an historical nature. The question I explore here is, Why is history so important in establishing the authenticity and charisma of this goddess?
National Policy, Agrarian Reform, and the Corporate Community during the Guatemalan Revolution, 1944–1954
Authors: Handy Jim
Published: June 2009

The ‘revolution’ from 1944 to 1954 prompted important changes in rural communities in Guatemala. The extension of many government services to rural areas for the first time, the involvement of political parties in village politics, and the growth of a rural labour federation all altered the political, economic, and social organization of rural Guatemala irrevocably. Changes became even more dramatic and more significant after 1950 with the growth of a national peasant league and the passage of a comprehensive agrarian reform law in 1952. Despite its importance, the changes that came to rural Guatemala with the revolution are not well understood and the shape of the‘revolution in the countryside’continues to be debated.
Export, Die, or Subsidize: The International Political Economy of American Agriculture, 1875–1940
Authors: Lake David A.
Published: June 2009

The agricultural policies of the New Deal persist to the present day and are a particularly important turning point in the history of the American farm sector. In the period from 1875 to 1940, agricultural policy evolved from a strategy of exporting the domestic surplus, to shrinking production through attrition in the farm population, to subsidizing production and restricting acreage. Although rooted in farm demands upon the political process, this evolution was ultimately driven by both foreign demand and the alternative employment opportunities available to American farmers.
Rethinking Colonial Categories: European Communities and the Boundaries of Rule
Authors: Stoler Ann Laura
Published: June 2009

In 1945, Bronislaw Malinowski urged anthropology to abandon what he called its “one-column entries” on African societies and to study instead the “no-man's land of change,” to attend to the “aggressive and conquering” European communities as well as native ones, and to be aware that “European interests and intentions” were rarely unified but more often “at war” (1945:14–15). Four decades later, few of us have heeded his prompting or really examined his claim.
The Aesthetics and Politics of Colonial Collecting: India at World Fairs
Authors: Breckenridge Carol A.
Published: June 2009

In the second half of the nineteenth century, objects from India were repeatedly assembled for display at international exhibitions, known then and now as world fairs. Their transience and ephemerality set world fairs apart as extraordinary phenomena in the world of collecting. They are special because, despite the permanence they imply, they do not last; they come and they go. Their buildings are constructed, and then, by international charter, they are deconstructed. They are also special because they place objects in the service of commerce and in the service of the modern nation—state, with the inevitable imperial encounters that these two forces promote. In doing so, they yoke cultural material with aesthetics, politics and pragmatics.
The Exclusion of Women From Industry in Nineteenth-Century Britain
Authors: Jordan Ellen
Published: June 2009

In 1868, a clergymen told the annual congress of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science that “he had long lived in the town of Liverpool, and had been placed in circumstances there which made him frequently regret that there were no places in which women could find employment. The great want was of employment for every class of women, not only for the higher class, but for those placed in humbler circumstances.” At earlier conferences, however, a number of speakers described the abundant opportunities for female employment in other Lancashire towns. Census figures make it clear that the reason lay in the different industrial bases of these towns.
The Politics of Populism: Germany and the American South in the 1890s
Authors: Peal David
Published: June 2009

A Populist newspaper in North Carolina commented in 1890 that agrarian unrest was common just about everywhere, in “high tariff and low tariff” countries as well as in “monarchies, empires, and republics.” Historians of this discontent have neglected the international dimension of protest that was so striking at the time. The countries that produced the most vigorous agrarian movements, Germany and the United States, have been especially well protected from the scrutiny of comparison. One reason for this neglect is that scholars in both countries emphasize their nations' peculiarities and capacity to make their own histories. The most influential study of American Populism, for instance, is still John D. Hicks' The Populist Revolt (1931). Hicks ascribed the movement to the closure of the frontier, the “safety valve” once thought to be the special feature of American history. Most scholars today reject the “Turner thesis,” but continue to see populism as uniquely democratic. Just as American Populists have been celebrated as “good guys,” German agrarian leaders have been demonized. The marked anti-Semitic aspect of agrarian movements in the 1890s has led historians to link them more or less directly to national socialism, the arguably unique “outcome” of German history. Whatever the sources of this exceptionalism, the constrained view has distorted the understanding of a crucial historical conjuncture.
The Theory of Ethnos and Ethnic Processes in Soviet Social Sciences
Authors: Bromley Julian , Kozlov Viktor
Published: June 2009

The term ethnos or ethnic community has been used in contemporary Soviet literature mainly to denote a human community, referred to in spoken Russian as “a people” (narod). The same term denotes both those peoples who have lagged behind in their development and peoples of highly industrial countries; tribes and nations, small populations (for example, the Hoppi or the Ket) and large ones including millions of people (like the Russians or the Italians). It is used to designate contemporary people as well as those who have vanished with history (for example, the Etruscans or the Scythians); peoples who are territorially compact and those who are dispersed over widely separated areas (for example, the Armenians). The substitution of the term ethnos for the word people was made necessary by the fact that (in Russian and in many other languages) the word “people” has a number of different connotations, and the Russian narod is used to describe not only ethnic communities but also the “toiling masses of people” or simply a large crowd of humans.
Urban Decline and Regional Economies: Brabant, Castile, and Lombardy, 1550–1750
Authors: Lees Lynn Hollen , Hohenberg Paul M.
Published: June 2009

Urban troubles were endemic in early modern Europe. Not only did cities undergo sieges, conquests, and epidemics, but the rapid spread of rural protoindustrial manufacturing threatened established markets and employment patterns. The acute problems of Antwerp, captured by Spanish troops in 1685, or of Como, whose textile industry collapsed in the early seventeenth century are not isolated examples of cities in trouble. Many more could be offered. Indeed, descriptions of cities in the seventeenth century, particularly those of the Spanish Empire, stress depopulation and decay. Contemporaries saw around them scenes of urban desolation. Sir Thomas Overbury, travelling in the Spanish Netherlands around 1610, wrote of the “ruinous” towns, while visitors to Ciudad Real in Spain around 1620 noted vacant, tumbledown houses, unemployment, and urban land gone to waste (Parker 1977:253; Phillips 1979:29). After several years in which Spanish Lombardy was devastated by wars, famine, and plague, the Milan City Council complained of “the destitution of all sorts of persons and the threat of impending ruin.” Moreover, throughout the state, values of houses and landed property had allegedly plummeted (Sella 1979:57,63).
The Cities of Avignon and Worms as Expressions of the European Community
Authors: Heckart Beverly
Published: June 2009

At the end of 1978, the German art critic Walter Frentz, introducing a film and public lecture in the city of Worms, postulated that Europeans could breathe new life into the idea of European unity by devoting greater care and attention to the shape and form of European cities. The theme of his remarks that night specifically encouraged the preservation of historic urban cores, but more striking was his general concept linking the development of the European Community with the treatment of the European city. As a growing literature on architectural symbolism and urban imagery suggests, cities take the shapes that are expressions of a total society, reflecting the spectrum of their political, economic and cultural life. As Europeans rebuilt and developed their cities in the period after World War II, they also charted the course of their unification.
The Nature of Customary Law in the Manor Courts of Medieval England
Authors: Bonfield Lloyd
Published: June 2009

The once well-defended border between legal history and social history has been overrun. The assault has been carried out on two fronts. In part, it occurred through internal subversion by legal historians actually interested in the nature of societies whose laws they studied. The attack has also been launched externally by researchers who persistently employed records generated by the operation of the legal system to shed light upon various aspects of contemporary social structure. This union of interest between disciplines with widely divergent research skills, a phenomenon somewhat similar to what French political commentators have termed cohabitation, has been soundly applauded. Conferences have been convened; journals have been founded; monograph series have been established. All of these have facilitated methodological and substantive dialogue between legal and social historians.
Orientalism, Colonialism, and Legal History: The Attack on Muslim Family Endowments in Algeria and India
Authors: Powers David S.
Published: June 2009

One of the earliest and most highly developed areas of orientalist scholarly production was the study of Islamic law. Modern western investigation of Islamic law emerged during the era of European colonial expansion, and the first studies of the subject were written by citizens of the colonial powers, many of whom had lived in the colonies for extended periods. These men produced the first translations of legal texts, the first studies of individual legal institutions, and the first comprehensive studies of Islamic law, thereby laying the foundations for the modern discipline of Islamic legal history. Surprisingly, students of orientalism have devoted little attention to the colonials'viewsof Islamic law—that is, to the attitudes and assumptions that underlay their writings and interpretations—or to the impact of those views on the development of Islamic legal studies as a discipline.
Macrohistory and Acculturation: Between Myth and History in Modern Melanesian Adjustments and Ancient Gnosticism
Authors: Trompf G. W.
Published: June 2009

Historical consciousness has not been a prized possession in most human cultures, and a sense of a time that considers social affairs to have been developing over several hundreds of years [prior to the present] and by agents ⋯μοουσἱος ⋯μîνx(of essentially the same being as ourselves) is actually a cultural oddity. Most of the thousands of the world's cultures are discrete primal societies—many of them small—that constitute the ethnographic panorama of today. They remind us that there once lay hundreds of more regionally confined, more homogeneous and tribal-oriented human groupings. For such a vast array of societies, however, we simply lack long-term histories.
Mad Mullahs and Englishmen: Discourse in the Colonial Encounter
Authors: Edwards David B.
Published: June 2009

Winston Churchill was winning money at the Goodwood Races when he heard the news that a tribal uprising had broken out on the north-west frontier of India. Within a matter of hours, the young cavalry officer, who was then on home leave from his regiment in Bangalore, booked return passage on the Indian Mail. He also sent off a telegram to an old family friend, General Sir Bindon Blood, who had been appointed to head the column that was being dispatched to relieve the two garrisons at Malakand and Chakdara then under Beige. General Blood had once made a casual promise to Churchill that he would include him in a future campaign, and with this promise in mind Churchill set off for the frontier.
Emergence of Capitalized Family Farms in Latin America
Authors: Llambi Luis
Published: June 2009

The mechanized grain farm of the American Midwest and the Canadian prairies has been the ideological leitmotif of most attempts to modernize agrarian structures during the last century in Latin America. Not only held up as the archetype of efficient farming, the family-sized enterprise has also been taken as model for an egalitarian rural society.
Environmental and Social Change in the Valle del Mezquital, Mexico, 1521–1600
Authors: Melville Elinor G. K.
Published: June 2009

The often disastrous consequences of the introduction of exotic animals into a New World environment are very clearly demonstrated by the sixteenth-century history of the Valle del Mezquital, Mexico. A rapid and profound process of environmental degradation, caused by overstocking and indiscriminate grazing of sheep in the post-conquest era, leads us to ask whether the Spanish always acted in their own long-term interests in the New World.
On the Interpretation of Terrorist Violence: ETA and the Basque Political Process
Authors: Douglass William A. , Zulaika Joseba
Published: June 2009

Political violence, labeled loosely as “terrorism,” is a seemingly ubiquitous factor in twentieth-century world politics. Coping with it has become a major preoccupation of governments and is the object of considerable international cooperation among them. The purpose of this paper is to examine the case of ETA (Euskadi ta Askatasuna or Basque Country and Freedom) within the Basque nationalist movement in order to underscore several of the conceptual weaknesses in the literature on terrorism while also suggesting avenues for future research.
Patronage and Pornography: Ideology and Spectatorship in the Early Marcos Years
Authors: Rafael Vicente L.
Published: June 2009

In the aftermath of the February 1986 “revolution” that forced Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos out of the Philippines, the government of Corazon Aquino turned the presidential palace, Malacañang, into a museum and in doing so meant to put the Marcoses legacy of excess on display. A guidebook on the presidential palace describes one instance of that excessiveness, in which the doors leading to the Grand Staircase are said to have “depict[ed] the Philippine legend of ‘Malakas’ (Strong) and ‘Maganda’ (Beautiful), the first Filipino man and woman who emerged from a large bamboo stalk. Mrs. Marcos liked to think of President Marcos and herself in terms of these legendary First Filipinos.” They identified so thoroughly with this myth that they had portraits of themselves done as Malakas and Maganda in the palace—seminude and emerging from a forest of bamboo stalks (see Plate 1). In 1985 they even commissioned a group of Filipino academics to rewrite the legend that culminated in the celebration of the Marcos regime.
Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World: Perspectives from Indian Historiography
Authors: Prakash Gyan
Published: June 2009

To ask how the “third world writes its own history” appears, at first glance, to be exceedingly naive. At best, it reaffirms the East–West and Orient–Occident oppositions that have shaped historical writings and seems to be a simple-minded gesture of solidarity. Furthermore, in apparently privileging the writings of historians with third-world origins, this formulation renders such scholars into “native informants” whose discourse is opened up for further disquisitions on how “they” think of “their” history. In short, the notion of the third world writing its own history seems to reek of essentialism. Seen in another way, this formulation can be construed as positing that the third world has a fixed space of its own from which it can speak in a sovereign voice. For many, this notion of a separate terrain is rendered problematic by the increasing rapidity and the voracious appetite with which the postmodern culture imperializes and devours spaces.
The Formation of the Russian National Identity: The Role of Status Insecurity and Ressentiment
Authors: Greenfeld Liah
Published: June 2009

This paper is a part of a much larger study in comparative historical sociology addressing the question of the emergence and initial development of the related phenomena that may be subsumed under the umbrella term “nationalism”: national identity, national consciousness, and political collectivities based on such an identity and consciousness—nations. This larger project focuses on the five societies that were among the very first to define themselves as nations—England, the United States of America, France, Germany, and Russia—and examines the social bases of national identity, its embodiment in and perpetuation through institutional arrangements and patterns of culture, and its transformation in the process of diffusion from one culture to another.
Roman and Modern Imperialism: A Reassessment
Authors: Miles Gary B.
Published: June 2009

Those who view Rome from the perspective of modern empires have been struck by Rome's longevity (for example, Brunt 1965:267; Doyle 1986:81–103; Syme 1958:1). Attempts to explain this phenomenon, however, have given little if any consideration to why movements of national independence have occurred in modern times, but not in Roman antiquity. This is the more striking inasmuch as nationalist rebellions against imperial rule typically accompanied the dissolution of direct imperial control over native populations during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Certainly the decisions of modern imperialists to give up their empires have been influenced by political idealism or by calculations of economic self-interest unique to their historical situations (Liithy 1964:34). Nonetheless, the role of their subjects must also be taken into consideration, because it was the initiative of the colonial natives, not that of the imperial masters, that typically has resulted in the first calls for independence and, most often, in the nationalist rebellions that provoked imperialists into dismantling their empires. Idealistic impulses and calculations of economic self-interest alike have taken place within the context of that initiative and cannot help but to have been colored by it. It would be a mistake to identify nationalist sentiment and rebellion as the only reasons for the collapse of modern empires, but they must be included among the decisive reasons.
Social Anthropology and Two Contrasting Uses of Tribalism in Africa
Authors: Ekeh Peter P.
Published: June 2009

A remarkable feature of African studies has been the sharp discontinuities in the characterization of transitions in African history and society from one era to another. Thus, for an important example, colonialism has rarely been related to the previous era of the slave trade in the analysis of any dominant socioeconomic themes in Africa. Such discontinuity is significant in one important strand of modern African studies: The transition from the lore and scholarship of colonial social anthropology to postcolonial forms of African studies has been stalled into a brittle break because its central focus on the “tribe” has been under attack. Social anthropology gained strength through its analysis of the tribe and its associated concepts of kin groups and kinship behaviors in colonial Africa. However, following criticisms of the mission and manners of social anthropology by postindependence African scholars and politicians, and a brave reexamination of the conceptual problems of their discipline, social anthropologists more or less agreed to abandon the use of thetribeand of its more obvious derivativetribalismwith respect to Africa.
“Uneasy Lies the Head”: Politics, Economics, and the Continuity of Belief among Yoruba of Nigeria
Authors: Dixon P.J.
Published: June 2009

Traditionally a considerable gap has existed between social anthropologists, on the one hand, and political scientists and historians, on the other, in their analysis of events. Archetypically, social anthropologists have concentrated upon enduring social structure and have tended to steer clear of more recent events in the society under study; yet this suggests that the anthropologist is avoiding the question of how the social structure that he enshrines in the ethnographic present is derived. ‘Social structure’ is a composite of the anthropologist's own observation of native behaviour and native exegesis, the latter in turn being the result of a dialectic between their (the indigenous people's) present perception of events and their idea (or image) of what their society has traditionally been and perhaps ought to be. This is particularly so in those societies that, in Lévi-Strauss' words (1966a:233–4) seek “by the institutions they give themselves, to annul the possible effects of historical factors upon their equilibrium and continuity in a quasi-automatic fashion,” that is, in those societies in which “their image of themselves is an essential part of their reality.”
Response to Yelvington
Authors: Bentley G. Carter
Published: June 2009

In his challenge to the validity and utility of my argument in “Ethnicity and Practice” (CSSH 29:1, 24–55), Yelvington raises a number of issues. He notes, for instance, that I did not, in that article, offer a specific definition of ethnicity, although I did consistently refer to ethnicity as descent symbolism and as fictive kinship. Indeed, I believe ethnicity is, at base, a claim to common identity based on putative shared descent. Wherever we find an “ethnic” category or group of people, we will also find a myth that they all originated in some primordial person, place, or event. Membership in the category or group is validated by pointing to some set of attributes, usually overt culture traits, the members believe they share in common. Given Yelvington's concluding paragraph, it appears we generally agree on what ethnicity is, if not on how to explain it.
Protecting Peasants from Capitalism: The Subordination of Javanese Traders by the Colonial State
Authors: Alexander Jennifer , Alexander Paul
Published: June 2009

Colonial Java represents the paradigmatic case of an ethnically stratified economy. The Dutch controlled large-scale agricultural production and processing and the sale of these products in European markets. They also monopolised the import of European manufactured commodities, such as cloth. The Javanese provided labour for the cultivation and processing of export crops, maintaining themselves by subsistence farming and subsidiary occupations, such as petty trading and handicrafts. The Chinese linked the other two groups, providing supervisors and skilled workers in export agriculture, bulking peasant crops for interregional trade and export to other Asian countries, and wholesaling the imported and manufactured commodities that the Javanese required. Although ethnic monopoly of economic function was never quite this absolute, the basic hierarchical structure was only momentarily threatened in the mid-1930s, when the Japanese began importing their own commodities and selling them in their own stores to challenge the position of both the Dutch and the Chinese (Cator 1936:75–7; Liem 1947:66).
The Evolution of Common-Field Agriculture in the Andes: A Hypothesis
Authors: Godoy Ricardo
Published: June 2009

Similar forms of subsistence and social organization have emerged in different parts of the world in response to similar ecological, technological, and demographic factors. For example, moldboard plow agriculture evolved in many places as the result of high population density, availability of large domesticable animals, presence of wet and heavy soils, and such staples as wheat, barley, rye, and buckwheat, which required extensive land preparation and “considerable surface area to produce the food calories necessary to feed a family” (Pryor 1985:732). Wolf long ago (1957) noted that the colonial experience had helped to promote the development of closed, corporate communities in rural societies of Mesoamerica and Indonesia.
Kinship and Contract: Property Transmission and Family Relations in Northwestern Portugal
Authors: Brettell Caroline B.
Published: June 2009

In 1886 Emile Zola published La Terre (The Earth), a novel about peasant life in nineteenth-century France. In that novel, the peasant-proprietor Fduan, aware that he has reached an age at which he can no longer farm his own property, decides to divide it among his three children. Monsieur Baillehache, the notary before whom they all appear to legalize the transaction, feels that it is his duty to “make the usual comments.”