In the beginning of the world we had the forge and we forged things, we had weavinglooms and we wove our clothes, we had oracle huts where we consulted the oracle, and we had boats from which we caught fish. We had no guns. We had no cowrie-money (akwá). If you went to the market you took beans in order to exchange them for sweet potatoes. You exchanged something specific for something else. Then the king brought the cowrie-money. What did the king do in order to bring the cowrie-money? He caught people and broke their legs and their arms.

Nature is seen by humans through a screen of beliefs, knowledge, and purposes, and it is in terms of their images of nature, rather than of the actual structure of nature, that they act. Yet, it is upon nature itself that they do act, and it is nature itself that acts upon them, nurturing or destroying them.

Rappaport (1979:97)

Palestine, under British mandatory rule since the end of the First World War, was an arena of confrontation between Arabs and Jews over land, immigration, and political power, as well as over place and position in the labor market. This article will deal with the split labor market of mandatoryPalestineand the actors within it. The analysis will make use of the split labormarket theory of Edna Bonacich. In her theory she posits a situation in whichtwo groups of labor, belonging to different ethnic and national origins, meet in the same labor market. The more advantageous ethnic group has been able, due to its past history and its more advantageous position within world capitalist development, to ensure a higher value for its labor but considers itself threatened by the presence of the less advantageous groups, whose labor has lower value and thus greater attraction to employers who aim to maximize their profits. The theory then goes on to develop the different ways in which cheaper labor might serve to displace and substitute higher-priced labor and the strategies pursued by the latter in recurring attempts to maintain its relative advantage.

In 1821 the newly appointed director and rector of the Imperial Kazan University received the following instructions from the government in St. Petersburg: “It is of utmost importance for the government that the education of its people be based on a firm foundation of the Christian religion, that the evil spirit of our time, the all-destructive spirit of free thinking, does not penetrate the sacred temples, where the happiness of the future generations must be secured by teaching the contemporary youths.” The fact that Orthodox Christianity was at the heart of Russian imperial identity is not surprising, but the fact that such an identity was to be uncompromisingly forged in the Kazan region, where most of the residents were non-Russians of different faiths, is noteworthy.

During the last two decades there has been intense debate over the causes of the domestic subordination of women within industrial-capitalist societies. A significant part of this discussion has involved attempts to understand the emergence of a form of family organisation in which the husband was expected to be the main, preferably the sole, bread-winner and his wife was to assume responsibility for running the household, preferably on a full-time basis. Established first among the middle classes, this pattern spread widely throughout the working class with increasing momentum from the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Although the outlines of this development, and the accompanying payment of a family wage to men, are now well-established, the factors responsible for its origins and expansion are still a matter of controversy. In this article I shall review some major explanations of the rise of this “male breadwinner” family and seek to identify a number of weaknesses in the debate as a whole.

Cross dressing is about deliberately traversing meaningful boundaries. The cultural critic, Marjorie Garber, argues that Western civilization has long been obsessed with transvestite behavior. Garber's wide-ranging analysis (from Shakespeare to Madonna) stresses the disruptive aspect of the phenomenon, which, she claims, precipitates a “category crisis” by exposing the futility of all binary oppositions, including those of gender. Could cross dressing ever have been a commonplace part of the notoriously cautious bourgeois culture of nineteenth-century France? The very idea seems implausible on the surface, but in fact the mainstream stage presented the opportunity to see an enormous amount of transvestite performance (travesti). It consisted not simply of plays within which characters disguise themselves as the other sex. In hundreds of French plays before and after the Revolution, actresses assumed male roles, and, to a more limited extent, actors took female parts. Playwrights and producers, more concerned with fame and success than with social commentary, turned out a stream of such transvestite spectacles.