It is increasingly fashionable for anthropologists to castigate themselves (or at least to castigate other anthropologists) for failing to take into account the larger or global processes that affect the small communities they study. We accuse ourselves, for example, of treating peasant communities as if they were primitive isolates and of failing to consider the external forces that created those communities and that cause them to operate the way they do. While this accusation may be warranted for the earliest work on peasant communities, I suggest that for quite some time now the anthropological perspective regarding these communities has shifted. In fact, I will argue here that many anthropologists have been all too ready to accept global views of peasant communities and social relations without proper consideration of the interplay between local and global processes.

A history of the Maraka textile industry provides a glimpse into the fitful and uneven social and economic changes taking place during the nineteenth century in the area of the Western Sudan that is now part of Mali. Although the major historical events of this period are well understood, historians know very little about the social and economic history of the West African interior. Exactly how the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade, renewed Islamic militancy, and European territorial encroachment influenced African societies remains poorly understood. This is even more apparent for the Middle Niger valley, located near the geographical center of continental West Africa. Paradoxically, the gradual end of the Atlantic slave trade and the coincident expansion of the so-called legitimate trade in agricultural crops increased the use of slaves within Africa to meet demand for all types of African goods. The nineteenth century was thus an era of commodity production and market activity which was probably unparalleled in the history of West Africa prior to this period. The inhabitants of the Middle Niger participated in these changes, and this study describes what these changes meant to one group of African men and women.

This article examines some factors related to problems of demographic behaviour. To illustrate my arguments I will use as examples two case studies, one carried out in Argentina and the other in Ecuador. The original research was not cast in strictly demographic terms and therefore many of the relevant data cannot be presented in a precise way. However, many of my empirical findings and qualitative observations can be used in discussing problems concerning demographic behaviour.

In this essay I propose to examine an hypothesis about dowry payments in the light of certain evidence from Ireland. The sources of this evidence are, first, my own data collected during fieldwork in the small community of Beaufort, County Kerry, Ireland, and, second, the work of writers who have studied the question of dowry payment in Ireland, notably Conrad M. Arensberg, Solon T. Kimball, and K. H. Connell. The intent here is to draw attention to some of the deficiencies in Jack Goody's definition and discussion of dowry payments, and to offer alternatives to them. In particular I shall argue that Goody's discussion of dowry is centrally flawed by a discrepancy between the generality of the variables he uses to explain the geographical distribution of the practice, and the specificity of his definition of it. It is the unwarranted detail involved in the latter that leads him to obscure certain crucial variations within dowry systems more broadly defined, and to confuse the issue of the relationship between dowry and bride wealth.

The development of world-systems theory enables us to explain human migration without resorting to the theoretically barren lists of “push-pull” factors and personal motivations that characterize previous studies. Although individuals still make private decisions to move, the patterned movement of groups is better understood as an essential component in a global economic order with shifting demands for labor. National migration policies can also be interpreted within this global context. Since migration plays a central role in moving workers to regions where their labor is needed, governmental legislation regulating these movements has reflected capitalists' needs for a free labor force. It is with this in mind that Aristide Zolberg summarizes the behavior of one nation-state in the world-system as “an element in the interest-calculus of others.”

As the quotation from R. Park's 1928 work demonstrates, sociologists have a rather longstanding interest in migration and its consequences, in “the conflicts and fusions of peoples.” The period of relative tranquility between 1925 and 1955 was followed by a marked resurgence of ethnicity and a revitalization of international migrations during the 1960s and 1970s. Neither of these phenomena was confined to the Western Hemisphere or the new countries in Africa and Asia, but included a revival of ethnic mobilization in such nationstates as Great Britain, France, and Spain and the migration of millions of workers from southern Europe to the advanced industrial countries in northern Europe.