Gordon Griffiths and George Nadel have shown convincingly that the Revolt of the Netherlands shows some resemblance to the four great revolutions—the English, American, French and Russian revolutions—that Crane Brinton analyzed and compared in his stimulating work The Anatomy of Revolution. Both authors have been perhaps too modest. The resemblances are even more striking than they suggested; the Dutch Revolt had some features in common with the other revolutions which did not receive sufficient consideration in Brinton's analysis

Among the causes of the demise of the Fourth Republic, one prominently mentioned has been the incapacity of governments to govern. Not merely cabinet instability as such, but the association of premiers' popularity in the Assembly with their disinclination toward bold policy innovations, is the charge. Stability indeed there was: continuity of ministers under changing cabinets, relative persistence of cabinets (such as those of Queuille and Mollet) that maintained the existing political balance or even defended the Assembly against innovation. Stability, too, of policy: the continuation of the Indo-Chinese war and the Algerian war, for example, long after a policy change might have been considered. Underlying this sometimes artificial stability was the threat that an innovating premier or minister might soon find himself returned to the status of an ordinary denuty.

In recent years sociological work in the field of stratification and social mobility has become, in at least one sense of the term, impressively cosmopolitan. National sample surveys which include data on inter-generational occupational mobility have been carried out in every major Western nation and in a good many non-Western societies as well, and those have inspired some ambitious comparative analyses of social mobility. This development, as S. M. Miller puts it, has had the virtue of making "the study of mobility one of the few fields of sociology which has overcome national parochialisms”. True as this is, however, it must be said that there are forms of parochialism other than national. Much contemporary research into social mobility suffers from one of these - a parochialism of time rather than of place, as it were, the parochialism of presentism. My purpose here is to suggest what is lost as a result of that parochialism, and to argue that a sense of the past, an ability to see his subject in historical depth, is not a luxury but a necessity for the student of social mobility.

The years of colonial rule in Malawi (formerly Nyasaland) were characterised by the imposition of a political and social system whereby a superior European authority attempted to exercise its will over a territory already populated by Africans. This enforced colonial relationship determined the pattern of political change within the Protectorate, so that any variation in the fundamentals of the relationship was bound to have important repercussions on the total colonial situation. From the earliest years of British rule in Malawi, Africans sought to modify or alter the colonial relationship and it is this sort of African sentiment and activity in reaction to alien control and domination that has come to be regarded as manifestations of nationalism not only in colonial Malawi but also in the other ex-colonial territories of Africa. Thomas Hodgkin, for example, has lumped under the general rubric of ‘nationalism’ “any organisation or group that explicitly asserts the rights, claims and aspirations of a given African society (from the level of the language-group to that of ‘Pan-Africa’) in opposition to European authority, whatever its institutional form and objectives”. Others, however, although appreciating the deep roots of nationalism have tended to confine the use of the term to the post-1945 period with its emergence of nation-wide movements seeking self-government and independence. They have argued that to include every social movement of protest against alien rule as a part of nationalism obscures the political meaning of the concept, blurs the important distinctions that can be made among African responses to the colonial situation, and makes comparative analysis difficult.

Man not only lives within history; he is changed by it, and he causes it to change. This interplay between individual lives and wider historical forces is many-sided, erratic, seemingly contradictory, charged as it is by capricious human emotions. Yet there are common patterns—shared images and styles of imagery—which men call forth in their efforts to deal with the threat and promise of a changing outer and inner world. These patterns can sometimes be seen most clearly in cultures outside of one's own, and I have found them to be extremely vivid in present-day Japan.

Studies of the role of land tenure in the economic and social history of China are flawed by the unexamined assumption that the sale of land by impoverished farmers was the only process that generated high rates of tenancy and concentration of ownership of land. Debt-sales are assumed to occur as part of a cycle of immiserization in which a peasant population outgrows its landed resources and owner-farmers are forced to sell their lands and become the tenants or hired laborers of wealthy landlords. This essay demonstrates the improbability of such a scenario and establishes its opposite: that rates of tenancy and concentration of landownership rise, not in periods of economic decline but in periods of prosperity, and not through debt-sales but through the alternate processes of reclamation, migration, and changes in the mode of landlord farm management.

The forms and processes of local-level social organisation seen today in fishing communities in northern Europe can be fully appreciated only after their history is recognized and explored. Until the middle of this century, the predominant form of organisation was the joint maritime household, which involved men and women in separate sets of collaborative activities. With changing technology, rising standards of living, and the intervention of the institutions of modernity, women everywhere in northern Europe have been able to disengage themselves from their former obligations, doing so largely in order to realise their aspirations for domestic independence. The men, however, continue to own their boats in partnerships and to pool their labour, drawing upon relationships of kinship, affinity, and neighbourhood as economic and social recnnrces

Recently attention has been devoted to the use of apparent eclipse references in African oral traditions for dating at least a few remembered events with some certainty and precision. Unquestionably the few such references in these sources could be invaluable in charting islands of absoluteness in a sea of relativity. In fact their very importance demands that their study should, from the very beginning, be undertaken as carefully as possible, following the example set in refining the paths of African eclipses. One way in which a higher level of critical analysis can be attained is by bringing the rich comparative data to bear on the problems associated with the interpretation of historical eclipse references. This paper attempts to initiate this process by discussing some results of research into eclipse references preserved in oral historical sources and by scontemporaneous chroniclers and observers.

As in all Asian countries, modernization in China was a result of Western impact. The year 1860 was a turning point in Chinese history. Prior to that year tradition reigned supreme, and all foreign nations were considered as distant uncivilized peoples whose best fortune lay in becoming vassals of the Middle Kingdom. A preliminary sign of change came in 1839–1842, when China suffered defeat in the Opium War with Great Britain. The defeat, humiliating as it was at the time, proved insufficient to shake China's inertia and was soon almost forgotten. The age of change had, however, arrived. Internal rebellion flashed up in the fifties. In addition, a new war with France and Britain started in 1856. In 1860, the emperor was a fugitive at Jehol; his summer palace was burned down by the invaders; a humiliating “unequal” treaty was concluded. The wound was too deep to be ignored, and the ground for reform was prepared.

Throughout his career Gilberto Freyre has refused to be classified as a fullfledged member of any academic craft union. He has preferred the title “writer” or “essayist” rather than “historian” or “sociologist”. Such courage is refreshing in an era when the labels of scholarly expertise, however baroque in their refinements, have come to be taken more and more seriously. Disdainfully rejecting the cult of specialization, Freyre has set out to “see the truth and see it whole”.

The spectacular confrontation between the Chinese government and the Falungong spiritual movement has focused attention on the very visible conflict between state and religion in China's urban areas. Conflict and violence have also accompanied the explosion of popular religious activities in the rural areas of post-Mao China, where much of the conflict is subdued and largely invisible to the outside observer. Christians are denied the permits necessary to make “home worship” legal; popular religious temples are confiscated and occupied by authorities hungry for physical and cultural space; proselytizers seeking to spread the Word or the Way are run out of town on a rail. Other examples, however, are much more spectacular, and recall the mobilizing force enjoyed by certain religious groups in imperial times. Wu Yangming was arrested in 1995 for having founded the “Anointed King Sect” in eastern Anhui, which was to “unite the country” in its spirit (Maclean's 1996). The “Lightening from the East” sect preached the second coming of Christ as a woman, and prophesied the end of the world according to a mixture of folk Buddhist and Christian soteriological motifs (China Study Journal 1997). In the context of the group studied in this essay, the Way of the Temple of the Heavenly Immortals, a sect leader summoned village cadres to a Temple festival in 1985 and delivered—in trance—a message to village cadres:

German coffee planters in nineteenth-century Alta Verapaz, Guatemala were also ethnographers, archaeologists, and geographers who published their works in Germany, the United States, and Guatemala. Their published works, as well as coffee plantation records, government correspondence, judicial records and other archival materials reveal how German coffee planters-cum-ethnographers drew upon ethnographic knowledge and representations to forge a reliable labor force. Like ethnographers in Britain's colonies, German settlers in Alta Verapaz understood the potential symmetry between ethnography and the governance of indigenous peoples. Their ethnographic knowledges also push us to reconsider distinctions drawn between German cosmopolitan ethnographic traditions and British functionalist ones and demonstrate how ethnographic knowledge and cultural difference could be deployed to forge new kinds of racial capitalism. In Guatemala, the intimate relationship between the rise of capitalism and ethnography shaped the anti-communism of mid-twentieth-century anthropology in the region.

In a recent CSSH article, Jutta Sperling argued that in early modern Venice, political theory was a hermetically enclosed linguistic system, characterized by paradoxes and tautologies.J. Sperling, “The Paradox of Perfection: Reproducing the Body Politic in Late Renaissance Venice,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 41 (1999), 3–32, at p. 16. I am uneasy when historians (or anthropologists for that matter) insist that the “real” significance of what people said and did was inaccessible to them at the time, a position that might be described as methodological atheism and which is generally associated with functionalism (although Sperling's analysis is more like “dysfunctionalism”). By contrast, like Clifford Geertz, I would argue for methodological agnosticism. I do however entirely agree with Sperling that the “second serrata . . . institutionalized tensions between mutually exclusive requirements” (5), and that the paradoxes of Venetian political discourse were “both constitutive and destructive of the political system” (32). Sperling's approach can also be contrasted with S. Chojnacki, “Identity and Ideology in Renaissance Venice: The Third Serrata,” in Venice Reconsidered: The History and Civilization of an Italian City-State, 12977mdash;1797, (J. Martin and D. Romano, eds., Baltimore, 2000, 263–94), which sees patrician marriage legislation as part of a positive programme of self-definition. In what we might describe as a “deconstruction” of the so-called “myth of Venice,” Sperling argued that it collapses under the weight of its own internal contradictions, which reveal it to be “non-sensical.”Sperling's article includes full bibliographic references to the literature on the “myth of Venice.” The insistence that Venice was a perfect state not only prevented nobles from dealing effectively with conspicuous consumption and electoral corruption but made it impossible for them to admit to the real source of their problems without destroying their claims to legitimacy. In particular, Sperling singles out the demographic and social consequences of a commitment to lineal purity among nobles, resulting in limited marriage, inflated dowries, the enforced placement of women in nunneries, and increasing economic divisions within a nobility whose official ideology remained one of Republican equality.

In this article I engage the work of three scholars, each of whom speaks to reactions to Muslims or interventions in their lives in the United States and Europe. Each is critical of these reactions and interventions, and traces them to inconsistencies in liberal thought and practice. My purpose is to interrogate their theorizing by applying it to the interface of liberalism with another religious Other, one that tends to generate far less sympathy in the predominantly secular and liberal academy: religiously motivated Jewish settlers in Israeli-occupied territories. The first scholar is Saba Mahmood, who recently argued against U.S. involvement in trying to alter the theology and practices of Muslims in the Middle East. The second is Judith Butler, who in a 2008 article addressed Muslims in the Netherlands, the problems of citizenship, and the right to religious freedom. Finally, Talal Asad has spoken to issues of violence, arguing that suicide bombing is really not so different from state violences perpetrated by the United States and Israel. Each of their arguments contains critiques of secular liberalism and the contradictory ethics and inconsistencies within liberal thought and practice, and each carries different but related implications. My intent is to begin to explore the possibilities of applying the analyses of these writers to the case of conflict between religiously motivated settlers in Israeli-occupied territories and left-wing, secular, and liberal Israeli Jews. Although this case mirrors broader representations of “Islam and the West,” it is rarely considered in comparison when such representations are deconstructed. The questions raised through this uncomfortable comparison will, I hope, contribute to broader conversations about the challenges and complexities of living together with differences that may be threatening if not altogether incommensurable.

The gorgons had thus the same effect as paradoxes. For paralysis means: immobility; and immobility: to be unable to observe (Niklas Luhmann).Niklas Luhmann, “Sthenographie und Euryalistik,” Paradoxien, Dissonanzen, Zusammenbrüche, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht und K. Ludwig Pfeiffer, eds. (Frankfurt a. M., 1991), 58. Recently, the “paradoxical” character of sixteenth-century Venetian politics and culture has become the focus of attention among scholars of early modern Venice. In her book on City Culture and the Madrigal at Venice, Martha Feldman states that “Venice was above all a paradoxical city,” given the “divided consciousness” of Venetians whose urban culture oscillated “in a peculiarly ambivalent counterpoise” to contemporary court culture.Martha Feldman, City Culture and the Madrigal at Venice (University of California Press, 1995), 10. Margaret Rosenthal has examined how Veronica Franco, poetess and prostitute in sixteenth-century Venice, portrayed herself as an “honest courtesan,” ingeniously appropriating the oxymoronic Venus-Virgin paradigm in Venetian iconography.Margaret F. Rosenthal, The Honest Courtesan: Veronica Franco, Citizen and Writer in Sixteenth-Century Venice (University of Chicago Press, 1992). According to Edward Muir, the doge's “two contrasting personae, one so humbled and the other so splendid,” were the complementary features of a “paradoxical prince.”Edward Muir, Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice (Princeton University Press, 1981), 261. I would like to contribute to this debate by analyzing how the social practice of marriage among the patriciate and the language of perfection in sixteenth-century political discourse followed the logic of paradoxical constellations. Rather than arguing for a causal connection between social practice on the one hand and political theory on the other, I propose to apply one analytical framework to investigate the paradoxical qualities of different social, political, economic, and cultural phenomena which were at the center of politics and society in Late Renaissance Venice.

Was bedeutet die Bewegung? What does this movement mean?

Bringt die Ost mir frohe Kunde? Goethe, cited from “West-östlicher Divan,” on title page of George B. Sansom, The Western World and Japan: A Study in the Interaction of European and Asiatic Cultures (New York: Knopf, 1968). Sansom, of course, was certain that the West did not need to learn anything from the East. Does the East bring me glad tidings?

An analogy comparing Shin Buddhism—the largest, most active, and most liberal of Japan's traditional Buddhist institutions—to Protestant Christianity has existed for a long time, beginning with the sixteenth century Jesuit encounter with Japan. See Galen Amstutz, Interpreting Amida: Orientalism and History in the Study of Pure Land Buddhism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997). The analogy has always been distinctly limited in scope and in important respects has also always—in the context of all world history—remained primarily confined to the Shin-Christian encounter. Apparently, the kind of evolution of consciousness it indicates is historically rare. Notably, the notion of protestant has never developed into a systematic comparative term even in religious studies. See Amstutz, Interpreting Amida, 180–1.

Anthropologists' view of law, as Bohannan (1963: 288) recently summarized, is generally concerned with two aspects: one studies the legal procedures of foreign cultures and discovers and compares inquisitorial and correctional devices, and the other focuses on basic axioms or ‘postulates’ underlying the stated norms or laws of a society. Bohannan amplifies the scope by noting that not only the ‘institutions of counteraction’ should be studied but also the events that precede and follow counteraction, for the anthropologist has learnt that legal institutions are, after all, a product of and constantly molded by indigenous culture. We are better aware of this interrelationship in simple cultures (for examples, see Bohannan, 1957; Gluckman, 1955,1965; Hoebel, 1954; Llewellyn and Hoebel, 1941; Pospisil, 1958; Schapera, 1938; and Beattie, 1957). The anthropologist has attempted to compare and analyze the legal institutions of one society with another, and tried to learn what the natives thought they ought to do, and what they thought constituted a ‘breach’ of norms.

In Brazil, ever since the thirties, when the sociologist, Gilberto Freyre, made pioneering use of journalism as a source for his studies of the past, considerable weight has been given to journalistic texts on the grounds that their news and editorial sections, as well as their advertising columns, portray society with a reasonable degree of accuracy.

This article examines a case study from war-torn Sierra Leone in 1994, in which a rumor galvanized violent public action and only dissipated when a seemingly unrelated issue was resolved. I argue that the circulation of rumors can foment the emergence of political narratives focused on topics that are otherwise taboo, and creates the space to act on them without overtly disturbing the status quo. I analyze the content of interview material with residents of the town of Makeni and eight months of articles printed in national newspapers to illustrate the subtle emergence of tribal accusations in the context of military mutiny. The rumor itself concerned an imminent attack by mutinous, criminal soldiers (called sobels) on the town they were meant to defend. This instigated a mass demonstration, shooting into a crowd, political mudslinging, and accusations that some politicians were trying to “tribalize the war.” Responding to the distress, the government removed the offending “tribalist” administrator from Makeni, and all talk of sobel fears dissipated, even as the reality of sobels was borne out in confirmed attacks and a high profile court-martialing. That tribal favoritism was the real issue was illustrated by residents' embrace of their new military administrator and the town's unprecedented move towards development in the midst of renewed security threats.