Latin American political thought and scholarship has historically evidenced preoccupation with the problem of self-definition. Simón Bolívar, for example, concerned with the distinctive quality of Latin American civilization, said that it was not European nor North American nor Indian, but a new synthesis. A century later Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, father of the Aprista political movement, insisted that he had spawned a new ideology derived from the unique reality of Indoamerica. The contemporary Christian Democratic movement formally acknowledges its debt to the European tradition but also highlights its differences, which stem from the disparity between industrial and emerging nations. The well-known thesis of Herbert Eugene Bolton and the ‘Atlantic Triangle’ of Arthur P. Whitaker are variations on the same theme.

In this article I will first investigate the response Freudian psychoanalysis received in the Netherlands from 1905, when the first Dutch analyst began to practice psychoanalysis, until the beginning of World War II. Then I will briefly describe the development of psychoanalysis after the war.

In the Netherlands as elsewhere Freudian psychoanalysis was transmitted first to the medical profession, that is to say, to a segment of the Dutch social elite. From there, Freud's ideas spread to other parts of the elite, especially the intellectuals and the religious leaders, after which psychoanalysis was filtered down to the public at large in a form the elite thought appropriate to it.

The emergence of one-party political systems among the new nations of Africa, now an unmistakable trend, has been disconcerting to social scientists for at least two reasons: first, this trend was not clearly foreseen during the period leading to independence; and, second, now that it is clearly discernible students of Africa are uncertain as to how the trend should be interpreted and evaluated. This question was discussed in a recent article by D. E. Apter from the viewpoint of political science. The present paper deals with the same problem, but from an anthropological viewpoint. It considers only the new nations in Africa south of the Sahara; these were also Apter's main concern, though he includes in his discussion some of the new nations in other parts of the world as well.

The history of agrarian reform is as long as the history of the world, extending back into medieval, ancient, and biblical times. Like many other socio-economic and political movements, agrarian reform movements have been sporadic and discontinuous, although the last two centuries have witnessed almost continuous reform attempts commencing with the French Revolution. These attempts have become very common during the last two decades and have become part and parcel of United Nations programs. Though the literature on reform is extensive, there has been no endeavor to review reform movements in a historical perspective, or to synthesize the knowledge that can be derived therefrom and utilize it in guiding or evaluating reform. The need for this cannot be overestimated.

This essay uses the controversies surrounding the enigmatic Ismet Ali, a yogi working in Chicago and New York in the 1920s, to illuminate the complexities of how the performativity of religion and race are interrelated. I examine several moments in which Ali's “authenticity” as Indian is brought into doubt to open up larger questions regarding the global flows of colonial knowledge, racial tropes, and groups of people between India, the United States, and the Caribbean. I explore the ways in which, in the early twentieth-century United States, East Indian “authenticity” only became legible via identificatory practices that engaged with and adapted orientalized stereotypes. The practices of the yogi persona and its sartorial stylings meant to signify “East Indianness” in the United States, particularly the donning of a turban and beard, were one mode through which both South Asian and African Americans repurposed “Hindoo” stereotypes as models for self-formation. By taking on “Hindoo” identities, peoples of color could circumvent the U.S. black/white racial binary and the violence of Jim Crow. This act of racial passing was also an act of religious passing. However, the ways in which identities had to and could be performed changed with context as individuals moved across national and colonial boundaries.

To review a volume such as this in this journal is a bit tricky. I am not an historian of the United States nor of its diplomatic history. Rather I am a pre-modern historian of Vietnam looking at a book on American legislative history that deals with Vietnam and our war in that country. I shall seek to examine it from a more Vietnamese point of view.

Twenty years ago, in Cooking, Cuisine and Class, Jack Goody trained his sights, those of a social anthropologist, on the conditions prerequisite for the emergence of differentiated cuisine—a high and a low cuisine—in societies and cultures. Sweeping boldly over Europe, Asia, and Africa, and traversing a period of time which extended from the fourth millennium B.C.E. in Egypt to two contemporary societies in northern Ghana, Goody could find space for only a few pages on ancient Rome; these may conveniently serve as my point of departure.

In 1919, when Carlos Gagini penned this two-sentence definition of hulero for a dictionary of “Costa Rican-isms,” he matter of factly specified murderousness, slaving, terrorism, and Nicaraguan nationality as intrinsic characteristics of rubber tappers. Few other entries in Gagini's compilation reveal so tellingly a key implicit objective of the country lexicons that Central American intellectuals (for example, Membreño 1982 [1895]) began to publish in the late nineteenth century: the specification, through Spanish dialectology, of a still emergent national identity vis-è-vis neighbors who—until recently—had not been clearly distinct Others but simply fellow subjects first of one or another province of the Spanish Captaincy General of Guatemala and later, briefly, of the Mexican Empire (1821–23) and the independent Central American Federation (1823–38). And none of the other generally concise entries in Gagini's dictionary hints so directly at the links between processes of commodity creation, physical and cultural death, and the construction of nations.

In strong contrast with twentieth-century prevailing forms of military obligation (by which service, whenever exacted, is individual, uncommutable for money, untransferable, no social status or fortune providing a legal basis by itself for exemption), nineteenth-century standards as imposed for the first time in revolutionary France after 1792–1793, were based on principles such as those stated in 1776 in Massachusetts: “That no rank or station in life, employment or office … shall excuse or exempt any person from serving in arms for the defence of his country either by himself or some able-bodied effective man in his stead … or from paying the fine.” As the brokers who made it their business to provide substitutes put it, more crudely, “le conscrit paye sa dette de sa personne ou par celle de l'homme qu'il achete”. Whatever the reasons invoked to justify “rich man's money and poor man's blood”, “l'impôt de sang pour le pauvre, impôt d'argent pour le riche“ the basis for this bastard form of equality in face of military obligation, from a juridical point of view, could be defined as a transition between Old Regime frank inequality and post-1870 personl, uncommutable, untransferable obligation. It was best summed up in Napoleon's words: “Chez un peuple dont Pexistence repose sur l'inegalite des fortunes il faut laisser aux riches la faculte de se faire remplacer.”

The problems created by rapid expansion of educational systems in the underdeveloped states of Asia, Africa and South America are the subject of a large and diverse literature.1 Familiar to even the most cursory student of this literature are several themes: (1) the ‘devaluation’ of elementary education, which no longer affords entry into white-collar positions as it did in the late colonial periods; (2) the persistent and diffuse ‘elite’ connotations of higher (and even secondary) education, the supply of which, while increasing, remains relatively short; (3) the skewed distribution, within higher education, toward ‘traditional’ disciplines—notably law and the humanities—reflecting the values of the colonial system and running against perceived needs for technological skills; and finally, the concern over the ‘destabilizing’ consequences of a growth in educational access and aspirations disproportionate to the economy's ability to ‘fit’ much of tne-educated-manpower into the system.