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.

Traditional European values of noncapitalist wealth preferred “rent to profit, security to risk, tradition to innovation, and, in terms of personal goals, gentility to entrepreneurial skill and renown.” Both in the dynamic, expansive sector of the international economy and in marginal, “retrograde” economies, nonpecuniary values based upon kin, custom, religion, law, and politics openly contradicted the utilitarian assumptions of our contemporary economic theory, spurned reinvestment, and worked against development. How can we balance such premodern conceptions with economic forces that may have been imperfectly understood or not even perceived and, at the same time, give both early modern rationale and economic rationality a place in our descriptions of the old order in Europe? In other words, how can we account for the role of culture in economic decision making?

Historians and anthropologists in Sri Lanka have tended to migrate in opposite directions, but away from the multiethnic confusion of the port cities. Typi- cally, the heterogeneous, semi-Westernized, postcolonial urban society of Colombo and the larger towns has been only a transit point on intellectual journeys outbound to European archives or inbound to “traditional culture.” This was certainly my viewpoint as I arrived “inbound” in Sri Lanka for my first anthropological fieldwork. I took only passing notice of the clerks of mixed European and Sri Lankan descent who sold me stationery supplies at Cargill's and mosquito nets at Carvalho's. These people are given the official designation of Burghers in the government census: they are the racially mixed descendants of the Portuguese, Dutch, and British personnel who occupied the island during four and a half centuries of colonial rule.

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).

The idea that the British colonial administration of Malaya systematically excluded non-Malays from rice cultivation has gained some currency in writings on Malaysian history and has become an important part of a model of colonial exploitation. According to this model, the British administration of Malaya undertook to maximize revenue and to serve the needs of British capital by pursuing a policy of ethnic division of labor, with Chinese working in the mines and Indians on the estates of Malaya and with the indigenous Malay population producing food for the mine and estate workers. Immigrant labor, the argument continues, was denied the opportunity to build an economic base in Malaya in order to keep wages low, while the indigenous Malay population was discouraged from growing export produce (particularly rubber) in order to stimulate rice cultivation, thereby creating a cheap supply of food. This model is attractive but in several particulars it is wrong, and taken as a whole it oversimplifies and seriously distorts the situation in colonial Malaya.

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.