Professor Russell was the first historian to try to apply statistical methods to analysis of the effects of epidemic plague on the composition, not just on the total size, of medieval population. He argues now that general plagues differed from the type of the disease that became epidemic after the crop failures of 1315–1317, in sharply lowering the sex ratio and in greatly increasing the burden of child-rearing.

In the last issue Richard A. Easterlin criticized some arguments which I have advanced. Because I think that his main point is at least partially irrelevant, I shall briefly summarize my argument. I suggested that demographic growth in the pre-industrial West was determined primarily by levels of fertility, levels which depended in large part on economic factors, and that mortality has been the major variable in the demographic growth of most less developed countries today mainly because they do not control fertility in the interest of the maintenance of a given standard of living. From this basic difference, I drew a number of consequences. Among them, but by no means the most important, was the one to which Easterlin devoted most attention. It was my statement: “Hence, there is the possibility that improved nutrition and health will increase birth rates fantastically.”1 Easterlin omitted the first six words of the sentence from his quotation.

Indonesian law and judicial institutions raise almost every conceivable theoretical and practical problem. Professor Jaspan certainly conveys admirably the bewildering confusion of diversity of custom, judicial practices, arguments about theory and policy, and political pressures, describing dilemmas which, on sociological first principles, seem in the short (or even middle) run to be insoluble.

Economic anthropology has two ‘sacred' field sites—one in Melanesia, the other in Central America—and the empirical data gathered from these sites has set the theoretical agenda for the sub-discipline. Malinowski conducted seminal fieldwork in both of these areas and the respective subjects of his investigations tells us much about the socio-economic concerns of people in Melanesia and Central America. His classic ethnography on the Kula exchange system of the Milne Bay area of Papua New Guinea, Argonauts of the Western Pacific, established Melanesia as the classic home of gift exchange. The postwar ethnographies have only served to confirm the passion Melanesians have for creating intricate forms of gift exchange: Andrew Strathern's The Rope of Moka, introduced us to the ties that bind the ‘big men' in the Highlands; Michael Young's Fighting with Food: Leadership, Values and Social Control in a Massim Society, challenged us to rethink the social role of food, and so on. These ethnographies, and many others like them, have provided the ethnographic base on which general theories of the gift have risen, Marilyn Strathern's The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia, being the best-known recent synthesis. The product of Malinowski's Central American fieldwork, Malinowski in Mexico: The Economics of a Mexican Market System (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982), which he wrote with J. de la Fuente, has not had the impact of Argonauts, for a number of reasons, including the fact that an English translation of the 1957 Spanish edition took some twenty-five years to appear, and that his research, carried out in 1940, was not pioneering in the same ethnographic and theoretical way that Argonauts was. His Mexican work was part of a long tradition of American scholarship on the peasant-artisan commodity producers of this area. Commodity production and exchange is to the people of Central America what gift exchange is to Melanesians. However, the exchange of commodities in Central America is a not ceremonial ritual, but rather everyday reality that the people must undertake in order to survive. It has been this way for centuries, which is why Central American ethnographers have devoted so much time to describing and analyzing petty commodity reproduction. This is not to say that market exchange is unimportant for the people of Melanesia, but what sets Melanesia apart is that gift exchange has flourished under the impact of capitalism, and it is this question that commentators have tried to describe and explain. What then are the peculiar social conditions found in Central America that account for the specificities of the economy found there? What conceptual frameworks have economic anthropologists developed to come to terms with these facts?

Since 1952 the elaboration of Egyptian ideology has constituted a source of conflict between the regime and the left/right opposition. In trying to capture the ideological center, the regime has inevitably drawn itself into the maelstrom of public contention characterized by mass conformity, intimidation, purges, arrests, show trials and incarceration of all who fundamentally question the principles of the leadership. Democratic cooperative socialism (‘Arab socialism’) is the official ideology, and a spate of books and articles have been published on its significance for Egyptian politics. Despite all these efforts, confusion still tends to reign over this concept, both among Egyptians themselves, and outsiders studying it.

It was David Hume who said that “a man acquainted with history may in some respect be said to have lived from the beginning of the world”. At the present juncture of time, when various civilizations are in the process of being more and more closely interlinked, it certainly seems desirable for all of us to “have lived from the beginning of the world”. From this springs the necessity for having a theory of universal history which is applicable to the main historical processes in our world. For without such a theory the facts become unmanageable in their complexity and enormous volume; no sort of intellectual comprehension is possible. A theory or philosophy of history has, of course, to be applicable in the same manner as a scientific hypothesis. That is to say, if it cannot explain important processes, it has to be discarded, either entirely, or partially. Unfortunately, this attitude has not prevailed among philosophers of history, who have thought of their theories in the spirit of quasi-religious revelations. The term “philosophy of history” is a fairly recent one, having apparently been introduced by Voltaire in 1756. But there have been philosophers of history of some sort or other from very much earlier times. In this essay one cannot consider all of them, of course.

Certain analysts have argued in support of liberal democratic rule that this method of structuring political power through parliaments, mass political parties and specialized interest groups is both responsive to mass needs and imbued with high capabilities for public welfare and resource redistribution. Critics2 of this view contend that liberal democratic government merely provides a facade of mass legitimacy that obscures and masks the control of public policy and decision making by privileged and affluent classes that own or control the means of production. This paper attempts to examine these conflicting views on the policy responsiveness of liberal-democratic rule to mass welfare needs in the context of the mainly capitalist societies of Latin America.

Don Anselmo, the protagonist of a story by Mesonero Romanos, was a wealthy established gentleman in one of Andalusia's leading towns. Young, good-looking, affable, and generous, Anselmo held all the virtues and qualities that can make a man happy, except for one weakness: an overbearing ambition for becoming important. First, he did everything possible to attain a position of power in his town. Unsatisfied with merely local power, he decided to leave his house and possessions in the hands of an administrator and emigrate to Madrid, the only place in Spain where one could achieve a brilliant political career. Once in Madrid he spent his time and his money looking for protection and political connections, a process in which he experienced only personal humiliation and frustration. In the end, Don Anselmo, once a wealthy provincial gentleman, became a failed politician who abandoned both his family and his estate. Don Anselmo's sorry destiny illustrates, according to Mesonero, one of the worse diseases of Spanish society: the empleomania of its elites, a terrible misjudgment that provoked the abandon of productive activities and contributed to the country's backwardness.

The rate of modernization in Venezuela over the past forty years has been rapid, even startling, if attention is focussed on the more conspicuous institutions and processes. During this period an agrarian, patrimonially ruled, backward society has been transformed into a highly commercialized urban society governed by a political party system based on widespread popular participation in the electoral process. However—and this is a phenomenon of which social scientists in the United States have become increasingly aware—modernization does not affect people in an evenhanded, uniform manner. While the great transformation in economy and society which we call modernization improves the quality of life for many people, some groups or individuals are bypassed in the process, and some even come to suffer as a consequence of it. Therefore, the level of modernity and personal well-being achieved in the most advanced sectors of a society will often be irrelevant as an indicator of welfare in those pockets of deprivation left behind or created in the general march of progress.

The Hutterites are an Anabaptist sect that was founded early in the sixteenth century. Their society today is characterized on the one hand by a traditional social order and on the other by the pursuit of rationally structured economic activities. How is it possible to combine these seemingly contradictory characteristics in the daily life of communities whose populations hardly exceed 140 members? Would it not be much more reasonable for Hutterites not only to uphold their traditional social order, but also to follow conservative economic practices as some of the Old Order Amish do? How is it possible that a Hutterite individual can at one moment give detailed technical instructions for repair of a complicated machine over shortwave radio and an hour later expose himself to a religious sermon, the text of which has not changed for 350 years?

For centuries descendents of people from the region of Hadramawt on the southern Arabian Peninsula have navigated the Indian Ocean and inhabited its far-flung littorals. Engseng Ho's The Graves of Tarim offers an anthropological history of these Hadramis, in particular the ‘Alawī Sayyids, one line of the Prophet Muhammad's descendants through his daughter Fāt˙ima and cousin ‘Alī. Beginning in the graveyards of Tarim, a town in Hadramawt where some of the earliest ‘Alawī ancestors are buried, Ho describes genealogical rituals developed at the turn of the fifteenth century used to “presence” those buried there, bringing the living into contact with the dead. These practices, which Ho identifies with a complex of Sufi practices (t˙arīqa) called “the ‘Alawī Way,” took on new resonances as a Hadrami diaspora, “a society of the absent,” spread across the Indian Ocean. Its members, like the buried ‘Alawī ancestors at Tarim, required constant “revivification.” For some this was achieved through genealogies associated with the ‘Alawī Way, transformed and reworked on journeys, which sometimes spanned generations, away from, returning to, and circumventing Tarim.