Anthropologists have been interested in African societies and cultures for several decades. Few will dispute the contributions which British social anthropologists and others have made to the understanding of African institutions, especially in the domains of kinship and marriage, political organization, and most recently in urban studies. Many of these studies, however, have been avowedly synchronic; they are intended as descriptions of societies at a single time level. Even in those cases where the anthropo- logist has been privileged to conduct research within the same society over an extended period of time, the problems of social and cultural change which he documents generally involve modifications of ‘traditional’ institutions and behavior in the context of colonialism, postcolonialism, and world capitalism. While such studies are extremely important, the processes they describe do not exhaust the limits of the study of change in African society.

The term ethnos or ethnic community has been used in contemporary Soviet literature mainly to denote a human community, referred to in spoken Russian as “a people” (narod). The same term denotes both those peoples who have lagged behind in their development and peoples of highly industrial countries; tribes and nations, small populations (for example, the Hoppi or the Ket) and large ones including millions of people (like the Russians or the Italians). It is used to designate contemporary people as well as those who have vanished with history (for example, the Etruscans or the Scythians); peoples who are territorially compact and those who are dispersed over widely separated areas (for example, the Armenians). The substitution of the term ethnos for the word people was made necessary by the fact that (in Russian and in many other languages) the word “people” has a number of different connotations, and the Russian narod is used to describe not only ethnic communities but also the “toiling masses of people” or simply a large crowd of humans.

The oppressive regime of Nicholas I witnessed the rise of the free-lance literati in Russia. Estranged from the state and divested of status in the official hierarchy, they turned their youthful energies and talents into intellectual pursuits. The generation of the “remarkable decade” represented the crowning point of this emancipatory development. While contrasting cultured Moscow before 1812 with that which he left in 1847, Herzen's heart throbbed with joy and satisfaction:

We have made tremendous strides forward. In those days there was a society of the discontented — that is, of those who have been left out, dismissed, or laid on the shelf; now there is a society of independent people.

With the continuing rapid growth of cities in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, social scientists have expected a clear shift of political power from rural to urban-based groups. The usual assumption is that this shift would stem from the process of urban economic growth which would lead to political centralization and political integration, both centered in the city. Such assumptions are found most explicitly in many ofthe theories of modernization developed in the 1950s and 1960s. Such theories were often derived from a so-called “Western” or European model.

Past studies of modernization have assumed that intellectuals adhering toWestern values would be conduits of rational, scientific norms deemednecessary to the structuring of modern, complex societies. Littleconsideration was given to the attitudes of these intellectuals towards thesocial change presumably resulting from the distribution of rationalvalues. Modernization theorists supposed a positive relationship betweenrationalism as a mode of thought and social change, a suppositionreflecting their own expectations of a progressive and relativelypredictive evolution of traditional societies toward more modern and intricate social systems.

The history of the professions in the West since the French Revolution is a success story, a triumph, but not always an easy one. From the beginning of the nineteenth century in continental Europe the professions had a great attraction as careers presumably open to talent, but the demand for professional services developed more slowly than interest in professional careers and more slowly than the schools that supplied the market. Lenore O'Boyle has drawn attention to this discrepancy and the revolutionary potential of the frustrated careerists produced by it.

The renewed interest in the phenomenon of charisma, which was first given coherent conceptual form by Max Weber, shows little sign of abating. It is probably the most easily comprehensible, possibly the most popular and certainly the most dramatic model which can be utilized in interdisciplinary studies. Moreover, the theory has the apparent attractiveness of enabling students to intensively study one leader and his movement and then draw more general conclusions about that leader's impact on the society in which he operated. In an article written in 1966, Claude Ake gave a timely warning to practitioners who made grandiose deductions from evidence about one leader and then drew firm conclusions about his total society. In particular, Ake, at one stage in his critique, pointed out the fallacy of assuming that charisma usually implies integration of a previously decentralized, regionalized or fragmented society. As Ake correctly noted, this is unenlightening, unanalytical reasoning since ‘the theory seeks to explain how solidarity may be forged [by a charismatic leader]; but it does so by means of a concept which assumes the existence of solidarity’, thus producing ‘a circular explanation of integration’.

In recent years, a number of anthropologists have come to recognize that missionaries, who play a central role in many of the social systems that anthropologists study, have yet to receive the ethnographic and theoretical attention they deserve. Often, when anthropologists discussed missionaries at all, they treated them as part of the setting, much like rainfall and elevation: matters one felt obliged to mention, but peripheral to the real object of social anthropological description and analysis. There were, to be sure, exceptions, notably the body of anthropological literature that has dealt with the effects of missionaries on various areas of native life.

At first sight there seems to be little in common between Zionism and the national movements of the Third World, and more particularly of Africa. The diplomatic and economic links established by the State of Israel with the new states of the Black Continent were impressive partly because they looked as if they were created ex nihilo. The speed with which the Israelis entered the ‘African game’ in the sixties and the equal speed with which they found themselves ejected from it in the seventies tended to underline the superficiality of these links. There were, of course, interested rationalizations of this newly found ‘brotherhood’: the historico-mythological relations between King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba were stressed to give an historical dimension to a very new cooperation; the role of the Zionist and Messianic African churches and sects, and the possible latent influence of Jewish lore on certain African tribes, such as the Poeul or the Ashanti of Ghana, were dusted off and used in many ambassadorial speeches.

This article examines the relationship between the Catholic Church's self- image and the way its leaders and organizations perceive the world around them and act within it. By focusing on the development of central religious concepts, (most notably ‘authority’ and ‘the Church’) and their changing expression in organizational structures and patterns of behavior, a first step is taken toward a more complete and adequate analysis of the Church's evolving role in Latin American society and politics.

Recent writing on political development in Africa has shown a marked tendency to de-privilege the state. We might discern three broad, related, reasons for this trend. The first is the deepening political crisis involving what Crawford Young has described as “shrinkage in the competence, credibility and probity of the state.” The second is the growing dissatisfaction among scholars with the narrow analytical focus of state-centered scholarship on state structures and elites. The third is the re-emergence of civil society as an analytical concept (sparked by political crises in Eastern Europe) and a renewed emphasis on market institutions as appropriate arbiters of social provision.Many scholars, despairing of the political and economic decline of African countries and seeking more compelling explanations, have moved the state out of the explanatory spotlight. They have stressed the fragmentation of politics, processes of economic disengagement from the realm of state control, and expanding areas of social life that fall outside of the ambit of state authority. For some, the relationship between the state and civil society has offered a more appealing focus for analysis.2 Society-centered research has even suggested that the state is not (or is no longer) the main organising principle of politics in Africa.