This essay is no more than a preliminary endeavor to examine analogies between principles of land tenure in the recent history of an East African society and what appear to be strikingly similar principles that obtained in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in England. If these analogies are demonstrable with a reasonable degree of plausibility, a useful framework of reference may be established within which some broader theoretical issues can be discussed. One such issue is that, given a degree of structural similarity between two or more social systems, there might be a corresponding equivalence in the logic of legal thought in response to a common object of litigation—in this particular case, the subject of land tenure.

Anyone who sees today's high schoolers sporting beards will be surprised— or incredulous—to read in Homer's Iliad that Achilles, the greatest warrior among the Greeks at Troy, was still beardless. Yet Plato accepted it as a wellknown and unsurprising tradition.

Few questions have galvanized the attention of observers of African affairs in recent years as forcefully as the performance of the state on the continent. The debate on the nature of the state—its capabilities, weaknesses, external and societal connections, and impact—has come to occupy center stage in the field of African political studies. This overriding preoccupation emanates from the underlying assumption that the state constitutes a superior means for the fulfillment of economic and social aspirations; participation in its activities is deemed beneficial, and various sectors of society strive to associate with its institutions and gain access to its resources. Some recent works have cast doubt on this assumption, however, and the trend in the literature has been shifting towards an emphasis on the diminishing role of the state in African social life. However, even in these new studies the focus has been primarily on the state itself, its difficulties, incapacities, and failures, rather than on societal response to its actions.

My purpose in this study is to refine understanding of the functional role of conventional religion for the viability of communal life (Bainbridge 1985). I shall endeavor to do this by broadly coordinating Talcott Parsons's evolutionary perspective of human society (1966, 1971) with that of Robert Bellah on religion (1964), and applying them to the formation and development of the Religious Kibbutz Federation (RFK) in Israel. By examining the historical experience of the groups that formed religious communes during the Mandatory period in Palestine, I shall attempt to demonstrate that religion can play a dysfunctional as well as a functional role in a communal system.

If one were a Tagalog convert to Christianity in the seventeenth or early eighteenth century, one would have probably been compelled to go to confession at least once a year. Confronting the Spanish priest, one would be subjected to his anxious probing in the vernacular as he proceeded through a checklist of possible transgressions against each of the Ten Commandments. Such checklists in the local language, called confessionarios, were common throughout the colonial period. Compiled by missionaries skilled in the Tagalog, they were designed to serve as mnemonic devices to aid Spanish clerics in eliciting the confessions of their native flock.

To an historian or anthropologist familiar with land problems in Fiji, nothing would have been less predictable than the urban discontents over land rights since independence, for these disturbances, in an ethnically plural society whose colonial history is marked by hostility between Indians and Fijians, were among the Fijians themselves. During the whole of the colonial period, from cession of the islands to Britain in 1874 to independence in 1970, the coexistence of Europeans, Indians (first imported as indentured labor), and Fijians had been forged out of land law. Successive colonial administrations labored for four decades around the turn of the century to secure for Fijians a precapitalist system of property rights that would become a bulwark against encroachment by a white planter and settler community. The system “by law established” subsequently became the basis for hostility between several generations of rural Fijian landowners and a growing number of landless Indian peasants. By the time self-government arrived in the mid-1960s, Indian access to land and Fijian resistance thereto was the most important issue threatening the stability of the new state, and government-commissioned reports and legislative acts pointed to this conflict of interest as the most significant problem for an independent Fiji. But the authoritative history written from commission reports and based on administrative policy often conceals another history, that formed by the experience of everyday life, where opposed groups confront each other over interests not always visible to legislators and judges, and often less so to scholarly observers.

Beginning around the turn of the twentieth century, the Chinese state launched onto a course of development that seemed to resemble the process in early modern Europe that Charles Tilly and others have called state making (Tilly 1975). The phenomenon of an expanding state structure penetrating levels of society untouched before, subordinating, co-opting, or destroying the relatively autonomous authority structures of local communities in a bid to increase its command of local resources, appeared to be repeating itself in late imperial and republican China. The similarities include the impulse toward centralization, bureaucratization, and rationalization; the insatiable drive to increase revenues for both military and civilian purposes; the violent resistance of local communities to this inexorable process of intrusion and extraction; and the formation of alliances between the state and local elites to consolidate their power (Duara 1983).

The decline of the missions in far northern Mexico during the age of Santa Anna has attracted the attention of several scholars. Most recently David Weber in The Mexican Frontier, 1821–1846 has identified many complex national and regional factors that contributed to their demise, arguing that in the cases of California and Texas the government's secularization policy played a decisive role, while the reductions—towns of Indians converted to Christianity—in Arizona “crumbled by default” and in New Mexico were quietly abandoned by the clergy.1 (The term secularization means the replacement of state-supported missionaries from religious orders (regular clergy) with parish-supported priests obedient to the ecclesiastical hierarchy (secular clergy).) Many of these same destructive forces operated in New Granada (modern Colombia), where the once thriving missions on the eastern llanos frontier all but disappeared by the mid-nineteenth century. In striking contrast to the Mexican governments, however, those in New Granada were determined to revitalize the missions. A review of their unsuccessful efforts, when compared with the process in far northern Mexico, offers fresh insight into the viability of the mission as a frontier institution in Spanish America during the early national period.

What are the social and psychological sources of social movements that are committed to (1) equality among their members, (2) communitarian ideals emphasizing strong ties of affection among members and a belief in spontaneous cooperation without direction by authority, and (3) austerity in the consumption of physical goods and also in the use or display of comforts and ornaments? In the course of time what becomes of such a movement as it tries to put its ideals into practice? Many but not all of those that have lasted—and I shall limit this inquiry to examples that have lasted for at least several generations—have become quite wealthy. How and why does this change come about, and what are its consequences?

Problems of periodization have received but limited attention in Burmese historiography. Precolonial, that is to say, pre-nineteenth-century history, is said to be of a piece, without significant institutional or social transformations. Dynasties and rulers changed, of course, sometimes with stunning rapidity; but it is always assumed that these oscillations occurred within a static framework. Lamenting the failure of the early Kon-baung kings to move their capital to the coast, G. E. Harvey, whose history remains the standard work on the precolonial era, observes, “Their ideas remained in the nineteenth century what they had been in the ninth. To build pagodas, to collect daughters from tributary chiefs, to sally forth on slave raids, to make wars for white elephants—these conceptions had had their day, and a monarchy which failed to get beyond them was doomed.” In the same vein, it has recently been argued that no “significant transformations” occurred between the origins and collapse of monarchical Burma. The entire precolonial royal era “should be viewed as one entity,” for from the mid-ninth to the late nineteenth century “the major features of [Burma's] political, economic, social, administrative, and religious systems were also virtually identical.”

In primitive and nonindustrialized societies the typical (and in many cases, the exclusive) tasks of religious elites have revolved chiefly around the creation, modification, and maintenance of the symbolic universe of society. Such work invariably implied privilege and various kinds and degrees of political power. But with the expansion of the modern world order, the situation of religious elites has altered dramatically. For one, religious-knowledge workers make up a very small percentage of the ranks of a much larger knowledge sector. For example, while the percentage of religious-knowledge workers (including clergy) relative to the entire economically active population in the United States has remained relatively constant since 1870, the percentage of religious workers to the knowledge workers has declined by one half in the period between 1950 and 1970—a period of dramatic growth of the knowledge sector (see Table 1). By 1970, the percentage of religious-knowledge workers to knowledge workers generally had shrunk to one sixth of its proportionate size a century earlier. Between 1970 and 1984, this proportion has leveled off somewhat. In Western Europe and Japan the same patterns have become firmly established as well.

During the last nine years, while Western feminists were directing critical attention to what they described as “the curious courtship,” the “unhappy marriage,” and the “uneasy hyphen between marxism-feminism,” Western students of Middle Eastern women were pushing the field toward a serious consideration and adoption of Marxian social and economic theories. In two very important articles, Nikki Keddie and Judith Tucker argued that the field can expand its understanding of the different worlds of women by studying their roles in production and social reproduction. This new materialist approach promised to overcome what both said was a serious idealist bias in the literature that derived the status of Middle Eastern women from the major Muslim religious and legal texts and/or relied on the culturally biased Western/Orientalist conceptions of these women.

This essay is about concepts of time and the past among the Maya Indians of Yucatan in southeastern Mexico. It explores how these concepts fit into the Maya's general view of the way the world works and how they relate to certain dynamics of Maya history—as we define history—during their pre-Hispanic and colonial past. One inspiration has been the often baffling written records the Maya have left, from which we try to quarry historical facts without always enquiring what the records meant to the people who produced them. The other is the reminder, provided by recent historical work from anthropologists, that people do not record their past so much as construct it, with an eye to the present, and at the same time use that past in molding the present.