From a cultural and historical-sociological perspective, the Danish nationstate of today represents a rare situation of virtual identity between state, nation, and society, which is a more recent phenomenon than normally assumed in Denmark and abroad. Though one of the oldest European monarchies, whose flag came ‘tumbling down from heaven in 1219’—ironically enough an event that happened in present-day Estonia—Denmark's present national identity is of recent vintage. Until 1814 the word, Denmark, denominated a typical European, plurinational or multinational, absolutist state, second only to such powers as France, Great Britain, Austria, Russia, and perhaps Prussia. The state had succeeded in reforming itself in a revolution from above in the late eighteenth century and ended as one of the few really “enlightened absolutisms” of the day (Horstbøll and østergård 1990; østergård 1990). It consisted of four main parts and several subsidiaries in the North Atlantic Ocean, plus some colonies in Western Africa, India, and the West Indies. The main parts were the kingdoms of Denmark proper and Norway, plus the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein. How this particular state came about need not bother us here.

The most crucial problem confronting historians of early modern Europe is the nature of absolutism and its relationship to society. At the center of scholarly debate have been the questions of the social and economic bases of absolutism. What determined whether state policies could be successfully implemented? Were rulers dependent on the nobility, and did they therefore act in its interest; or did they achieve independence from the dominant class by supporting the interests of a new bourgeoisie or by balancing interests between the two groups? Closely related to these concerns is the problem of how to explain the causes and nature of the numerous rebellions by the elites during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

In 1985 Edmund Leach, well into retirement from his chair of Anthropology in Cambridge, made his first visit to the site of the temple of Diana at Nemi, some fifteen miles southeast of Rome.Leach called this visit a pilgrimage, for Nemi and the problems of its bizarre cult were the starting place for James Frazer's founding work of Social Anthropology, The Golden Bough. This was the spot that Frazer described in such lavish detail in his opening chapter: ‘the sylvan landscape [that] was the scene of a strange and recurring tragedy.’ This was the setting for the problem that Frazer set out to solve: Why in Roman times could the priest-king of the sacred grove of Nemi (the so-called Rex Nemorensis) win his priestly office only by killing the previous incumbent; why would he himself lose it only through murder at the hands of his successor? For those who see Frazer's work as the start of anthropological study in its modern sense, the site and the cult of Nemi must hold a particular place: This colourful, but minor, backwater of Roman religion marks the source of the discipline of Social Anthropology.

Ideologies of reproduction are social facts, collective representations, of the dramatic ways in which human beings construct and appropriate gender for the imaging of social reality. Such symbolic universes are often centered on the body (Foucault 1980; Martin 1989; Turner 1984; Douglas 1973). As a template of cultural signification, the body becomes a model through which the social order can be apprehended. For instance, gender hierarchies are sometimes envisioned by means of an anatomical or physiological paradigm (Needham 1973; Hugh-Jones 1979; Theweleit 1987). However, the operation of societal power is generally focused on women's bodies and bodily processes. Women, according to a widespread (and controversial) paradigm, are grounded in nature by virtue of the dictates of their bodies: menstruation, pregnancy, birth (Lévi-Strauss 1966, 1969; Ortner 1974; Ardener 1975; Mac-Cormack and Strathern 1986).

Recent years have brought a proliferation of studies on the family on such topics as household composition, marriage patterns, childbearing practices, and life-cycle transitions. Scholars in ancient near eastern studies have contributed mainly to the legal and economic aspects of family history. Frequently the work done has centered on philological questions. The cuneiform data on the Mesopotamian family, accidental and all too often limited, is spread over a period of some three thousand years. Nevertheless it is time to broaden the focus despite the inherent problems. In this essay, I treat the question of the dynamics of Mesopotamian family life, more specifically intergenerational conflict, a topic barely touched upon by scholars in the field.

In China there is less inequality in the fortunes than in the conditions of men. Property in land has been divided into very moderate parcels, by the successive distribution of the possessions of every father equally among his sons. It rarely happens that there is but one son to enjoy the whole property of his deceased parents; and from the general prevalence of early marriages, this property is not often increased by collateral succession. These causes constantly tend to level wealth; and few succeed to such an accumulation of it as to render them independent of any efforts of their own for its increase. It is a common remark among the Chinese that fortunes seldom continue [to be] considerable in the same family beyond the third generation.

For a long time now, people have pondered the ambiguity, at least in English, of ‘history’: the records men make, the records men write. In modern Chinese history, these are beginning to correspond. Revolutionary spirits like the famous writer Lu Hsün (1881–1936) felt that the old high culture was dead, and they resented being instructed, as it seemed, to rest quietly, uttering platitudes in silk-fan attitudes. They wanted to create (and destroy): to make-their own history, not to be politically stricken by forces from abroad, or culturally sterile at home, their past frozen solid in the present. The revolution they helped to foster in a cosmopolitan spirit—against the world to join the world, against their past to keep it theirs, but past—may be interpreted, in cultural terms, as a long striving to make their museums themselves.

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.’

Maclntyre sought to raise a series of crucial questions in an address before the Eighty-First Annual Meeting of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association. What is the best way to evaluate two competing languages, conceptual schemes, or cultural approaches to being in the world? May conceptual schemes or theoretical languages be so radically different as to be fully incommensurable, that is, incapable of intertranslation or meaningful comparison?2 Maclntyre, drawing upon the example of the sixteenthcentury Zuni Indian and Spanish colonial frontier, contended that some languages or conceptual schemes might well be partially untranslatable, but this did not necessarily preclude commensurability. His remarks suggest additional questions, namely, what does constitute a frontier situation? What is involved in the symbolic differentiation of one conceptual scheme, one interpretive group—one culture—from another? We might recognize here the familiar problem of boundary construction, the social process of creating a common group identity that marks it as different from others.3

English cheeses—Cheddar, Gloucester single or double, Cheshire, Stilton, and others—are familiar throughout the Anglo-American world, whether consumed after dinner in English homes or as key ingredients of American tex-mex or vegetarian cuisine. These famous cheeses originated long ago but in most cases reached a zenith in quantity and in reputation during the last century. Little is known about the history of English cheese dairying, despite its fame and its importance to agriculture past and present. Its economic background has received only slight attention, and its social history is almost entirely unexplored; yet clearly the social structure of English cheese dairying has historically exerted a major influence on the industry, because it traditionally depended upon a distinctive sexual division of labor. The history of women's work in English cheese dairying has implications for a broader historiographical question: When and why did women gradually disappear from many kinds of agricultural work in Western societies?

The settlement of the external debt of insolvent sovereign borrowers has become one of the most important issues in relations between the north and south since the outbreak of the global debt crisis in the early 1980s. For the past eight years representatives of governments and international organizations, bankers, and scientists have suggested several proposals and plans to solve the present debt crisis. The most prominent schemes in this respect are the Baker Plan of 1985, which suggested massive new credits for the most highly indebted developing countries, and the recently adopted Brady Plan, which proposes partial debt discounts and reductions in interest rates. Both of these debt settlement proposals were initiated by the United States and are supported by the other principal creditor countries. However, despite the ten years of crisis management, world leaders have not yet agreed upon a longterm solution to the current debt problems. In the history of the capitalist world economy, the current problems of coping with a global debt crisis do not represent a unique event. Rather, recent empirical studies demonstrate that sovereign borrowers have experienced many instances of debt-servicing difficulties during the past 150 years (Eichengreen and Portes 1986; White 1986; Eichengreen and Lindert 1989; Marichal 1989; Suter 1989).

Nepal is a predominantly rural nation: Most people live in villages and make their living as subsistence farmers. The Nepalese government, assisted by international donor agencies, administers projects directed at improving the conditions of life for these rural people. Images of villages and village life accompany the promotion of development ideals. Radio Nepal has actors playing the part of villagers in didactic skits aimed at convincing rural people that they should consult doctors for their health problems or should feed oral rehydration solution to children suffering from diarrhea. Schoolbooks contain illustrations of village scenes and talk about village life as they inform children about development programs. When development policy makers plan programs, they discuss what villagers do, how they react, and what they think. Together, these images coalesce into a typical, generic village, turning all the villages of rural Nepal into the village.

The relationships among schooling, language, and knowledge—especially through the systematic comparison of the organization, form, function, and acquisition of institutionalized knowledge—in literate and nonliterate societies has hardly been examined. This essay attempts such an analysis, focusing on knowledge acquired through the use of language, because language is the major medium for imparting knowledge in schools and for social reproduction in the larger society, because knowledge acquired through the use of language is readily identifiable and testable, and because language is one of the major terms of the present analysis. The proposed elastic concept of schooling views schooling as a cover term for institutionalized learning in any society, literate or nonliterate. It thus questions the analytical adequacy of the received, Euro-American, concept of schooling as a unitary phenomenon based on the dual assumption that the school specializes in the transmission of literate knowledge and that literacy education is coterminous with formal education.