The central question of this article is why the minority problem has remained under control in Israel but has led to an internal war in Northern Ireland. This question is explored within the analytic frame of the notion of a plural society.

At the turn of the twenty-first century two countries—one at the center of Europe and the other at its periphery—officially declared converts to minority religions to be threats to national security. The first is Germany, where since early 2006 Minister of Interior Affairs Wolfgang Schäuble has repeatedly warned against the danger posed by German converts to Islam (e.g., Schmid 2007). Recently, after two German Muslims were caught collecting chemicals used to make explosives, the Christian Democrat Union (CDU) faction's leader Wolfgang Bosbach and its Bavarian Interior Minister Günther Beckstein suggested the government register and follow all who have converted to Islam (Küchen 2007). Bosbach said, “A convert registry only makes sense given that we know some of them may be radicalized after converting” (Ringel 2007).

It has become a nearly universal reflex to think about the contemporary Middle East as a region in which secularism is in decline. This is particularly true in countries like Egypt, where the modernist imagination of independence-era socialism seems to have been eclipsed by a grassroots vision of the future as a thoroughly Islamic place, and where the nature of the government's stance with regard to secularism and religion has long been an important question (Winegar 2009; Agrama, this CSSH issue). Since the late 1970s, a decade which saw the Iranian Revolution, the rise of televangelism in the United States, and the beginnings of an extraordinary wave of Protestant conversion in Latin America, it has become popular to produce histories of secularism that will help explain the failure of “the secularization thesis,” the idea that with economic development, the spread of education, and the advancement of Science, religion was a doomed commodity like pounce pots and butter churns. The moral vision of the popular long-running Star Trek mythology, in which humans as a species have given up religion altogether, seems ever more remote the closer its technological vision becomes. Surprisingly durable, religion refuses to wait quietly in the churchyard for people to visit. Instead, it stands on the street corner denouncing bad behavior and calling the world to salvation. But now the street corner is a television broadcasting satellite (or a cassette tape, or a website), and religion's call has succeeded in ways that no Cold War sociologist or political scientist could have imagined.

Historians and anthropologists in Sri Lanka have tended to migrate in opposite directions, but away from the multiethnic confusion of the port cities. Typi- cally, the heterogeneous, semi-Westernized, postcolonial urban society of Colombo and the larger towns has been only a transit point on intellectual journeys outbound to European archives or inbound to “traditional culture.” This was certainly my viewpoint as I arrived “inbound” in Sri Lanka for my first anthropological fieldwork. I took only passing notice of the clerks of mixed European and Sri Lankan descent who sold me stationery supplies at Cargill's and mosquito nets at Carvalho's. These people are given the official designation of Burghers in the government census: they are the racially mixed descendants of the Portuguese, Dutch, and British personnel who occupied the island during four and a half centuries of colonial rule.

The politicians of the Brazilian Empire (1822–89) have provided the inspiration for a tremendous production of historical writing. Scholars have experienced difficulty, however, in making valid generalizations concerning the career patterns of imperial politicians: recruitment, training, integration, and advancement within the ranks of the political elite. Good biographies furnish useful details about individual politicians and their careers, but do not identify the system adopted by the monarchy for the purpose of developing its own political elite. Generalizations have been based on individual cases, and no adequate treatment of collective career patterns exists.

The image has become an iconic one: five young men in dirty uniforms kneel in the middle of a dusty plain with their hands behind their heads. They squint in the blinding midday sun, their faces expressing anxiety and a measure of fear. A Turkish soldier leans to talk to one of them, appearing calm, even friendly. To one side another Turkish soldier whose face we do not see stands guard. This photograph has become one of the most famous images to come out of the Cyprus conflict. The men's kneeling posture, the fright in their eyes, and the apparent calm of the soldiers all evoke a vulnerability to violence. And like the bloody photo of a woman and her children murdered in their Nicosia home that was used for decades by the Turkish Cypriot administration, or like certain photographs of distraught women crying for losses that we can only imagine, the image of these five young men has been reprinted in pamphlets and brochures, newspapers and books, in ways that take for granted its power to evoke their uncertain fate.

When Thomas Hobbes arrived in France at the end of 1640, “the first of all that fled” from the growing threat of civil war in England, he began an exile which was to last eleven years, an exile which was moreover to prove the most intellectually fruitful period of his whole life. In Paris he was to reach the height of his polemical powers, conducting his debates with Descartes on the existence of secondary qualities, and with Bishop Bramhall on free will. In Paris he was also to bring to fruition a lifetime of speculation about the science of politics, completing the De Cive and writing the whole of Leviathan.

The debate over estate and class continues to be one of the more enduring in colonial Latin American history. At its core lies an argument, much older than the terms estate and class, about the degree of rigidity of the colonial social structure. Evidence of this older concern can be found in the writings of Sergio Bagú (1952) and Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán (1946) among others. The formulation of the debate into more precise sociological terms originated with the publication of an article in 1963 by Lyle McAlister in the Hispanic American Historical Review entitled “Social Structure and Social Change in Colonial New Spain.” In that article McAlister characterized the social structure of Latin America on the eve of independence as shifting from inequality based on estates to a new system founded upon economic class. What McAlister sought to underline was the transition from a social structure with static, defined statuses to a more open system based upon property and wealth. Since then the terms class and estate have been utilized to signify relatively open or closed social structures. Magnus Mörner (1967), for example, argued that the emerging system of economic classes could be found in the rural areas, whereas the urban areas retained more of a static, closed quality. The dichotomy of estate and class has since been widely utilized to characterize Latin American social structure.

The recent influx to the United States of a new large wave of immigrants from Hispanic America and Asia has reinvigorated immigration and ethnic studies, including those devoted to the analysis of the origins and process of international migrations. The accumulation of research in this field in the last fifteen years has brought about a shift in the theoretical paradigm designed to interpret these movements. The classical approach explains the mass flow into North America of immigrants (from Southern and Eastern Europe, in the period 1880 to 1914), as an international migration interpreted in terms of push and pull forces. Demographic and economic conditions prompted individuals to move from places with a surplus of population, little capital, and underemployment, to areas where labor was scarce and wages were higher (Jerome, 1926; Thomas, 1973; Piore, 1979; Gould, 1979). This interpretation views individual decisions and actions as the outcome of a rational economic calculation of the costs and benefits of migration. Recent studies of international population movements have reconceptualized this problem, recasting the unit(s) of analysis from separate nation-states, linked by one-way transfer of migrants between two unequally developed economies, to a comprehensive economic system composed of a dominant core and a dependent periphery— a world system that forms a complex network of supranational exchanges of technology, capital, and labor (Castells, 1975; Cardoso and Faletto, 1979; Kritz, 1983; Sassen-Koob, 1980; Portes, 1978; Portes and Walton, 1981; Wood, 1982). In this conceptualization, the development of the core and the underdevelopment of the peripheral societies are seen not as two distinct phenomena, but as two aspects of the same process—the expanding capitalist world system, explained in terms of each other. Generated by the economic imbalances and social dislocations resulting from the incorporation of the peripheries into the orbit of the core, international labor migrations between the developing and industrialized regions are viewed as part of a global circulation of resources within a single system of world economy. This interpretation shifts the central emphasis from the individual (and his/her decisions) to the broad structural determinants of human migrations within a global economic system.

This paper is an empirical study of the cultural context and historical development of the division of labour by sex in the farming systems of two peoples of the West African cocoa belt: the Yoruba of Western Nigeria and the Beti of South-Central Cameroun. It examines the way in which cocoa as an export crop has been integrated into two different indigenous economies, one in which farming was predominantly a set of tasks for males in the pre-cocoa era, and the other in which farming was women's work.

Could Britons in India commit murder? More precisely, could they be prosecuted and sentenced for doing so? As these epigraphs suggest, the Raj was deeply preoccupied with elaborating minute taxonomies of violence and death. In a variety of ways, British violence toward indigenes was made an object of policy initiatives by the Government of India. Defining violence, both indigenous and foreign, was one key task of the Raj, along with clarifying the boundary between legitimate and illegitimate violence. But this boundary shifted constantly over the colonial period, and indeed, it has continued to do so ever since. Given the extensive legal violence of colonial conquest, when and why were specific acts of white violence defined as murder?

There was a time when Western political science was somewhat sensitized to the historical perspective from which “exploited men” might view the making of modern world order. During the Cold War, and with the rise of the Non-Aligned Movement especially, debates in the Western Academy made regular reference to what might be called the “development/security nexus.” Many political scientists claimed that the peculiarities of “Third World” development could engender security threats for the “First World.” But it was further acknowledged that Third World politicians (especially at the Bandung Conference in 1955) could see their post-colonial development threatened by a West that, still exhibiting racial hierarchies domestically, might wish to retain these hierarchies internationally.2

Most of the extraordinary waves of terror which have swept many Latin American societies since 1970 have occurred in guerrilla-based insurgencies or even civil wars. Because of the massive body counts produced during these confrontations between revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries based in or linked with a government, human rights organizations have issued a long series of reports about terror—especially that which has been carried out by incumbent regimes and death squads—and which has been supplemented by the exposés of the guerrillas themselves. Amnesty International, the Human Rights group in the Organization of American States (OAS), and Americas Watch have been the major international actors documenting the wave of terror. Many independent national groups, such as El Salvador's “Socorro Juridico” and other human rights organizations linked with church bodies have undertaken that more perilous task at home.

In the aftermath of the February 1986 “revolution” that forced Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos out of the Philippines, the government of Corazon Aquino turned the presidential palace, Malacañang, into a museum and in doing so meant to put the Marcoses legacy of excess on display. A guidebook on the presidential palace describes one instance of that excessiveness, in which the doors leading to the Grand Staircase are said to have “depict[ed] the Philippine legend of ‘Malakas’ (Strong) and ‘Maganda’ (Beautiful), the first Filipino man and woman who emerged from a large bamboo stalk. Mrs. Marcos liked to think of President Marcos and herself in terms of these legendary First Filipinos.” They identified so thoroughly with this myth that they had portraits of themselves done as Malakas and Maganda in the palace—seminude and emerging from a forest of bamboo stalks (see Plate 1). In 1985 they even commissioned a group of Filipino academics to rewrite the legend that culminated in the celebration of the Marcos regime.

Confronted with the reality of cargo cults, postcolonial politics, disunited working classes, and the United Nations seminars on racism, theorists of different persuasions have found themselves in the last twenty years having to explain—or explain away—ethnic phenomena. In his recent article in this journal (CSSH 29:1, 24–55), G. Carter Bentley1 points out the deficiencies in the two pervading schools of thought on ethnicity and fruitfully advocates applying Bourdieu's concepts of “practice” and “habitus” to the study of ethnicity. This appropriation of Bourdieu's concept of the habitus to the study of ethnicity is surely innovative, and Bentley argues effectively that we should look at practice for an objective “handle” on ethnicity. Nevertheless, Bentley's approach suffers for two reasons.

Events of the last two hundred years have led many scholars to divide the societies of the world into contrasting pairs, such as developed—under-developed, advanced—backward, traditional—modern. Central to these concepts are not only ideas about the level of technological development, but the very character of the societies and cultures which are compared and contrasted as well. Professor Edward Shils has recently remarked that the traditional society is one in which, among other things, there is a strong attachment to the past, by which behavior is determined and validated. Solutions to problems old and new are determined by the past of the society, and modernization quickens when ties to the past begin to be cut and new criteria for determining and validating behavior are invoked.

In 1868, a clergymen told the annual congress of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science that “he had long lived in the town of Liverpool, and had been placed in circumstances there which made him frequently regret that there were no places in which women could find employment. The great want was of employment for every class of women, not only for the higher class, but for those placed in humbler circumstances.” At earlier conferences, however, a number of speakers described the abundant opportunities for female employment in other Lancashire towns. Census figures make it clear that the reason lay in the different industrial bases of these towns.

This article compares the strategies through which Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Indonesia have regulated religion and addressed questions of what constitutes “the religious” in the post-independence period. We show that the dominant approach pursued by the Indian state has been one of judicialization—the delegation of religious questions to the high courts—while in Indonesia it has predominantly been one of bureaucratization—the regulation of religious issues by the Ministry of Religious Affairs. Contrary to the expectation that judicialization devitalizes normative conflicts while bureaucratization, more frequently associated with authoritarian politics, “locks” these conflicts “in,” we show that these expectations have not materialized, and at times, the effects have been reverse. Engaging the literatures on judicialization and on bureaucratization, we argue that what determines the consequences of the policy toward religion is less the choice of the implementing institution (i.e., the judiciary or bureaucracy) than the mode of delegation (vertical versus horizontal) which shapes the relationship between the policy-maker and the institution implementing it. Bureaucrats, judges, and elected politicians in multicultural societies around the world encounter questions of religious nature very similar to those that authorities in India and Indonesia have faced. How they address the challenge of religious heterogeneity has a profound impact on prospects of nation-building and democratization. It is therefore imperative that the consequences of the policy toward religion, and even more so the consequences of political delegation, be studied more systematically.

In recent years the study of the ‘Diffusion of Innovations’ has become a very fashionable subject. Everett M. Rogers stressed the fact that his book on the ‘Diffusion of Innovations’ was based on 506 diffusion studies published in the last decades. Of course quantity is not necessarily synonymous with quality and brilliant ideas are not a function of the number of titles printed. The first of the major conclusions reached by Rogers after perusing the 506 diffusion studies is that ‘innovativeness of individuals is related to a modern rather than a traditional orientation’. One may doubt whether such an extraordinary conclusion was worth the input of energy and goodwill that allegedly went into its production, but there is no doubt that innovations and their diffusion are a topic of major relevance in the study of social development. Innovations are to history what mutations are to biology. Actually, innovations show a remarkable tendency to cluster in time and space, and this incidentally suggests that attention should not be devoted exclusively to the eccentric individual genius of the innovators, but should also be extended to the anonymous forces of the environment.