“It is one thing to be one of the Great; it is another to be noble.” The first are perhaps nobles as defined by locality, but they are not loved nor recognized by the People or by the Prince; the others are “well regarded and appreciated,” their nobility being linked not only to their birth but also to the recognition of their titles and merits. According to Bartolo, the Florentine jurist Lap da Castiglionchio attempted, around 1370, the difficult exercise of combining the rival definitions of nobility that circulated in the Italy of his times, and the justification of his own nobility. He wanted very much to be noble, but not “great”. Who then are these great people from whom these nobles mean to distinguish themselves?

From the time of the Spanish invasion, in the Andean world as in Mexico, a mere handful of conquistadores came to impose their domination upon the indigent masses. One cannot, therefore, begin by speaking of minorities nor of the marginalization of Amerindian populations, even when these decrease dramatically following the demographic catastrophe of the sixteenth century, for in spite of this they remain significantly more numerous than the Spanish. Yet it is true that the term Indian appears, from its origins even, as a derogatory term (see the flood of contemporary literature on savages, idolaters, and so forth) and that it is in fact applied even now in countries such as Peru and Bolivia, where the autochthonous substratum survives in many regions, to the populations least integrated into national life, who might be considered, in this sense, as “marginal.” What, then, has taken place during these last five centuries?

Religion … appears in all different sorts in Syria: Turks, Jews, Heretics, Schismatics, Naturalists, Idolaters; or to be more exact these are genera that have their species in great number, for in Aleppo alone we counted sixteen types of religions of which four were Turks different from each other; of Idolaters, there remains only one sort which worships the sun; of Naturalists, those who maintain the natural essence of God with some superstition concerning cows and who come from this side of the borders of Mogor; and the others without superstitions named Druze, living in Anti-Lebanon under a prince called the Emir. They pay a tribute to the Great Lord, and live in their own manner, naturally. From this one can see how necessary it is to have good missionaries, and virtuous ones, for all the scandals that go on in this Babylon, and learned men to refute so many errors. There are fourteen Sects or Nations differing from each other completely in Religion, in rite, in language, and in their manner of dressing: seven of these are Infidels, and seven Christians. The Infidels are Turks or Ottomans. Arabs, Kurds, Turcomans, Jezides, Druze and Jews. Among the Turks there are, moreover, several sects and cabals affecting Religious sentiments just as there are among the Jews.

Mexico's most famous holiday is, without doubt, the Day of the Dead. At the end of October, large numbers of foreign visitors descend upon Mexico to witness colorful—some would say carnivalesque—ritual performances and artistic displays. Decorated breads, paper cutouts, and plastic toys, most of them humorously playing on the theme of death, are evident everywhere. Sculpted sugar candies in the form of skulls, skeletons, and caskets suggest an almost irreverent, macabre confrontation with mortality. During November 1 and November 2, Mexicans clean, decorate, and maintain vigil over the graves of relatives. Tombstones and burial sites are adorned with flowers, candles, and food, all aesthetically arranged in honor of the deceased. Some Mexicans claim that the souls of the departed watch over their living relatives during these few days. Negligent family members await punishment, whether on earth or in the afterlife. This belief is invoked throughout Mexico to explain the substantial time, money, and energy invested in the two-day ceremony.

At the end of a distinguished career as chronicler of the Burgundian court, Georges Chastellain (1404–75) penned a quick sketch of the outstanding accomplishments of his duke, Charles the Bold. Accustomed to expositions awash in chivalric pomp, Chastellain employed a different tack to commemorate this sovereign: He sketched eleven “magnificences” performed by the duke of Burgundy, all reconstructed images of this prince's engagement with ceremony. Foremost among this snapshot collection of state ritual was neither a tournament, nor a wedding ceremony, nor even a processional entry. What stood out, in Chastellain's estimation, as Charles' greatest deed was something more riveting and more powerful than any of these spectacles so beloved by the fifteenth-century Burgundian court:

The first [magnificence] was at Brussels, where, seated on his throne, his sword unsheathed and held by his Marshall, he gathered the men of Ghent arranged kneeling before him and at his pleasure and in their presence cut and tore up the political charters they bore. Done for permanent record, this action was without parallel.

For Chastellain, the supreme magnificence of Charles the Bold was a lesson in exemplary punishment, the public abasement of the aldermen and guild deans of the Flemish city of Ghent in January 1469, a year and a half after a city revolt of rank-and-file guildsmen had unsettled celebrations in honor of his accession to the countship of Flanders.

Public practices for the suppression of witchcraft are periodically performed throughout Sub-Saharan Africa. Anthropologists have generally sought to interpret such practices rather than explain them. This interpretation rests on assumptions about what such practices might mean for social actors rather than on the actual social processes which make their public performance possible. In the anthropological view, the performance of anti-witchcraft practices amounts to an expression of discontent with aspects of social and economic life deriving from the terms of Africa's engagement with the contemporary world. Antiwitchcraft practices and the witchcraft discourse of which they are part are understood to constitute locally constructed critiques of social transformation and modernity. But, whatever the coherence of the symbolic logic expressed in anti-witchcraft practices, such accounts fail to explain why large numbers of people participate in such practices from time to time or how such practices become public.

The opening of the formerly closed, state socialist societies of East Central Europe has provided the opportunity to bring new empirical evidence to bear upon models of profession-state relations developed in pluralist western societies. The classic view of Tocqueville and Durkheim has been that professions are an intermediary group linking individuals and the state. Although not always explicitly stated, this model served as the basis for scholarly work on the professions in the post-World War II period, where it (more or less) fit the image of a differentiated pluralist society. Most work on the professions was based on the Anglo-American case.

But even in the United States, state support was more central to maintaining professional authority than was originally thought. Without explicitly discarding the model, Freidson (1970) introduced a distinction between corporate and technical (clinical) autonomy that provided a way out of the paradox he identified, that both aspects of professional autonomy are protected by the state. Corporate autonomy refers to the political power of the organized profession to define the social and economic context of professional work, and clinical autonomy, to the control of decision making in the workplace. Testing his hypothesis on the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union, Freidson argued that despite differing degrees of corporate autonomy, the medical profession retained clinical control of decision making, the core of professional autonomy, even in the extreme case of the former Soviet Union.

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.