In Carlos Fuentes's recent novel, Terra Nostra, El Señor, an autistic Spanish king who bears a conspicuous resemblance to Philip II, is told of the existence of new worlds across the seas. In outrage and disbelief, he denies that such a thing was possible, for he, El Señor, had decreed that the only world which existed was to be found within the walls of his newly constructed palace. Royal monk that he was, he had ordered the world built for him and so forbade the existence of other worlds.

André Breton often insisted that surrealism was not a body of doctrines, or a definable idea, but an activity. The present essay is an exploration of ethnographic activity, set, as it must always be, in specific cultural and historical circumstances. I will be concentrating on ethnography and surrealism in France between the two world wars. To discuss these activities together—at times, indeed, to permit them to merge—is to question a number of common distinctions and unities.

Our ideas of tradition, culture, and ideology found their places in the social scientific discourse of the 1950s and 1960s as part of modernization theory. This supposed theory was heir to ancient occidental habits of mythological thinking about history, as is well known.1 But the reorientation of these ideas in the postwar years was guided more specifically by the novel division of the globe into three conceptual “worlds” in response to the Cold War.

Four years after their “emancipation” in 1838, the former slaves of British Guiana protested against their conditions and their unfair treatment by the planters who sought to bind them to labor on the estates. When the planters introduced certain rules and regulations, which were intended to regulate the quality and quantity of work, and to reduce labor costs by lowering wages and abolishing customary allowances of free medical attention, housing, and provision grounds, the workers complained to the stipendiary magistrates and stopped work.

All history is comparative. The judgments historians make are derived from some explicit or implicit standard of comparison. Thus, when historians describe the antebellum South in the United States as technically backward, rural, nonindustrial, socially retrograde, and paternalistic, they mean to say that it was so in comparison with the North. When historians of nineteenthcentury Brazil describe it in the same terms, they compare it either to the hegemonic capitalist areas of that period, including the United States North, or to Brazil itself at later periods in its history.

How far were China's prewar economic institutions the product of its particular history and traditions—that is, the product either of the nature of its premodern society or of its later status as a semicolony—and how far can they rather be seen as answers to problems common to the stage of economic development which the country had reached at that time?

Although only a minority of harvest workers in California are covered by union contracts, jobs in some nonunionized industries are becoming increasingly stabilized and internally stratified in ways and to extents that are largely unnoted. These conditions result from an augmentation of the labor market structure (Fisher 1953), that is, from policies evolving within agricultural industries that partially insulate their job markets from external market forces.