Are industrial societies becoming alike? This crucial question, unfortunately sometimes treated as an assumption, has been of central theoretical interest since the appearance of the social sciences. The philosophes, with their optimistic belief in progress, were theorists of convergence because they believed in the perfectibility not of particular groups in society, but of all ‘mankind’. It was a radical, anti-relativistic notion to believe that Man not Men was the basic unit of study, the premise for speculation. For if Man acted the same everywhere, then forms of social organization must share essential analytic properties and be proceeding toward an equivalence of structural arrangements. Morally, good was to be found everywhere. Samuel Johnson remarked that ‘the King of Siam sent ambassadors to Louis XIV, but Louis XIV did not send ambassadors to the King of Siam’. But Johnson sent his literary imagination on a diplomatic mission to Abyssinia in Rasselas, presumably to clear his mind of such ethnocentric cant. The cult of the Noble Savage was not only an aspect of eighteenth-century Romanticism, but an indication that Europeans, even Frenchmen, had something to learn from the simple lives of their primitive contemporaries. Like the philosophes many thought that the state, in the form of the benevolent despot, assured continual improvement, and often saw middling groups of intellectuals as allied with or advisory to the king in this great enterprise. It did not seem improbable that societies would converge to a similar political structure—with a strong state, an intellectual elite, and a mature opinion publique, a phrase that originated in pre-revolutionary eighteenth-century France.

As anthropologists turn increasingly to the study of complex societies, they are led to reflect on the role that social science plays in national ideologies and the ways in which the current state and development of social science reflect other cultural states and processes. Indeed, such reflections can usefully be turned on our own society. One sees that it is much more appropriate to discard old notions of the distinction between ‘science’ and ‘folklore’ and to regard the social science of a particular society, however sophisticated and presumably objective, as an important part of its subjective ideology about itself and the world and thus a part of its own folk theory about the relations of man to society and of men to men. This paper is a sketch of some of the interrelationships between Yugoslav social science and other aspects of Yugoslav culture, with primary emphasis on ethnology.

Several decades ago, many studies of Indian caste equated this institution with the four-fold scriptural division of society called the varnas. At the present, however, most anthropologists agree that the jati or local endogamous group is the effective unit of caste. Although the varnas have little to do with the organization of caste groups, they do say something about the ideological integration of regions and sub-regions in traditional India. The term varna should not only be taken to refer to the literate, scriptural division. Rather it should mean any indigenous ideological scheme which merges castes into larger status categories or classifications. This paper suggests that such varna schemes are found throughout India, and that their individual distribution demarcates important cultural regions or nuclear areas. These schemes seem to function as ideological or ‘mechanical’ integrating mechanisms for areas which do not have stable and longstanding political and economic centricity (or ’organic’ cohesion). The ideas advanced below are in no sense final, but rather are intended mainly as suggestive of future research. They are tentative propositions aimed at a broader perspective on how regions in India were ideologically bounded by localized status categories of castes.

In the year 946, in three separate areas of the civilized world, certain changes took place which mark the beginning of a new era. In Iraq in this year a Daylamite Persian adventurer of Shiah persuasion, named Ahmad, seized control of Baghdad and the surrounding Iraqi plains and in so doing established a dynasty which was to last more than a hundred years. About a decade earlier in the French Midi two princes of the house of Toulouse and their Gascon ally and kinsman journeyed north to Auvergne to do homage for their vast holdings in Southern France to the weak Carolingian monarch, Louis IV, the last such homage scions of this house were to render to their Northern French overlords for more than two centuries. Finally, during the same year of 946, in distant Japan, an official of the central government of Kyoto, named Ono, after suppressing the dangerous pirate forces of a certain Sumitomo, issued an appeal against the use of private armies which was resulting in disorder and the inability of the central government to maintain peace and security.

Adoption plays a major part in the traditional law of many Eurasian societies. It occupies a large portion of Mayne's Treatise on Hindu Law and Usage (1878). The Babylonian code of Hammu-rabi, the oldest comprehensive set of written laws, gives a prominent position to ‘Adoption and Wet-nursing’ (Driver and Miles, 1952: 383–406). And the institution receives the same kind of attention in the law of China, Greece and Ancient Rome. Theoretically it has been of central importance in the writings of Sir Henry Maine and Fustel de Coulanges, where it is linked to the perpetuation of corporations of agnates over time.