bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Diffusion of Innovations in Early Modern Europe
Authors: Cipolla Carlo M.
Published: June 2009

In recent years the study of the ‘Diffusion of Innovations’ has become a very fashionable subject. Everett M. Rogers stressed the fact that his book on the ‘Diffusion of Innovations’ was based on 506 diffusion studies published in the last decades. Of course quantity is not necessarily synonymous with quality and brilliant ideas are not a function of the number of titles printed. The first of the major conclusions reached by Rogers after perusing the 506 diffusion studies is that ‘innovativeness of individuals is related to a modern rather than a traditional orientation’. One may doubt whether such an extraordinary conclusion was worth the input of energy and goodwill that allegedly went into its production, but there is no doubt that innovations and their diffusion are a topic of major relevance in the study of social development. Innovations are to history what mutations are to biology. Actually, innovations show a remarkable tendency to cluster in time and space, and this incidentally suggests that attention should not be devoted exclusively to the eccentric individual genius of the innovators, but should also be extended to the anonymous forces of the environment.
Aqiili Agha: The Strongman in the Ethnic Relations of the Ottoman Galilee
Authors: Zenner Walter P.
Published: June 2009

The quest for information about a historical figure in this study is part of a larger research into the interethnic relationships among the different groups of Arabs in Galilee: peasants and nomads, Muslims, Christians, and Druzes.1 This paper on a strongman who dominated the Galilee for nearly thirty years is written out of a conviction that in his life-history we can see the dynamics of group relations in his time and that his biography is comparable to those of similar figures in other parts of the world.
Comment: The Uses of Reminiscence
Authors: Gutmann David
Published: June 2009

Like Dr. Zenner, I have carried out field research in the Galilean region of Israel, and like him have had to rely mainly on older respondents—in my case, exclusively Druze—for basic data. But where Dr. Zenner is an anthropologist with historical interests, I am a psychologist; as such, my thoughts on the kinds of materials that we both collected may provide a worthwhile complement to his. Faced with the fact that memories of Aqiili Agha continue to echo through the Galilee long after his death, the historical scholar asks, ‘what manner of man engendered these accounts?’ while the psychologist asks, ‘why do these memories persist, and in what ways are these memories distorted by the same motives that keep them alive?’. Accordingly, Dr. Zenner uses his subjects as informants on an historic figure, Aqiili Agha, a person external to themselves. As a psychologist I use equivalent materials, from a similar respondent group, as
projective data.
Charismatic Leadership in Islam: The Mahdi of the Sudan
Authors: Dekmejian Richard H. , Wyszomirski Margaret J.
Published: June 2009

It is generally acknowledged that the contemporary revival of Weber's concept of charismatic authority was prompted by its utility in explaining the revolutionary movements of the first half of the twentieth century. The more recent applications of the concept to the study of leadership in the emerging non-Western states, constituted yet another revival, testifying to the analytical power of Weber's conceptual scheme.
Modernization and Development: the Role of Regional Elites and Noncorporate Groups in the European Mediterranean
Authors: Schneider Peter , Schneider Jane , Hansen Edward
Published: June 2009

This paper is about social change in underdeveloped areas. It is based on field work in the European Mediterranean between 1965 and 1967. Hansen worked in the wine and champagne district of Villafranca del Panadés, roughly 30 miles from Barcelona, in Catalonia. The Schneiders were in the wheat and pastoral latifundium zone of Western Sicily. The two regions exhibit quite different patterns of land use and tenure, social stratification and settlement. We were struck, however, by two characteristics which they shared. First, we found a plethora of noncorporate social structures (for the most part coalitions) which organized fundamental economic and political activities of a quite modern sort. In rural Catalonia, coalitions of businessmen, skilled workers and government functionaries are formed within the context of an emergent bar culture, centered in major towns like Villafranca. In Western Sicily, until quite recently, the locus of similar coalitions was the latifundium. As yet, no clearly defined urban tradition has replaced this predominantly rural one
Precolonial Markets in Bunyoro-Kitara
Authors: Uzoigwe G. N.
Published: June 2009

One of the weaknesses of students of African development studies has been their inability to speak in the idiom of Africans. Anthropologists, despite their often magnificent contributions of earlier times in the field of ethnography must find a new role in the present state of African studies. The tendency to conceive precolonial developments in Africa in terms of primitivity, tribality, and feudality, has conveyed the erroneous impression that Africa is characterized by the static nature of its past. In other words, the dynamics of the growth of African societies has traditionally not been their concern. Unfortunately, the African historian who should have been particularly concerned with this aspect of study has, until recently, proved to be of little help. He has first to win the battle of African history, the mopping up operations of which are still going on. But he, too, must now realize that a history of specifically political developments is an anachronism: precolonial Africa had no clear-cut distinction between the political, the economic, and the social. To be meaningful, history must be conceived in its totality. Finally, the economist seems to speak least in the idiom of theAfrican. It is ‘fashionable’ for him, it has been pointed out, to assume that ‘the African economy’ ought not to work in a basically dissimilar fashion from ‘the Western economy’ and that something is wrong with it if it does. The problem of the African economist, then, is that of relevance, a problem that has to be satisfactorily solved if his readiness to offer his services as the specialist ‘doctor’ of African economic problems is to be taken seriously.
The ‘Provincial Party’ and the Megalopolises: London, Paris, and New York, 1850–1910
Authors: Yearley C. K.
Published: June 2009

The venerable but underdeveloped assumption that modern urbanization is comprehensible in terms of social struggles for control of great cities' dominant institutions and its corollary that these struggles, in turn, helped shape further urbanization may still bear fruitful suggestions. Abundant evidence, moreover, makes exploration of this proposition eminently feasible in respect to London, Paris, and New York while as the foremost of the world's megalopolises they were acquiring their modern technical and social characteristics between the 1850s and, let us say, 1910. Notwithstanding the uniqueness of many developments in each of them, the complex social conflicts and the roughly similar climates of opinion often marking their evolutions, encourage certain comparisons among them. Such comparisons, hopefully, may illuminate some of the lingering consequences of the megalopolitan middle classes having to protect their new power not only against the potentialities of the working classes but also against the forces of provincialism operative inside as well as outside of their urban bailiwicks.
Patterns of Religious Reformations
Authors: Shapiro Sheldon
Published: June 2009

It is an historical truism that the Reformation of the sixteenth century consisted of a unique series of events. What we don't always realize, however, is that this series of events was itself one member of a class of historical phenomena. The most direct approach to elucidating this proposition is to start with the most obvious characteristic of Luther's teaching, his emphasis on salvation through faith. It is not generally recognized that this idea can be found in other religions and that it developed in those, as it did in Europe, in reaction to religious ideas which stressed works and subtle theological knowledge as the road to salvation.
Purdah: Separate Worlds and Symbolic Shelter
Authors: Papanek Hanna
Published: June 2009

Purdah, meaning curtain, is the word most commonly used for the system of secluding women and enforcing high standards of female modesty in much of South Asia. Purdah is an important part of the life experience of many South Asians, both Muslim and Hindu, and is a central feature of the social systems of the area. The crucial characteristic of the purdah system is its limitation on interaction between women and males outside certain well-defined categories, which differ among Muslims and Hindus. Muslim purdah restrictions do not apply within the immediate kin unit,but only outside it, while Hindu purdah is based on a set of avoidance rules between a woman and her male affines. Muslim seclusion begins at puberty, Hindu seclusion strictly speaking begins with marriage.
Costume and Identity
Authors: Kuper Hilda
Published: June 2009

Clothing is a bundle of cultural symbols that has been dealt withsomewhat eclectically and indiscriminately in the anthropological wash.Some writers have speculated on the origins of clothing, stressing suchqualities in human nature as modesty and vanity; others, more materiallyoriented, have emphasized utility; others again have listed separategarments, the materials of which they were made, and the techniquesemployed; and some have paid attention to broader historical and sociological dimensions. In a pioneering study, Kroeber used documentary evidence to correlate fluctuations in women's fashions (using indices of skirt length, width of waist, and depth of decolletage) with major social and political upheavals (Kroeber, 1919, 1940), but perhaps because of the nature of his data, as well as his particular orientation, he made no reference to the persons involved, and overlooked internal cultural variations and conflicts of style. These issues received more attention from scholars trained in the Malinowski tradition of fieldwork, and they described clothing worn by different persons in different situations; those who worked in areas where people of different cultures were brought in contact in the colonial situation indicated the meaning of changes in style of clothing over time. General textbooks draw attention to the correlation between clothing and social status and to such facts as the cost of clothing, its technology and its aesthetics.
Fascism, Industrialism and Socialism: The Case of Italy
Authors: Szymanski Albert
Published: June 2009

The correlation between socialism and industrialism was found to be. 30. Thus, there is a small positive correlation between the two factors. That is, socialism tends to occur most strongly in industrial areas; however, the relation is not especially strong.

The correlation between socialism and fascism as measured by violence per 100,000 population was found to be. 55. Thus there is a fairly strongest.
Comparing Household Structure Over Time and Between Cultures
Authors: Hammel E. A. , Laslett Peter
Published: June 2009

Because of the importance of the family and household in all societies and at all historical periods, it is essential to be able to make comparisons between varieties of domestic groups. If we wish to comment on the extent to which the household is affected by social change and especially by the process of modernization, industrialization, social mobilization, or whatever that vague but ubiquitous phenomenon is called, it must be clear what would consitute such change. This means knowing how domestic group structure differs from country to country as well as from period to period.
Elites and Noncorporate Groups in the European Mediterranean: a Reconsideration of the Catalan Case
Authors: Pi-Sunyer Oriol
Published: June 2009

In a recent article in this journal, Peter Schneider, Jane Schneider and Edward Hansen (1972) examine the role of regional elites and noncorporate groups in the European Mediterranean and proceed to elaborate a model that should allow us to understand more clearly the dynamics of social and economic change in underdeveloped peripheral regions. The two areas which they have selected for detailed consideration, and which consequently form the empirical basis for a model of broader applicability, are Western Sicily and Catalonia. Sicily I know only from the literature, but my impression is that it can more realistically be regarded as an underdeveloped peripheral region with the structural attributes described and analyzed by the authors. Catalonia, though, is a different matter, and it is to the Catalan case that I will be addressing myself.
Local Government in Portuguese America: A Study in Cultural Divergence
Authors: Russell-Wood A. J. R.
Published: June 2009

The expansion of Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries had brought Europeans, primarily English, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, and French, into contact with the lands, peoples and civilizations of Africa, Asia and the Americas. In Asia the effects of the European discoveries had been less far-reaching than had been the case in Africa and the Americas where barter had soon given way to slavery, peaceful proselitization to forced conversion, trade and commerce to extortion and monopolies, and coexistence to armed domination by the European intruders. Whereas in New France, Brazil, and the British colonies agricultural and commerical considerations had predominated, in counterdistinction to Spanish America where the initial emphasis had been militaristic, nevertheless the results of European settlement had been remarkably similar throughout the Americas.
From Autonomous Development to Dependent Modernization: The Catalan Case Revisited: A Reply to Pi-Sunyer
Authors: Hansen Edward , Schneider Jane , Schneider Peter
Published: June 2009

In a recent essay in CSSH (16:1) Oriol Pi-Sunyer has joined in debate with our article ‘Modernization and Development…’ (CSSH 14:3). The thrust of his critique is that our model of social change in the Western Mediterranean leads us inexorably to lump Sicily and Catalonia together with respect to general social and economic developments since World War II. He argues in terms of modernization theory that Catalans long ago developed industry and have always shown a propensity to organize in corporate groups whenever the central government gives them the opportunity to do so. In short, our model is lacking in ‘time depth and political sensitivity’ (pp. 128–9) since it puts the Catalans in the same class as the Sicilians. We wish here to demonstrate that (1) in our article we discussed the differences between Sicily and Catalonia in much the same way that Pi-Sunyer did in his critique; (2) that, in fact, Sicily and Catalonia have undergone similar processes of social change since World War II, in ways that threaten the historical continuity of these societies, both formed over centuries; and (3) that Pi-Sunyer's misreading of our materials is due to his unfortunate confusion of modernization with development, which is precisely what we tried to get away from in our essay.
Tradition/Modernity: An Ideal Type Gone Astray
Authors: Shiner L. E.
Published: June 2009

In a recent essay in this journal Dean C. Tipps subjected the tradition/ modernity concept to a thorough ideological and empirical critique and concluded that the time has come to get rid of it. Although his ideological and empirical analyses were convincing, the methodological remarks at the end of the essay were incomplete. If the contention that we should no longer attempt to revise the tradition/modernity concept is to stick, compelling methodological grounds must be given since ideological bias and empirical inadequacy can in principle be corrected. I want to show that in so far as the tradition/modernity concept is an ideal type, efforts to make it better ‘fit’ the spread of empirical data are in principle wrong. Moreover, efforts to transform the concept into an empirical ranking device or a classificatory system are open to equally serious objections. In order to do this I will first clarify the nature and function of ideal types, empirical types and classification systems.
Peasants and Political Mobilization: Introduction
Authors: Wolf Eric R.
Published: June 2009

In the present issue, and the one to follow, Comparative Studies has brought together a set of papers which address themselves, in various ways, to the understanding of how peasants come to take part in political mobilization, and how they are affected by such participation. It is thus the intention of the editors to contribute further to the ongoing discussion, in history and the social sciences, about the nature and characteristics of peasantry. This discussion has a secure and venerable genealogy in continental Europe: relevant names which come to mind are those of the Frenchman Le Play, the German Riehl, and the Russian Vasil'chakov. Something of this rich legacy reached North American sociology through the influence of the Polish sociologist Florian Znaniecki. But in the United States the interest in peasantry remained marginal, until it took root in anthropology, primarily through the efforts of Robert Redfield. Drawing on the legacy of Maine, Durkheim, Tönnies, and of the German-influenced urban sociologists at the University of Chicago, Redfield elaborated the concept of ‘the folk society’, possessed of a distinctive ‘folk culture’.
Toward a Comparative Study of Revolutions
Authors: Hermassi Elbaki
Published: June 2009

Revolutions have been studied for many different reasons—some involving the scholarly task of understanding the transformations of societies, and some involving the pragmatic problems of promoting or preventing revolution. However, the contributions to the study of either orientation and of the social sciences as a whole remain quite unimpressive. Analytical talent and availability of information are not in question here. On the contrary, few fields in social science have produced a comparable array of theories and findings. Some practitioners are even asking how the embarrassment of riches can be reduced: a veiled recognition that perhaps something has gone wrong.
The Retention of Caste Notions Among the Indian Immigrants in British Guiana During the Nineteenth Century
Authors: Moore Brian L.
Published: June 2009

Indian immigration into the West Indies generally during the nineteenthcentury, and in particular to British Guiana, forms a small portion of migrationmovements from one area to another in the world during thatperiod. But in terms of West Indian societies, this immigration representeda major influx and so had significant social effects, especially inBritish Guiana and in Trinidad. By 1917 when the system was terminated some 429,286 Indians had been introduced into the West Indies since 1838, of which 238,909 went to British Guiana, and 143,939 to Trinidad.
The Historiography of Scientific Medicine: An Invitation to the Human Sciences
Authors: Figlio Karl
Published: June 2009

It is clear from the title that this paper has an historiographical emphasis, one which might seem naive to the professional historian, but one which is not at all so naive to the historian of science or medicine. For me, these disciplines should speak to the present; my aim is to direct our attention to the failure of the history of medicine in this respect, and to suggest possible linkages with the human sciences, whose energies are so directed. I do not mean that its subject matter must be drawn from contemporary events—sometimes the very foreignness of the past allows an encapsulation of a situation which gives a clearer view both of the constraints operative within it, and of the unities underlying apparent diversity. This clarity can then encourage a more perceptive reflexion back to the present.
The Glut of Doctors in Mid-Nineteenth-Century France
Authors: Sussman George D.
Published: June 2009

The history of the professions in the West since the French Revolution is a success story, a triumph, but not always an easy one. From the beginning of the nineteenth century in continental Europe the professions had a great attraction as careers presumably open to talent, but the demand for professional services developed more slowly than interest in professional careers and more slowly than the schools that supplied the market. Lenore O'Boyle has drawn attention to this discrepancy and the revolutionary potential of the frustrated careerists produced by it.
A Comparative Study of French and British Decolonization
Authors: Smith Tony
Published: June 2009

Despite the historical significance of European decolonization after the Second World War, there has been no serious interpretive account of it as an overall process. A number of excellent case studies exist analyzing specific policies or periods in the imperial capitals or in the colonial territories, and there are several chronologically complete surveys of the decline of European rule overseas. These have neither been directed nor followed, however, by studies attempting to conceptualize synthetically the entire period. In default of a wide-ranging debate over the character of decolonization as an historical movement, a kind of conventional wisdom has grown up attributing the differences in the British and French experiences to a combination of their respective imperial traditions and the governing abilities of their domestic political institutions. As yet, there has been no systematic attempt to separate carefully the chief variables to be analyzed, to assign them weights of relative importance, and to coordinate them in an historical and comparative manner. This essay hopes to open discussion of these questions.
Woman's Place: A Critical Review of Anthropological Theory
Authors: Rogers Susan Carol
Published: June 2009

Primitive societies and barbarous societies and the historical societies of Europe and the East exhibit almost every conceivable variety of institutions, but in all of them, regardless of the form of social structure, men are always in the ascendancy, and this is perhaps the more evident the higher the civilization … so far as I can see, it is a plain matter of fact that it is so. Feminists have indeed said that this is because women have always been denied the opportunity of taking the lead; but we would still have to ask how it is that they have allowed the opportunity to be denied them …
Domination and Containment: An Approach to Modernization
Authors: Smith Dennis
Published: June 2009

This paper is built upon the assumption that modernization consists of processes of structural transformation which tend to increase both the resource-producing or energy-producing capacity of a social configuration and the extent to which this capacity may be realized and coordinated by strategic elites. There are a number of qualifications. For example, modernization involves an increase in resources or energy producedand/oran increase in the extent to which such resources are channelled into the hands of groups such as capitalist entrepreneurs and state officials. In the short run, rapid increases may occur in either of these aspects while the other remains relatively stable. ‘Resources’ and ‘energies’ are terms broadly interpreted to include the enthusiasms and allegiances of a population experiencing profound alterations in the conditions of its existence, the fruits of colonial expansion and frontier exploration, and the outcomes of scientific research and technological innovation. A proportion of resources is likely to be drawn from outside the national polity (for example through colonial receipts or ‘development aid’); a proportion is also likely to beappliedoutside this polity (as in warfare and commercial activity).
The Class Situation of the Arab National Minority in Israel
Authors: Rosenfeld Henry
Published: June 2009

This is a study in political anthropology. The feudal-bourgeois characteristics of the groups which dominated the Arab national movement and the socialist workers'ideology that was central to Zionism in Palestine during most years of the British mandate are discussed briefly. The main part of the study analyzes the circumstances underlying the rise of a new Arab class formation and the meaning of a struggle for minority rights within Israel where the state employs political and other means, and ideological mystifications, in order to deny the implications of this Arab class and national reality.
Working Class Birth Control in Wilhelmine Germany
Authors: Neuman R. P.
Published: June 2009

In his recent study,The Decline of Fertility in Germany, 1871–1939, John Knodel shows that in about two generations the ‘overall fertility declined by 60 percent, marital fertility by 65 percent, and illegitimate fertility by 54 percent.’ Given the facts that a greater percentage of women of child-bearing ages than ever before were married during this period, and that illegitimate births never counted for more than 10 percent of the total births, Knodel concludes that the decline was mainly due to a reduction of marital fertility. This decline became apparent in the 1870s and was already pronounced enough to be a matter of concern for a variety of sociologists, demographers, and physicians in the decades immediately before the First World War. One of the reasons for this contemporary concern sprang from the belief that the secular decline in fertility indicated that birth control, hitherto presumably limited to the effete French and to rather small numbers of German middle class and professional families, was now being practiced with a marked degree of success by large numbers of German working class families. In the minds of many nationalistic demographers, what had been the private vice of the publicly virtuous now threatened to become a mass phenomenon with potentially disastrous results.
Levi-Strauss and the Buddhists
Authors: Strenski Ivan
Published: June 2009

This is by no means the first attempt to link Levi-Strauss with Buddhist thought. It is my purpose to make it, however, the most thorough and least eccentric comparison to date. I want to set the record straight about the nature and significance of Buddhist parallels in the thought of Claude Levi-Strauss.
Household Composition and Headship as Related to Changes in Mode of Production: São Paulo 1765 to 1836
Authors: Kuznesof Elizabeth Anne
Published: June 2009

The relationship of household and family organization to changes in the larger economy (e.g., commercialization, industrialization) has long fascinated and baffled scholars. Data that specifically link the household and/or family unit to economic change have proved elusive, and most studies do little more than note temporal crosscultural coincidences of demographic and residential characteristics with those of economic development. The means by which the household interacted with the economy, what the patterns of interaction were and how they were determined in a given time and place are significant questions which are seldom addressed. Even less accessible are the changes in the dynamics of household organization in conjunction with economic development in terms of informal economic and social exchanges and household and family formation.
History and Anthropology: The State of Play
Authors: Cohn Bernard S.
Published: June 2009

This paper is an exploration of two models, “Anthropologyland” and “Historyland,” which exist in the practices and minds of anthropologists and historians. It is about how particular forms of knowledge are created, written and spoken about. It is about what historians and anthropologists do and say they do.
The Resolution of Conflicts Through Territorial Partition: The Palestine Experience
Authors: Klieman Aaron S.
Published: June 2009

One finds partition often mentioned but rarely discussed in any detail by authors of texts on world politics. Denned as the act of dividing into two or more units an area previously forming a single administrative entity, partition is firmly anchored in both the theory and practice of international statesmanship. Modern diplomatic history offers a classic illustration in the repeated partitioning of Poland in the late eighteenth century. More recent instances of territorial division are Ireland (1920), Germany and Korea (1945), India (1947) and Indochina (1954). Reinforcement for such political arrangements, moreover, derives from the teachings and insights of bargaining theory, negotiating strategies, crisis management and conflict resolution with their primary emphasis upon compromise. Partition is thus presented as being a traditional and accepted method for terminating disputes outstanding among nations without recourse to war.
Brother-Sister Marriage in Roman Egypt
Authors: Hopkins Keith
Published: June 2009

A Favourable Horoscope: ‘If a son is born when the Sun is in the terms of Mercury, he will be successful and have great power … He will be brave and tall and will acquire property and moreover will be married to his own sister and will have children by her.’
Landscape and World View: The Survival of Yucatec Maya Culture Under Spanish Conquest
Authors: Clendinnen Inga
Published: June 2009

The religions of contemporary Middle American Indian communities fall neatly enough under the descriptive category we call ‘syncretic’. Myths and rituals, integrated experiences for the participant believers, betray to the outside observer their Spanish and Indian antecedents. This indicates a methodology of analysing the ongoing flow of religious life into its smallest constituent parts—colours and gestures, sacred objects and sacred locations, the structure and language of invocations—the more precisely to identify the ingredients of the ‘mixed’ religion we see being lived out. When enquiry moves to the process of imposition and selection by which the mix was initiated, in the early days of Spanish-Indian contact, the same familiar methodology lies ready to hand: Spanish Catholicism, and what is known of the traditional Indian religion, can be analysed into elements, those elements arranged in parallel, and the likely ease of transferance inferred, being judged to be the highest where a match seems good and where evidence from the ethnographic present appears to offer confirmation.
A Century and One-half of American Epitaphs (1660–1813): Toward the Study of Collective Attitudes about Death
Authors: Vovelle Michel
Published: June 2009

The history of collective attitudes about death, a branch of the newhistory of mentalités, was until recently considered a speciality, or even acuriosity that was peculiarly French, or so at least, E. Le Roy Laduriewrote with reference to the work of Philippe Aries, Francois Lebrun and myself in his Territory of the Historian.
Cults of Saints in the Churches of Central Paris
Authors: Wilson Stephen
Published: June 2009

Cults of saints in traditional rural society or in European societies of thepast have been studied by scholars in various disciplines.1 But lessattention has been paid to such cults in modern urban settings, where theyare also an important part of ‘popular’ Catholicism, and an example of thecontinuing vigour of ‘popular’ or ‘folk’ culture in industrial society.
Sacred Symbol and Sacred Space in Rural India: Community Mobilization in the “Anti-Cow Killing” Riot of 1893
Authors: Yang Anand A.
Published: June 2009

The course of events leading up to 1947, when independence and partition came to the Indian subcontinent, has colored retrospectiveassessments of Hindu-Muslim relations in many perceptible ways.Polarities in religion and culture receive inordinate attention as theharbingers of the great divide yet to come, as do political developments asturning points in the eventual separate destinies of many Hindus and Muslims in South Asia.
Sacred Symbol as Mobilizing Ideology: The North Indian Search for a“Hindu” community
Authors: Freitag Sandria B.
Published: June 2009

Always have Indians identified themselves by their caste, by theirancestral village: “Our family were Khatris from the West Punjabcountryside.” “Murud, at one time a fairly prosperous village, is mynative place.” In the late nineteenth century, however, an important new process of forging group identities which transcended these local attributions came to characterize South Asian social history. This was in part prompted by the efforts of an alien British administration to identify the constituent units in Indian society. Drawing on European historical experience, the administrators applied the collective labels "Hindu" and "Muslim" to groups who were far from homogeneous communities.
Contradictions between the Sacred and the Secular Life: The Church Missionary Society in Ukaguru, Tanzania, East Africa, 1876–1914
Authors: Beidelman Thomas O.
Published: June 2009

This essay discusses some beliefs and activities of the Church Missionary Society (CMS), a missionary body of Evangelicals in the Church of England, as its members attempted to found and expand missionary work in Ukaguru, an area inhabited by the Kaguru people about one hundred and fifty miles inland in east-central Tanzania. In the nineteenth century, Ukaguru lay on the most frequented caravan route used to reach the great interlacustrine kingdoms of Uganda. Initial contact with the Kaguru was made in 1876 by CMS members en route to Buganda. Although CMS work in East Africa was concentrated in Uganda and coastal and highland Kenya, a minor station in Ukaguru was established in 1878, in part as a rest-stop for those proceeding inland but also to save souls.
Evangelical Rhetoric and the Transformation of Traditional Culture in Papua New Guinea
Authors: Schieffelin Edward L.
Published: June 2009

One night five years after completing my first field work I had a disturbing dream. In it I returned to my original field site in the Bosavi region of Papua New Guinea to discover that the vast tropical forest with its patches of gardens and isolated longhouses had disappeared. In its place was a sprawling development with rows of tract houses, paved roads, and motels. The whole was dominated by an impressive mission complex with airstrip, schools, dormatories, and a huge church.
The Organization of Households in Adabraka: Toward a Wider Comparative Perspective
Authors: Sanjek Roger
Published: June 2009

Households everywhere are staging areas for social life: places where individuals sleep, store personal belongings, and refurbish themselves, physically and psychologically, for the day ahead. The fire and simple shelter of the Australian Mardudjara (Tonkinson 1978), the sections within farming compounds of the Ghanaian Tallensi (Fortes 1949a), and the rooms in Manhattan hotels rented by poor, elderly, or mentally disturbed men and women (Sokolovskyet al.1978) are each examples of this basic aspect of household life. How then should households be compared in order to understand the ways in which ethnographic cases differ?
Sexual Language and Human Conflict in Old French Fabliaux
Authors: White Sarah Melhado
Published: June 2009

French literature has specialized, almost since its beginning, in accounts of eroticism and courtship. During the twelfth century, Northern romance and Southern lyric described an idealized heterosexuality and its role in honing the aristocratic individual. In the thirteenth century, a new genre appeared that dealt with sexual encounter in more materialistic terms. The new form, the fabliau, added to literary language a vocabulary of vulgarisms from the spoken vernacular. At the same time, it gave European literature a new theme: sexuality that betokens not personal fulfillment, but rivalrous interpersonal struggle.
Preservation of Jewish Ethnic Identity in Yemen: Segregation and Integration as Boundary Maintenance Mechanisms
Authors: Katzir Yael
Published: June 2009

This essay examines the sociocultural mechanisms which preserved the Jewish ethnic identity in Yemen over the centuries. The Jewish community of Yemen existed continuously as an ethnic minority for over 1,500 years, dating back to the mid-fifth century and ending with the establishment of the state of Israel, when the Jews were declared persona non grata by the Yemeni government and were forced to leave en masse in 1948 (Ratzaby 1978).
Achievement, Discrimination, and Mexican Americans
Authors: Surace Samuel J.
Published: June 2009

Overwhelming evidence from many sources, which covers diverse periods and aspects of life, suggests that the record of status attainment of Mexican Americans is unique among national groups in the United States. The variety of theoretical perspectives which has been used to explain the pattern of progress experienced by various national groups is not helpful in explaining why Mexican Americans depart from this pattern.
State, Dependency, and Nationalism: Revolutionary Mexico, 1924–1928
Authors: Tardanico Richard
Published: June 2009

The domestic and global forces that shaped Mexico's revolutionary struggle of 1910–17 continued to shape its state-building conflicts during the 1920s.Recent revisionist historiography underscores this point by emphasizing the bitter irony of the Mexican revolution. This literature contends that, despite the revolution's populist and nationalist aura, by the late 1920s it had done little more than subordinate the masses to an even more centralized state and deepen Mexico's dependence on United States governmental and capital interests. The revisionists argue, then, that the revolution had basically reinforced the country's old regime legacies and created a more institutionalized version of the Porfiriato's authoritarian state.
Who Is the Church? Conflict in a Polish Immigrant Parish in Late Nineteenth-Century Detroit
Authors: Tentler Leslie Woodcock
Published: June 2009

Early on the cold morning of Wednesday, December 2, 1885, a crowd beganto gather in the forecourt of a handsome brick church on the outskirts ofDetroit. The church, only recently blessed, was the Polish Roman Catholicchurch of Saint Albertus; the crowd, eventually numbering perhaps eighthundred, were Polish immigrants. Most of them were women. Shortly after 6:00, seven policemen marched into the convent opposite the church and soon emerged escorting two Polish priests. The group moved toward the church, but at the church steps the crowd—“the women,” according to witnesses—began to jeer at and jostle the priests, and even pelted them with gravel. The police responded vigorously, but they and the priests were pushed from the door several times before they were finally able to enter.
Time and Historical Consciousness: The Case of Ilparakuyo Maasai
Authors: Rigby Peter
Published: June 2009

In a manner somewhat unusual in anthropological discourse, most writers on the Maa-speaking peoples of Tanzania and Kenya include an early section or chapter on what is often called “Maasai traditional history.” For example, in his pioneering work, “An Administrative Survey of the Masai Social System,” Henry Fosbrooke (1948) devotes a leading and major section to Maasai history and, in a later publication, he deals explicitly with what he calls a “tribal chronology” of the pastoral Maasai (Fosbrooke 1956a). Similarly, Thomas Beidelman, in an equally pioneering article, pays considerable attention to the historical connections of the Ilparakuyo (Baraguyu) section of the Maasai peoples of Tanzania (1960). It is among the Ilparakuyo that I have carried out most of my work in Maasai studies, and they are the primary focus of the present discussion (Rigby 1977, 1979, 1980, 1981).
Trade Politics and Native Polities in Iroquoia and Asante
Authors: Wesler Kit W.
Published: June 2009

The expansion of Western influence during and after the fifteenth century was a pervasive phenomenon. European seamen, traders, and settlers set off one of the most widespread and complex processes of cultural contact and transfer in human history. Students of acculturation are thus presented with a unique opportunity for controlled observation, that of keeping one variable—the culture of Western Europe—relatively constant while allowing others to range widely. European traders carried much the same cultural baggage, material and conceptual, whether they travelled to the Americas, Asia, or the East Indies, but the cultures they encountered and with which they interacted covered a wide spectrum of human conditions.
African Merchants of the Gold Coast, 1860–1905—Dynamics of Indigenous Entrepreneurship
Authors: Dumett Raymond E.
Published: June 2009

Entrepreneurship in Africa can be analyzed from a number of perspectives. One approach, undoubtedly the most popular among economic anthropologists and sociologists, has been to conduct group surveys of the attitudes and behavior of small-scale traders and market-stall operators against the background of specific urban or rural settings. These studies have emphasized the importance of religion, ethnic group affiliation, family or clan structure, specialization, and the development of long-distance trading networks through migration or diaspora. Another type of study pioneered by Polly Hill, and since taken up by other field economists and historians, has been to analyze the individual innovation, cooperative effort, and adaptation of traditional institutions involved in the development of export crop agriculture (groundnuts, cocoa, coffee) by small farmers in Africa.
“We Have No Colonies”— Similarities within the British Imperial Experience
Authors: Hind Robert J.
Published: June 2009

The magnitude of contrasts within modern empires is incontrovertible. In the opinion of some scholars, the range of human experience they encompassed is so immense that it is impracticable to study adequately even one empire in its entirety. This premise has contributed to the formation of clusters of scholars with circumscribed areas of interest, whose research demonstrates unequivocally the distinctive characters of the various societies under each empire's jurisdiction, and the diverse effects of imperial policies upon them. Other scholars elect to concentrate upon the imperial macrocosm, but their work often highlights imperial differentiation too. Analyses such as those which hinge upon a core-periphery nexus and focus upon antitheses within metropolitan and colonial relationships are inherently inclined to give prominence to contrasts within an empire. Some studies, moreover, convey the impression of an improbable degree of cohesion and identity of interest within the metropolitan community and within each different colonized group of an empire's subjects. The revolts against the West, against the Dutch, the British, the French, and so on, helped to promote and reinforce this idea. These revolts also revealed that amongst peoples under imperial subjection there was a degree of identification with each other, in their relationships to members of the metropolitan society.
Local History in Global Context: Social and Economic Transitions in Western Guatemala
Authors: Smith Carol A.
Published: June 2009

It is increasingly fashionable for anthropologists to castigate themselves (or at least to castigate other anthropologists) for failing to take into account the larger or global processes that affect the small communities they study. We accuse ourselves, for example, of treating peasant communities as if they were primitive isolates and of failing to consider the external forces that created those communities and that cause them to operate the way they do. While this accusation may be warranted for the earliest work on peasant communities, I suggest that for quite some time now the anthropological perspective regarding these communities has shifted. In fact, I will argue here that many anthropologists have been all too ready to accept global views of peasant communities and social relations without proper consideration of the interplay between local and global processes.
Dowry Payments and the Irish Case
Authors: Breen Richard
Published: June 2009

In this essay I propose to examine an hypothesis about dowry payments in the light of certain evidence from Ireland. The sources of this evidence are, first, my own data collected during fieldwork in the small community of Beaufort, County Kerry, Ireland, and, second, the work of writers who have studied the question of dowry payment in Ireland, notably Conrad M. Arensberg, Solon T. Kimball, and K. H. Connell. The intent here is to draw attention to some of the deficiencies in Jack Goody's definition and discussion of dowry payments, and to offer alternatives to them. In particular I shall argue that Goody's discussion of dowry is centrally flawed by a discrepancy between the generality of the variables he uses to explain the geographical distribution of the practice, and the specificity of his definition of it. It is the unwarranted detail involved in the latter that leads him to obscure certain crucial variations within dowry systems more broadly defined, and to confuse the issue of the relationship between dowry and bride wealth.
Human Sacrifice at Tenochtitlan
Authors: Ingham John M.
Published: June 2009

Many fixed and movable festivals in ancient Mexico were occasions for human sacrifice. The sun in particular was offered hearts and blood, ostensibly because its vitality and, therefore, life itself depended on such oblations. Numerous festivals also included ritual cannibalism, apparently because it was thought to facilitate communion with the gods.
The Buddhist Monkhood, the Law, and the State in Colonial Sri Lanka
Authors: Kemper Steven
Published: June 2009

Neither the unremitting imposition of alien ways nor the faithful preservation of local ones, colonialism proceeds by the melding of imperial practices with indigenous social forms, creating new arrangements that look like old ones. Moreover, colonialism is an intersubjective, interpractical relationship; as a growing number of historical and anthropological studies have shown, the natives are unlikely to be passive receivers of imposed forms. However difficult their circumstances, the colonized busily construe and misconstrue the colonizers and their social practices, manipulating both to their own advantage. What follows is a “working misunderstanding.”
The Internal Colonial Concept
Authors: Hind Robert J.
Published: June 2009

The use of internal colonial theories to examine racial developments within the United States of America had become almost fashionable by the late 1960s.A decade later, a study of the political economy of Wales described the internal colonial approach which it criticized as a “new variant of a time-worn model.’ Amongst historians, however, the internal colonial concept does not appear to be as familiar as it is to other social scientists. This article is addressed to historians who do not subscribe unreservedly to Alfred Cobban's belief that sociologists are their natural enemies, and amongst whom some might still be considering the implications of Fernand Braudel's contention that a “general history always requires an overall model, good or bad, against which events can be interpreted. ‘No theory, no history.’” The purpose here is to indicate some uses and characteristics of theories that the internal colonial concept has promoted, to comment briefly about some of the methodological issues which these theories present, and to suggest some benefits that the concept might have for certain types of social and historical enquiry.