The massive and ongoing exodus to cities from the countryside, a fact of life throughout Latin America today, includes Brazil. Although as late as 1960 that nation was a primarily agricultural country, over two-thirds of the population presently live in urban centers.

In this paper we wish to postulate and examine kinds of relationships between ritual dramas, ceremonials, and culture change. A number of individual studies concerned with this question deserve to be seen as focusing upon a unitary phenomenon. By this we have in mind ceremonies or ritual dramas which symbolically mediate structural conflicts or oppositions either within a society or between societies. Max Gluckman (1954) and Hilda Kuper (1947, 1964) among others have pointed out that rituals of rebellion symbolically alleviate conflicts at the level of the social structure of a single society, for example the Swazi of South Africa. In doing so the ritual intensifies identification with the traditional social structure in spite of the conflicts within this structure. C. Geertz (1957) and James L. Peacock (1967, 1968a, b) point out that the traditional Javanese slametan ceremony tends to increase neighborhood, or kampung, social integration. Geertz shows that with urbanization and modernization the neighborhood becomes socially and economically differentiated and that in this situation slametans tend to force interaction between individuals who no longer share specific cultural beliefs and symbols and thus increase rather than reduce hostility and anxiety. Peacock extends this argument to ludruck, an urban proletarian drama. In ludruck, Peacock argues, the individual is led to identify not with his kampung (neighborhood) nor with a traditional village set of values but rather with the urbanite and his urban set of values. Turning to Latin America we may cite the study of Maya Passion Plays by June Nash (1968).

My knowledge of the inner workings of CSSH began when the journal had completed its sixth year and was already well known and widely circulated. A few years before, Sylvia L. Thrupp had brought it with her when she moved to Michigan from the University of Chicago. When I joined the Michigan faculty, its presence was one of the attractions. I had been become aware of CSSH in its first year, pointed to it by Robert R. Palmer, who was working on the second volume of his Age of the Democratic Revolution. As we talked about his project, I expressed surprise that more was not being done with historical comparison, and he mentioned, rather skeptically I thought, that there was a new journal I might be interested in. I found the first issues in the library and mentioned them to another Princeton colleague who commented, “When historians don't know enough to write about one place, they write on two.” So I learned from the first that the venture was controversial. In contrast, Joseph R. Strayer told me he thought the new journal very promising, largely because of the woman who had founded it. (Much later, I learned that he had persuaded Princeton to make a small contribution to the journal's founding, and some twenty-five years after that conversation, when both were in their eighties, Joseph Strayer married Sylvia Thrupp).

This article considers the question of collective identity formation in the Arab Gulf by looking at the distinctive ways in which the genealogies of the dominant kinship collective of the United Arab Emirates, the Banī Yās confederation, have been represented by that country's cultural and heritage-making institutions. I look comparatively at two high profile, state-sponsored, Emirati genealogical projects, one a site, and the other a text, and investigate their significance from a historical and ethnographic perspective. I find that the relatively weak religious gravity of the United Arab Emirates allows for unorthodox representations of kinship at the national level, that women do not necessarily buy into these representations yet contribute in their own ways to a kinship nationalist discourse, and that genealogy is nonetheless a particularly fraught idiom for binding together an ethnically heterogeneous society like the Emirates. Approaching the public representation of genealogies through an integrative framework, this article sheds light on important themes in modern Emirati and broader Gulf social and political life, including the complicated place of religious norms in a newly fashioned Muslim nation, the influence of gender on conceptions of kinship and nationhood, and the challenge ethnic heterogeneity poses to an Arab ethno-national project.

:Power and Intimacy in the Christian Philippines, by Fenella Cannell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). @TX:Syncretism is a word with a history. Much like fetishism, its famously promiscuous cousin, it has been hurled as an accusation and deployed as a theoretical tool. One can try to neutralize this history by drawing a distinction between “processes of religious synthesis” and the “discourse of syncretism”--read condemnation and/or defense--but the word remains productively problematic (see Stewart and Shaw 1994). It not only conjures an orthodoxy against which deviations can be measured; it also tempts us to presume we can identify the ingredients in any particular mixture, and that we know in advance how and why synthesis occurs. At the heart of the concept lurk daunting questions. What do we mean by religion? How do ethnographers and the people they study produce this category, explicitly and tacitly, institutionally and informally, in texts and the practices of everyday life?

We examine Thomas Piketty's explanations for steady and rising inequality in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the decline of inequality in the half-century after World War I, and the return of high levels of inequality since the 1970s. We specify empirical and conceptual problems with his analysis, which stem from his presentation of causality at a highly general and vague level. That leads him to confuse rather than clarify the causal relations among implacable economic forces, changes in technological innovation and population growth, ideology, and governmental policies and the outcomes that he seeks to explain. We identify social scientists and historians who are able to account for temporal and geographic variations in the political coalitions that propelled egalitarian reforms, and that in their absence cleared the terrain for reactionary anti-egalitarian policies that the rich incited for their narrow benefit. We explain why Piketty's limited conception of ideology is insufficient for explaining how mass opposition to inequality is mobilized. We show that if we want to combine the study of capital in the twenty-first century with that of politics, we need a broader conception of ideology than what Piketty offers, one that will allow us to specify how ideology affects parties, states, voters, and activists.

Scholars have treated British colonial rule in India and the internal colonization of the United States in the nineteenth century as analytically distinct moments. Yet these far-flung imperial projects shared a common set of anxieties regarding land and labor. This paper seeks to conceptualize the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871 in India and the Indian Appropriation Acts of 1851–1871 in the United States as part of a congruent effort to manage and define the labor force in the context of the intensified expropriation of land. In the complement to agricultural improvement programs, British and American colonizers sought to rehabilitate itinerant populations to create a labor pool endowed with suitable qualities for unleashing the productive capacity of land. While in India the cumulative effect of criminal tribes legislation was inclusive in that members of criminal tribes were purportedly reformed in preparation for joining the colonial labor force, reservation policy in the United States excluded Native Americans from lands that were the preserve of white labor while simultaneously laying the groundwork for assimilation.

The West Indian area is one of the most attractive fields for comparative study. For, as Dr. Mintz has pointed out, it includes territories, generally similar in physical environment, which, nevertheless, differ in their individual histories. The marked divergence in the histories of Puerto Rico and Jamaica during the first half of the nineteenth century is only one instance among many which can be cited as worthy of attention. The interest of this particular case is that it raises the point in an acute form.

The basic Chiliastic character of the Taborite articles was recognized by scholars a long time ago. A. Hauck deals with the problem in his Kirchengeschichte Deutschlands, in which he introduces the problem to the general public. His knowledge of the subject is based solely on the Latin sources, since he did not read Czech. When German and Czechoslovakian scholars dealt with the problem questions of sectarian influence, such as the Waldensian, and of nationalism tended to prevail. However after 1945 the young Marxian historiography of the CSR tried to discover the social roots of these ideas, focussing attention on certain social and economic questions which even the bourgeois historians had admitted to be relevant.

Starting with the perception of Marx and Engels that the existence of revolutionary ideas in a given epoch presupposes the existence of a revolutionary class J. Macek came to the conclusion that urban and rural poverty were the driving forces of the Hussite revolution and that Chiliasm was the appropriate ideology for the movement. He denied foreign sectarian influence, and explained Chiliastic Taborism solely by the Bohemian environment.

The Tibetan term which is pronounced jisa and written spyi signifies literally terra commune or, like spyi, the principal or capital piece of land. The fact it is not to be found in the classical dictionaries of the Tibetan language, such as those of Sarat Chandra Das and Jäschke, seems to show that it is fairly recent. In these works the terms closest to it are spyi-tor and, better still, spyi-thog, which refer to a common fund or a common piece of property. These terms, too, appear to be relatively recent or at least exclusively Tibetan, for the dictionaries give no Sanskrit equivalent and they suggest that the terms belong solely to the dialects of Western Tibet. The Sanskrit terms corresponding to spyi would be sāmanyabhūmi and sādharanabhūmi in the first and most satisfactory sense, of common land, and agrabhūmi, murdhabhūmi and sirobhūmi in the second sense. But these do not occur in the dictionaries of classic Sanskrit, nor of Buddhist Sanskrit (Edgerton), nor of Pali. Nor were any equivalent expressions either developed in Chinese Buddhism or preserved through Chinese translations of Sanskrit terms. If any Indian or Chinese terms corresponding to the Tibetan spyi-sa existed, they obviously formed no part of the canonical or even of the paracanonical literary language of Indian or ancient Chinese Buddhism. It follows that if Indian or Chinese Buddhism had an institution resembling the Tibetan jisa, the Buddhist monks must have considered it to be foreign to their activities and in some way unworthy.

Purism represents the conscious effort of a culture to reject a commonly accepted iconography and the meanings implicit in its canons of proportion, taste and esthetic, and to substitute in their place a pragmatic solution of the artistic problem involved. What is not always recognized is that this solution must be the consequence of the terms of the problem; and the statement of these terms, indeed the selection of the problem itself, are both culturally determined.

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.

It is only human perhaps to approach a problem from the point of view of a discipline one knows and to find this approach illuminating and the approach from any other discipline obfuscating. Nevertheless some scholars have been able to utilize without confusion the results of other disciplines. Still others have wisely admitted their incompetence to control the results of the other disciplines and have ignored them entirely and proceeded to deal with their problem in their own way.

This article describes the development of family farms within a Kipsigis community in western Kenya. In Kenya, throughout rural Africa, and elsewhere in the “developing world,” family farms figure as key discursive and geographic spaces where the “development process” is located (see Crehan and von Oppen 1988, McCracken 1982, Ferguson 1990). Family farms are hybrid spaces where individual, local, state-based, and various “expert” visions of development intersect. They have the added virtue of being places whose geographic, historical and cultural specificity makes them accessible to ethnographic description.Of course the same applies to family farms everywhere. Quite distinctive forms of “the family farm” exist in different regions of France, the United States, and other places in the “developed” world. Despite the presumed leveling effects of modernization, such regional differences show few signs of disappearing (see Rogers 1991).