A comparative study of assimilation like the present one has shown that the structural or environmental factors in the larger society are principally responsible for the differential rates of assimilation. Historically, the United States has been racist in its treatment of nearly all immigrants. Eastern and Southern Europeans were judged inferior along ethnic/racist lines (Gordon 1964), let alone those with more pronounced physical characteristics such as blacks, Latins or Asians. The legal structure erected in the United States, which includes the historical anti-ethnic legisla- tion, discriminatory immigration policies and racist miscegenation laws, reflects the attitudes and perceptions of the host society. The long years of unfair policies and discriminatory practices implemented against the Chinese produced feelings of rejection among them. In Lima, by contrast, the Hispanic cultural tradition does not emphasize racial differences. Although therere is a subtle racism in Lima, there is no miscegenation law, and children born of marriages between Chinese and Peruvians become important factors in the assimilation of the Chinese.

Since 1972 I have been conducting a study of Jews in Tunisia and Morocco and Arabs in Israel. This study included interviews with stratified quota samples of Tunisian and Moroccan Jews from August 1972 to August 1973 and conversations with community leaders during these thirteen months, as well as my participation in the life of the Jewish communities. From May through August 1974 I carried out field work in Israel, surveying a stratified quota sample of Israeli Arabs and meeting regularly with Arabs from all walks of life. After my departure, research assistants completed the survey. Jews in Tunisia and Morocco and Arabs in Israel were selected for study because they are religious minorities in non-secular states. While they bear some resemblance to minorities the world over, there are additional factors defining their position in society which make their circumstances relatively unique. I have elsewhere described them as ‘non-assimilating’ minorities. The purpose of this paper is to examine two questions pertaining to the groups I am studying: (1) What factors account for the unnarrowed cultural distance between the three minorities and their respective host societies? (2) How do the three minorities understand their respective sociocultural identities? In responding to the second of these questions, some findings from the surveys will be presented.

This is a study in political anthropology. The feudal-bourgeois characteristics of the groups which dominated the Arab national movement and the socialist workers'ideology that was central to Zionism in Palestine during most years of the British mandate are discussed briefly. The main part of the study analyzes the circumstances underlying the rise of a new Arab class formation and the meaning of a struggle for minority rights within Israel where the state employs political and other means, and ideological mystifications, in order to deny the implications of this Arab class and national reality.

In his recent study,The Decline of Fertility in Germany, 1871–1939, John Knodel shows that in about two generations the ‘overall fertility declined by 60 percent, marital fertility by 65 percent, and illegitimate fertility by 54 percent.’ Given the facts that a greater percentage of women of child-bearing ages than ever before were married during this period, and that illegitimate births never counted for more than 10 percent of the total births, Knodel concludes that the decline was mainly due to a reduction of marital fertility. This decline became apparent in the 1870s and was already pronounced enough to be a matter of concern for a variety of sociologists, demographers, and physicians in the decades immediately before the First World War. One of the reasons for this contemporary concern sprang from the belief that the secular decline in fertility indicated that birth control, hitherto presumably limited to the effete French and to rather small numbers of German middle class and professional families, was now being practiced with a marked degree of success by large numbers of German working class families. In the minds of many nationalistic demographers, what had been the private vice of the publicly virtuous now threatened to become a mass phenomenon with potentially disastrous results.

The subject of this paper is the question of the stem family, in the sociological literature and in anthropological studies of Ireland. The notion of the stem family is said to derive from the work of the nineteenth-century French sociologist Frederic Le Play (1806–82). Le Play divided the history of the family into three stages. Ancient societies were supposedly characterized by what he called the ‘patriarchal’ family, in which all the sons were retained within the household, over which the oldest member of the family ruled and in which any number of generations resided. Most of the world's population were said however to have experienced their primary socialization in the ‘stem’ family. The stem family was a threegenerational structure which functioned to retain its original location (land and/or house) by means of dispersing most younger members, while preserving the main family stem by a principle of single inheritance. Parents married off and kept within the group only those children nominated as successors. Finally, there was the modern, ‘unstable’ family which formed upon marriage and dissolved upon the death of the parents.

The Industrial Revolution transferred both food production and home based manufacture from the family to larger nonkinship corporations. But, contrary to what is said by historians of the family, industrialization has not brought about the demise of ‘home-based’ family labor. Probably the most often cited premise in the study of the Western family is that ‘A fundamental characteristic of the world we have lost was the scene of labour, which was universally supposed to be the home’ (Laslett 1971: 13). Those who study the transition of the family from a peasant type of production to wage-labor production unquestioningly accept this view of post-peasant family labor (for example, see Mendras 1970: 238).