Recent scholars of the Middle East have implicitly and suggestively noted similarities between contemporary Muslim activists and sixteenth-century Protestant reformers. A more explicit and rigorous argument comparing Protestantism and contemporary Sunni movements in Egypt can yield insights into both movements.

In 1886 Emile Zola published La Terre (The Earth), a novel about peasant life in nineteenth-century France. In that novel, the peasant-proprietor Fduan, aware that he has reached an age at which he can no longer farm his own property, decides to divide it among his three children. Monsieur Baillehache, the notary before whom they all appear to legalize the transaction, feels that it is his duty to “make the usual comments.”

One morning in the middle of May 1558, the chief constable of the Governor of Rome led a detachment of his police to Monte Rotondo, a rural town some twenty miles north of the capital. There was nothing unusual in his mission, which was to capture two outlaws, who, though banished from the papal states for homicide, had returned to live under the shelter of the local lords. Nor was there anything extraordinary in the first response of the villagers, who, caught between their signori on the one hand and the state on the other, did their best to lend the police a very feeble hand. What was more unusual was what happened next, when, half by design and half by mischance, the village rose up in arms against the police and, for much of the day, held them hostage. In this essay, we will study the tangled events of that day, not so much as an example of a rural insurrection as, rather, a handsome illustration of a particular style of negotiation. Thus, settlement as much interests us here as does conflict, for it illustrates well the dense interplay of liberty and constraint. The burden of our exposition is that, to extricate themselves from a perilous impasse, the villagers, their magistrates, and the city's police could all bargain cannily with all sorts of risks, not only their adversaries', but also their own. Not only did they threaten one another, but, to their own profit, they pointed out external dangers and cited the perils they themselves faced.

In the wake of decolonisation, an increasing number of analyses turned the ethnographic gaze onto anthropology itself. Humbler postcolonial strategies emerged, designed to democratise anthropology's intercultural staging by means of an exchange of dialogue (Crapanzano 1977, 1980; Dwyer 1977, 1982). Though sensitive to the backdrop of neocolonialism, however, these strategies largely ignored anthropology's own cultural genealogy in favour of a more particularistic focus on the scene of ethnographic interaction.

In March 1871 the young slave woman Honorata went to police in the Rio de Janeiro parish of Sacramento to complain formally that her mistress had forced her into prostitution from the age 12. She testified that she was sent on various occasions to houses of known ill-repute “to be at the window receiving visitors.” At other times her mistress arranged the assignations herself, instructing Honorata to dress and go with a client. Between these stints at brothels, and sometimes at the same time, she was hired out as a domestic, usually as laundress or cook. The court record described Honorata as nineteen years old, black, a Creole born in the province of Bahia, and brought to Rio de Janeiro by her mistress some years earlier, unmarried and a domestic servant.

When the English cleric Joseph Townsend visited Spain at the end of the eighteenth century, he was impressed by the apparent tolerance with which beggars were treated and by what he called the “excessively generous” way in which charity was distributed. He cited, with both surprise and disapproval, the Bishop of Cordoba, who daily fed some 7,000 people by distributing 1,000 kilograms of bread.1 This image of Spain as a paradise for the poor persisted until well into the nineteenth century. George Borrow, who travelled through the country in the 1830s trying to sell Bibles without much luck, remarked approvingly that poverty was not despised in Spain as it was in other countries:

Yet to the honour of Spain be it spoken, it is one of the few countries in Europe where poverty is never insulted nor looked upon with contempt.…In Spain the very beggar does not feel himself a degraded being for he kisses no one's feet and knows not what it is to be cuffed or spitten upon.

Famine mortality has a special interest for those interested in population history. After Malthus wrote An Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798, famine was viewed as an event that “checks” population growth, perhaps the inevitable consequence of overpopulation. Although demographers have recently tried to show that a single famine or demographic crisis cannot retard population growth in the long run (Watkins and Menken 1985; Bongaarts and Cain 1982), yet famine, to the extent that it exists today, still constitutes a most dramatic demographic event.

The argument that the presence or absence of widespread literacy constitutes the central criterion to distinguish “savage” from “domesticated” society, presented by Goody in a number of works (1968, 1977, 1986, 1987), makes close associations between alphabetic literacy and the growth of knowledge and between restricted literacy and traditional societies. In this essay, I will challenge these associations by presenting material from medieval Europe, in which the milieu of restricted literacy is creative, and from Muslim Africa, in which widespread literacy does not lead to criticism or the revision of basic religious tenets. Second, I will deal with some of the reasons for the vitality of Islamic reform in West Africa, concerning myself principally with the impact of Western education on village society and the response of reformers through the promotion of Arabic literacy. A consideration of Western education and acculturation is vital for an understanding of scriptural reformed Islam's appeal. The latter issue will emerge from the material to be presented, but I will deal exclusively with the literacy debate for the moment.

The growth of English Nonconformity during the era of the demographic revolution (circa 1750–1850) has long been regarded as an impediment to the reconstruction of reproductive behavior. Historical demographers have relied heavily on Church of England registers of baptisms, burials, and marriages, while treating Protestant dissenters from the Church of England secondarily, as a factor of underestimation in the Anglican record. Such treatment suggests that religious culture played no independent role in determining population growth. This assumption seems problematic, however, considering the central role that social historians have assigned evangelical dissent to the emergence of modern English society and the somewhat greater place that religion has occupied in demographic studies of populations in continental Europe, the United States, and the third world.

Traditionally a considerable gap has existed between social anthropologists, on the one hand, and political scientists and historians, on the other, in their analysis of events. Archetypically, social anthropologists have concentrated upon enduring social structure and have tended to steer clear of more recent events in the society under study; yet this suggests that the anthropologist is avoiding the question of how the social structure that he enshrines in the ethnographic present is derived. ‘Social structure’ is a composite of the anthropologist's own observation of native behaviour and native exegesis, the latter in turn being the result of a dialectic between their (the indigenous people's) present perception of events and their idea (or image) of what their society has traditionally been and perhaps ought to be. This is particularly so in those societies that, in Lévi-Strauss' words (1966a:233–4) seek “by the institutions they give themselves, to annul the possible effects of historical factors upon their equilibrium and continuity in a quasi-automatic fashion,” that is, in those societies in which “their image of themselves is an essential part of their reality.”

Until recently it was rare to bring South Africa and Latin America into a shared focus for any purpose at all. Both regions habitually looked towards the United States of America and Western Europe and showed no interest in each other. With a few exceptions there was scant intellectual concern aroused by their common southern location. In the last few years, however, a number of academics have begun to show interest in comparisons and contrasts derivable from South Africa and Latin America. Our intention is to join this promising trend by examining the vexing question of human rights in South Africa and Argentina since the Soweto massacre and Peronist collapse in 1976. In that historic year of burgeoning abuse, Richard Claude complained that “comparative human rights research has not been systematic.” Concentration on definite themes in two appallingly delinquent countries may contribute to the general improvement he urged.

How do we conceive of law if litigation does not aim to settle conflict, if it is a means to perpetuate and obscure rather than resolve disputes? In this essay, I shall demonstrate the power of an unsettling norm: The Brazilian legal system aims neither to solve land conflicts justly nor to decide their legal merits through adjudication. My argument stresses intention and norm because land law in Brazil is so confusing, indecisive, and dysfunctional in its own terms that one suspects that the cause of these characteristics is not incompetence or corruption alone but rather the force of a set of intentions concerning its construction and application different from those aimed at resolution. Thus, I argue that Brazilian law regularly produces unresolvable procedural and substantive complexity in land conflicts; that this jural-bureaucratic irresolution dependably initiates extrajudicial solutions; and that these political impositions inevitably legalize usurpations of one sort or another. In short, land law in Brazil promotes conflict, not resolution, because it sets the terms through which encroachments are reliably legalized. It is thus an instrument of calculated disorder by means of which illegal practices produce law and extralegal solutions are smuggled into the judicial process. In this paradoxical context, law itself is a means of manipulation, complication, stratagem, and violence by which all parties—public and private, dominant and subaltern—further their interests. It therefore defines an arena of conflict in which distinctions between legal and illegal are temporary and their relations unstable.

The shiny, black stone statue of Shri Nathji that today resides in the busy pilgrimage town of Nathdvara (Rajasthan, India) is the preeminent image of the Vaisnava sect of the Vallabha Sampradaya. Like all statues in the sect, the image is an anthropomorphic manifestation of Krishna, the sect's paramount deity (see Plate 1). More than simply representing Krishna, Vallabhite statues are believed to contain this deity's ‘immanent presence’ and to possess (and emanate) his mystical powers. In order to partake of these powers, the worship of images is a regular feature of Vallabhite religious practice, and pilgrimage to important temples, such as the Shri Nathji Temple, is a cherished goal of all members of the sect. This article examines how the Hindu rajas of western India attempted to bind these mystical powers to the service of their rule and what consequences this had both for royal action and for the maintenance and perpetuation of the divine powers of the statues themselves.

The notion that “Westernization” is a process that is unconditionally positive in its impact has dominated both Western and Soviet accounts of Russian intellectual and cultural history during the period before the Emancipation of 1861. As a consequence, Westernization has been described as synonymous with progress, rational economic behavior, greater tolerance, civilization, and the advancement of individual freedom. Although this rather uncritically pro-Western approach to the study of Western influences has produced important research and analytical insights, the assumption that a homogeneous Western culture everywhere generates liberal and democratic influences is in fact highly problematic. As I have suggested elsewhere, it is very difficult to make the empirical case that any one Western political or economic model can be applied to Germany, France, and Italy as well as England. And in the Russian context, a belief in the unmixed benefits of Westernization obscures some of the most important ironies and contradictions that characterize Russian economic debates and strategies in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Although political violence has played a central part in the formation of nations, its historical constitution and its role in representing nations havereceived scant attention. All too frequently the explanation of violence is equated with the identification of its causes, its form is accounted for by its function, and its function is seen in instrumental terms; violence is reduced to a practical tool used by opposing social actors in pursuit of conflicting ends. Whether treated as a cause, function, or instrument, violence is generally assumed rather than examined in its concreteness. Little attention is paid to its specific manifestations, to the way its effects are inseparably related to the means through which it is exerted, and to the meanings that inform its deployment and interpretation. In contrast, typological approaches that postulate a correspondence between types of societies and forms of violence often recognize the opacity of violence yet lose sight of the historical depth and specificity of its manifestations.