The qadi, or Muslim judge, strikes one as an anomalous figure in the contexts of colonial Algeria and Senegal, areas better known for their mahdi-like resistance leaders, quietist Sufi shaikhs, and strongly assimilationist colonial regimes. In both cases, there were in fact attempts to eliminate the Muslim courts–in Algeria in the 1880s, and in the communes of Senegal in the early 1900s. While the two court systems were rather different, it is striking that the eventual crises had similar dynamics and that both occurred just as indigenous urban elites were beginning to seek an active role in politics. A comparative study of the two cases should not only help to put the problem of Islamic law in colonial settings into wider perspective, but also shed light on the antecedents of some well-known twentieth-century political developments.

In elections that offer genuine choices the individual eligible voter is confronted with having to make decisions. But such decisions are rarely based on a dispassionate weighing of all relevant issues and circumstances; on the contrary, most decisions result largely from the socioeconomic and cultural influences of the milieu in which the individual moves, and most people are content to vote with those of their fellow citizens with whom they share basic social and ideational orientations (cf. Jaros and Grant 1974:177; Parsons 1967:239). So far, the most reliable predictors of voting behavior appear to be structural factors such as group affiliation and its concomitant sharing of values and, although there is no compelling need to restrict explanations of voting behavior to factors of group affiliation and social structure (Iwand 1972:14), attempts to broaden the base underlying voting theory by including psychological processes seem to suffer from fundamental inconsistencies (Abrams 1973:47). It need hardly be mentioned that even at the “safer” level of social processes, any study that hopes to explain voting behavior must deal with a number of methodological problems such as the reliability of questionnaire and interview responses, or the choice of an optimum aggregate level for most fruitful analysis of election returns (see, for example, Feist 1976; Hartenstein 1976).

Households everywhere are staging areas for social life: places where individuals sleep, store personal belongings, and refurbish themselves, physically and psychologically, for the day ahead. The fire and simple shelter of the Australian Mardudjara (Tonkinson 1978), the sections within farming compounds of the Ghanaian Tallensi (Fortes 1949a), and the rooms in Manhattan hotels rented by poor, elderly, or mentally disturbed men and women (Sokolovsky et al. 1978) are each examples of this basic aspect of household life. How then should households be compared in order to understand the ways in which ethnographic cases differ?

This essay presents a study of the influence of certain cultural, social, and architectural factors upon the meaning and use of domestic space. It attempts to promote an understanding of the history of the kinds of ideas which are invested in the spatial form and use of houses. In addition, it establishes the principle that the meaning and use of domestic space are not intrinsic to a set of physical characteristics, nor the nomenclature applied to rooms and their facilities.

Slash-and-burn cultivation—the practice of clearing temporary fields in forests by chopping and firing the natural vegetation, planting crops for a brief time, and then allowing these fields to revert to forest—is a well-known type of agriculture in the world's tropical environments. Anthropologists, agronomists, and geographers have demonstrated that slash-and-burn cultivation, once regarded as a primitive and wasteful practice, can be an efficient adaptation to tropical forests, where the soils are highly leached, and the bulk of the nutrients available is locked up in the forest vegetation in a nearly closed cycle. By clearing and burning the forest vegetation in a field, slashand-burn cultivators release nutrients accumulated during many years of forest growth in order to fertilize a few years of cultivated crops. When the crop yield in such a field begins to decline, the cultivators abandon it to natural long-term fallow, allowing it to return to forest. The continued success of slash-and-burn cultivation depends on maintaining a high ratio of fallow land to cultivated land to allow for the gradual restoration of forests and nutrients.