Overt ethnic conflict is frequently accompanied by the observation that the conflict is not essentially rooted in ethnic differences but is primarilyeconomic in origin. Examples are not hard to come by; it has been madein regard to the American Negro situation, the Catholics in NorthernIreland and the Ugandan Asians, to name but three instances. The claim that economic differences underlie ethnic conflict raises the questions of whether all interethnic conflict can be accounted for within the framework of a conflict theory of social stratification, and this in turn raises the broader question of whether all types of interethnic relations, of conflict and harmony, assimilation, integration, separatism and segregation can be subsumed under a more general theory of stratification.

The consolidation of China did not come immediately with China's unification. It was not fully accomplished until the middle of the Former (Western) Han. The monolithic2 nature of the political powers and a group of local elite3 were then forming. And the bureaucracy, becoming much elaborated during this era, served to link the two. The elite group functioned, on the one hand as the reservoir of candidates to officialdom, and on the other hand, as the leading element with education, prestige, and often wealth, in the community. Based on these concepts, this paper ventures to present the formation of the local elite group through the changing social base of political power during Western Han.

Study of charismatic movements has become an increasingly large, complex, and rather confusing field. A recent bibliography on modern religious movements in Africa, to which these considerations will be restricted, lists 1,313 items.

Throughout the history of economics the stranger everywhere appears as the trader, or the trader as stranger. As long as the economy is essentially selfsufficient, or products are exchanged within a spatially narrow group, it needs no middleman: a trader is required only for products that originate outside the group. Insofar as members do not leave the circle to buy these necessities — in which case they are the “strange” merchants in that outside territory — the trader must be a stranger … This position of the stranger stands out more sharply if he settles down in the place of his activity, instead of leaving it again: in innumerable cases even this is possible only if he can live by intermediate trade… This position of the stranger stands out more sharply if he settles down in the place of his activity, instead of leaving it again: in innumerable cases even this is possible only if he can live by intermediate trade… The stranger is by nature no “owner of the soil“ — soil not only in the physical but also in the figurative sense of a life-substance which is fixed, if not in a point in space, at least at an ideal point of the social environment. Although in more intimate relations he may develop all kinds of charm and significance, as long as he is considered a stranger in the eyes of the other, he is not an “owner of soil”… Another expression of this constellation lies in the objectivity of the stranger. He is not radically committed to the unique ingredients and peculiar tendencies of the group, and therefore approaches them with the specific attitude of “objectivity”. But objectivity does not imply passivity and detachment; it is a particular structure composed of distance and nearness, indifference and involvement … The freedom, however, which allows the stranger to experience and treat even his close relationships as though from a birds-eye view, contains many dangerous possibilities. In uprisings of all sorts, the party attacked has claimed, from the beginning of things, that provocation has come from the outside, from emissaries and instigators.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the U.S. government paid the economics department at the University of Chicago, known for its advocacy of free markets and monetarism, to train Chilean graduate students. These students became known as the “Chicago Boys,” who implemented the first and most famous neoliberal experiment in Chile after 1973. Peruvian, Mexican, and other Latin American economics students followed a similar path and advocated a turn to neoliberal policies in their own countries. The Chicago Boys narrative has become an origin story for global neoliberalism. However, the focus on this narrative has obscured other transnational networks whose ideas possess certain superficial, but misleading, similarities with neoliberalism. I examine Chilean and Peruvian engagements with Yugoslavia's unique form of socialism, its worker self-management socialism, which was part of a worldwide discussion of anti-authoritarian socialism. I first introduce the Yugoslav socialist model that inspired those in Chile and Peru. I then examine socialist discussions in Chile and Peru that called for decentralized, democratic socialism and looked to Yugoslavia for advice. I conclude by examining the 1990s postponement of socialism in the name of a very narrow democracy and realization of neoliberalism. The Chicago Boys story assumes the easy global victory of neoliberalism and erases what was at stake in the 1988–1994 period: radically democratic socialism on a global scale.

What truths are available in imperial archives for non-colonial subjects? Tibet was never colonized by the British, and yet was drawn into the British imperial domain in ways that impacted both political history and historiography. In the 1940s, Tibetan intellectual Rapga Pangdatsang based his Tibetan Improvement Party in Kalimpong, India where he soon ran afoul of colonial officials who thought he was a Chinese spy. By drawing on multiple archival, ethnographic, and historic sources, I show how the story of Rapga Pangdatsang and the first Tibetan political party enables a recalibrating of both Tibetan and British imperial history. It also opens up a consideration of empire beyond the colonial, and speaks more broadly to a consideration of the non-colonial as a thus-far overlooked aspect of empire.

Theories of agency are central to any form of explanation or interpretation of human action in the social and behavioral sciences, including the study of history. In studies of religion, they appear to require even more reflection than usual, because of secular skepticism of religious understandings of agency, involving divine intervention or supra-human powers. The major problem with theories of agency is their immense range and complexity. They involve fundamental notions of emotions and intentions, of habits and social practice, of desire and passion, of passions and interests, of resistance and power, of freedom and un-freedom, of the distinction between subject and object, of interiority and exteriority. As such, they have complicated genealogies in different religious and philosophical traditions. Western philosophical traditions are among the many traditions that have wide-ranging theories about the self and agency and express them in a universalistic language.1 These universalistic claims are perhaps common, but the history of European expansion has implied a universalization of Western thought, so that despite its provincial origin Western thought informs both the understanding and the self-understanding of other societies. From the start, one of the tasks of anthropology and history has therefore been to critique universalistic assumptions about, for instance, agency, by examining other ways of life and traditions. Not only is universalism as such being questioned; the universalization of ideas is being critically analyzed.

Shortly before Vasco da Gama returned to Lisbon in September 1499 from his great voyage to India, a Florentine merchant in the Portuguese capital reported troubling rumors that ‘certain vessels of white Christians’ had visited the port of Calicut on the Malabar coast only a couple of generations previously. If true, this would mean that some other European power had beaten Portugal in its long search for a maritime route to the Indies. After speculating that the mysterious mariners were Germans (although ‘it seems to me that we should have some notice about them’) or Russians (‘if they have a port there’), the merchant concluded that ‘on the arrival of the captain [da Gama] we may learn who these people are.’

The convention for introducing biography in the Chinese textual tradition is to identify the subject not only by his name but also by his native place. The classic formula used for this purpose is set out in the preface to “The True Story of Ah Q,” in which Lu Xun remarks that “when writing biography, it is the usual practice to begin ‘so-and-so, from such-and-such place’ ” (Lu 1959 [1921]: 93). This formula was adopted in official documents, popular stories, obituaries and tomb epitaphs as well as in formal biographies or biographical notices. There were variations in its form, in which the person was identified as being “native of this place, living in that place” or “originally of this place, now of that place.” But in any event, a man was, and still is, normally identified by both his personal name and the name of his place of origin, just as a woman was usually identified by the names of her father and her husband. The problem for Lu Xun as fictional biographer was that Ah Q's name was a matter of debate and his place of origin unknown: He floated unmoored through Chinese society.

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.

As a work of political theory, Ideology and Utopia has satisfied almost no one. Mannheim's critics extend across a wide range of viewpoints, from Parsons, Merton, Bendix, Popper, and Shils on one side to Marcuse, Hork-heimer, Lukacs, and Adorno on the other. Neither Marxists nor non-Marxists have found much to their liking in the book, and the rather easy dismissal of Mannheim's arguments by such influential thinkers on both sides of the political spectrum has certainly constituted a major obstacle to any serious consideration of the position he developed in Ideology and Utopia. For, I shall argue, the arguments contained in that work, when they have not been neglected altogether, have been poorly understood by those individuals whose writings exercise a dominant influence upon the thinking of contemporary social scientists.

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.

Professor J.F.C. Harrison's recently-published book, Learning and Living, 1790–1960, underscores the sometimes neglected fact that strikes, agitation and political action are not the only ways to change a society, even though they are usually the most spectacular. For nearly two centuries multitudes of Englishmen put some of their faith in a number of less direct processes, all of which may be categorized as adult education. The men and women who devoted themselves to this work had different aims and used different methods, but all of them sought to educate grown men, particularly factory workers, and all of them believed their efforts would somehow make England a better place. This movement was not unique; in France, for example, something similar took place. Unfortunately, no one has studied the French movement as Professor Harrison has the English. Enough information on the history of worker education in France is available, however, to make possible a comparison of the movements in the two countries and thus help to confirm or bring into question some accepted propositions concerning differences in their political and religious attitudes and climates of opinion.

In the first decades of the nineteenth century, when the Middle East and North Africa first began to attract the sustained attention of European imperialism and colonialism, Arab, Ottoman Turkish, and Iranian polities began a protracted experiment with army modernization. These decades saw a mania in the Middle East for the import of European methods of military organization and techniques of warfare. Everywhere, in the Ottoman Empire, North Africa, Egypt, and Iran, nizam-i jadid (new order) regiments sprang up, sometimes on the ruins of older military formations, sometimes alongside them, unleashing a process of military-led modernization that was to characterize state-building projects throughout the region until well into the twentieth century. The ruling dynasties in these regions embarked on army reform in a desperate effort to strengthen their defensive capacity, and to resist growing European hegemony and direct or indirect control by imitating European methods of military organization and warfare. Almost every indigenous ruler who succeeded in evading or warding off direct European control, from the sultans of pre-Protectorate Morocco in the west to the shahs of the Qajar dynasty in Iran in the east, invited European officers, sometimes as individuals, sometimes as formal missions, to assist with building a modern army. With the help of these officers, Middle Eastern rulers thus sought to appropriate the secrets of European power.

This essay addresses the relationship between white-collar workers and nationalism by introducing a cultural-symbolic approach to examine how national discourse became an essential “point of production” of white-collar identities, particularly those of clerks and clerical work. Based on an analysis of the imagery that clerks use to describe their work experience, this discussion attempts to document and explain how and why nationalism, as a cultural system with an internal logic and specific stylistic devices, was employed by the clerks “from below” to construct their occupational identity.

The association between white-collar workers and nationalism, particularly in the context of state building, has long attracted the attention of sociologists and historians. First, the emergence of non-manual workers as the social basis of bureaucratic organizations was linked to state formation. Second, the role of white-collar workers in the evolution of national-capitalist economies and urban consumer communities was regarded as essential in linking state building and economic change. Third, political and social histories of the nationalist Right centered on bureaucrats and clerical employees as standard-bearers of conservative politics.

Durable Inequality is an important and insightful book. In this work, Charles Tilly links organizational needs to the production and reproduction of social inequality. For some time now, organizational theorists have demonstrated that formal organizations are central actors in modern society, and that the significant environment of formal organizations are other formal organizations. Durable Inequality demonstrates how social inequality is directly tied to solving organizational problems. His four master mechanisms—exploitation, opportunity hoarding, emulation, and adaptation—tell us a great deal about how inequality is produced and maintained. The argument about categorical pairing and how such pairing is used by organizations to generate inequality is plausible and seductive.

This essay compares the two greatest conquest movements of pre-modern times, the Arab and the Mongol, which resulted in the creation of world empires, and analyzes the importance of religion in these events. This attempt is hardly in the mainstream of current cultural anthropology, which does not encourage much comparative study of historical societies separated in time and space. Nonetheless, perhaps this comparison will facilitate a better understanding of some serious conceptual problems that both of these conquests pose for anthropologists and historians. The fact that the Arab society had a strong nomadic component and the Mongol society was firmly based on pastoral nomadism makes this comparison even more interesting.

The Molokan sect, one of the strongest and most influential in prerevolutionary Russia, is today moving towards extinction. This process, however, has not gone equally far in different geographical areas of the Soviet Union. This paper puts forward an assessment of the extent of the sect's decline and attempts to explain both the general decline and its differential rate in different communities. It analyses the sect's development over a long period of time and under radically different socio-political conditions and it tries to systematize the Molokans' changing response to their different social environments, locating the sect in the typology devised by Bryan Wilson. It concludes that the severe decline in membership during the Soviet period is due to the fact that the Molokan sect is no longer an organization through which political dissent can be expressed but has fully adjusted to and affirms the values of Communist society. In the paper it is pointed out that although the sect can be typified in Wilson's terms during its early period, its changed response in Soviet society is not anticipated in Wilson's scheme. Existence in the exceptional social environment of socialist society has called forth an exceptional sectarian response. To illuminate this process we will consider both the Molokans' historical development and their religious belief, as well as their social complexion today.

The preceding article by William A. Green does not make clear the basis upon which he criticizes my October 1981 comparison of Belize and the British sugar colonies. He begins by saying that the “phenomena compared must possess important and comprehensive unities of character” and writes later that “it is the presence of similar people performing similar functions under similar circumstances that renders comparative analysis valuable. These identities did not prevail between Belize and the British sugar colonies.” Belize, he writes, had a “unique system of domination” (his emphasis). Is the problem, then, that there are no “unities of character,” that “identities did not prevail,” or that Belize was “unique”? Every case is unique, surely, yet comparisons are made in social, as in natural, science between selected common factors which appear under similar, but not identical, conditions. There exists a range between John Stuart Mill's formulae called The Method of Agreement, in which one compares two situations which differ in every respect save one, and The Method of Difference, in which one compares two situations which are alike except in one respect, but Green seems to think only the latter is acceptable.