The study of education can be to complex societies what the study of religion has been to societies variously characterized by anthropologists as ‘simple,’ ‘cold’ or ‘elementary.’ Recognizing this potential, sociologists and social anthropologists have recently indicated a renewed interest in the study of how schooling, especially higher education, implicitly defines and transmits a culturally valued cognitive style, ‘a set of basic, deeply interiorized master-patterns’ of language and thought on the basis of which other patterns are subsequently acquired (Bourdieu 1967: 343; see also Cole, Gay, Glick and Sharp 1971).

This article examines the relationship between the Catholic Church's self- image and the way its leaders and organizations perceive the world around them and act within it. By focusing on the development of central religious concepts, (most notably ‘authority’ and ‘the Church’) and their changing expression in organizational structures and patterns of behavior, a first step is taken toward a more complete and adequate analysis of the Church's evolving role in Latin American society and politics.

Between 1873 and 1935 dramatic changes took place in the character of production in the industrial nations of the world. Longstanding and newly formed states in Europe and America engaged in vigorous campaigns of territorial expansion, so that virtually all the globe came to be incorporated within the sphere of world markets. During the same period, the expansion in industrial countries of new techniques of mass production coincided with growth and consolidation of organizations of people who worked for wages. The expansion of world markets, the development of mass produc— tion, and the new social importance of wage laborers, while certainly not the only features of the era, are often viewed as its central, interrelated, and dynamic basis.1 In this context, the transformations of production which accompanied the rise of a world wheat market during these decades were quite unusual.

INTRODUCTION

In looking at yesterday's frontiers (or at today's industrialized world), social analysts tend to see violence as a straightforward and uncomplicated phenomenon: when openly used, it is a direct way of settling disputes; when it is not used but available, it is a necessary—and, at least in the short run, sufficient—condition of domination. As a background condition violence is readily forgotten. Such is the case even in the study of the various affronts to authority that are lumped under the rubric of‘collective behavior.’ One speaks of violent ‘episodes’ arising from the ‘breakdown’ of various routine social mechanisms. By the same token, all the interesting problems in political theory seem to lie in the area of how to control people in every other conceivable manner: through the establishment of a normative consensus, through ideologies, through the creation of common interests, or through bargains and deals. Sufficient consideration is not usually given to the varied and subtle effects of these ways in which the capacity for violence is structured in social life. But consequences follow for any society from the presence or absence of full-time military specialists, from the forms of their organization, from the regional distribution of control of organized violence, from the advantages and disadvantages associated with the use of force, and from the norms associated with such use.