This paper examines the relationship between religion, ethnicity and politics in Cyprus during the Turkocratia (1571–1878), the period of Ottoman rule. Its major thesis is that in the pre-industrial framework of Ottoman rule in Cyprus neither religion nor ethnicity were major sources of conflict in a society composed of two ethnic groups (Greeks and Turks) and following two monotheistic faiths(Christianity and Islam) in marked contrast to the recent history of Cyprus. In broad outline it closely parallels Gellner's thesis (1983) that nationalism is a by-product of industrialization, extensive education literacy and geographical and social mobility, and it seeks to show that the major cleavages in Cyprus were mainly intraethnic rather than interethnic.

For the last two hundred years, with the exception of a brief interval between the two World Wars, Poland has been either partitioned, or occupied, or governed by proxy. Squeezed between Russia and Germany Poles took nourishment and continuity as a historical nation from remembrance of things past whenever their sovereignty as a political nation was curtailed or abolished. Lately these efforts were inspired by a conviction that even if present day institutions could not be changed, a half-way victory over totalitarianism's attempts to destroy social solidarity would still be won if the community's history were rescued from the regime's ambition to determine not only the country's future but also its past. Thus, the wonderful intuition—that totalitarianism must destroy all context of social reality independent of its own dictate and acquire a copyright not only on what is but also on what had been—came to the Poles not because they read Orwell's 1984, but because for well over one hundred years they nurtured the idea of the Polish nation against all the odds of nineteenth century geopolitics. Once before, when they had lost their national sovereignty, the Poles had locked in on their past spiritually and it worked: Poland was resurrected. But since the Second World War, despite the dogged persistence of the Poles to reclaim their past, to go beyond, revise, and correct the government-approved version of their history manifested during every mass upheaval in the Polish People's Republic, there was never a temptation to reopen the subject of wartime Polish-Jewish relations.

On peut soutenir que les sciences sociales en général et la sociologie en particulier sont nées, à partir du XVIIIe siècle, pour essayer de comprendre et d'expliquer les nouveautés qui émergeaient dans les sociétés européennes, et que l'on se plaît à nommer la modernité. Comme l'occurrence était unique et qu'il est impossible d'expliquer la singularité, on a spontanément produit un pôle de comparaison en parlant de « sociétés traditionnelles » contrastées avec les «sociétés modernes». L'événement a montré qu'il était imprudent d'utiliser une catégorie aussi vague que celle de societes traditionnelles, où l'on mettait pêle-mêle sociétés tribales, cités antiques, empires historiques et anciens régimes européens. Malgré une débauche d'efforts, le mystère des origines de la modernité reste presque entier, qu'on la définisse en termes de révolution industrielle, d'âge scientifique, de poussée démocratique, de laïcisation…

The legitimacy of modern democratic institutions rests on the ideal of popular sovereignty. The purpose of this paper is to examine the contemporary status of this ideal.

Since space limitations do not permit discussion that would place the concept of popular sovereignty in its historical and intellectual context, we simply postulate a definition. People, by whom we mean individuals acting on the bases of their current preferences, are collectively sovereign if the alternatives open to them as a collectivity are constrained only by conditions independent of anyone's will. Specifically, people are sovereign to the extent that they can alter the existing institutions, including the state and property, and if they can allocate available resources to all feasible uses.

Répondre à cette question suppose qu'on puisse définir avec précision ce qu'on entend par « réussite d'une modernisation », et par le mot « pourquoi ». Or, la modernisation est un concept vague. On pourra remarquer que, s'il n'y avait pas, à l'heure actuelle, un succès économique du Japon qui frappe même les plus aveugles des Européens, on ne discuterait guère de la modernité japonaise. Cela implique d'abord que l'élément économique, en particulier industriel, est fondamental dans notre perception de la modernité. Mais comme la notion de modernité a été definie à partir exclusivement de l'expérience européenne ou américaine, on éprouve la tentation de penser que seules les ressemblances entre le Japon et l'Europe sont significatives, et que le Japon (ou l'Europe…) ne saurait avoir sa modernisation particulière. Provisoirement, pour faire le tri dans le passé japonais, on retiendra ici des critères bien connus, déjà repérés en Europe: mobilité, individuation et laïcisation; et on admettra que la recherche de ces critères ne peut se limiter à l'ère Meiji et doit remonter d'une part au moins jusqu'au XVIIIe siècle et d'autre part, comme la modernisation est une adaptation continue à des techniques qui évoluent rapidement, aller jusqu'á nos jours.

Le ier octobre 1949, Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-tung) proclame, sur la place Tian An Men, à Pékin, la naissance de la Chine nouvelle. L'une de ses principales revendications est de « transformer cette Chine arrieéreée et ignorante, dominée par une vieille culture, en une Chine avancée et civilisée, animée par une culture nouvelle ». Son action a-t-elle été couronnée de succés ? Trente ansplus tard, quelle est l'ampleur du changement social?

A permanent threat of an outbreak of communal strife is a common characteristic of societies deeply divided along ethno-national, religious or linguistic lines. In such societies the state apparatus is often devoid of the capacity to maintain monopolistic control of the means for the exercise of organized violence in society. Indeed, there are many indications that conditions in communal-conflict-prone deeply divided societies are conducive to the evolvement of illegal or semi-legal community-based armed organizations (Horowitz 1982).

Anthropologists have been from the very beginning engaged in the study of tribes, and it is in somesense to this study that their discipline owes its distinctive identity. When historians, political theorists, sociologists and others have to deal with tribes, they turn to anthropologists for expert opinion on what tribes are and how they are constituted. In some countries what constitutes a tribe is of concern also to administrators and policy makers, and they too expect advice and guidance from anthropologists. Yet it cannot be said that anthropologists are themselves in agreement about the concept, and their disagreement is, if anything, even larger today than it was in the past.

The newars are the indigenous inhabitants of the Kathmandu Valley, a bowl-shaped plateau about fifteen miles across at a height of approximately 4,000 fest in the Himalayan foothills. It is a plateau in that the major rivers in the immediate area (the Trisuli and the Sunkosi) pass it by at a much lower level. The Valley is surrounded by a rampart of hills rising to 7 or 8,000 feet; according to local belief and myth, and according to geology, the Valley was once a lake. Its soil is exceptionally fertile by Himalayan, or indeed any, standards. Thanks to this, and to the Valley's strategic position astride trade routes to Tibet, it has a long and distinguished history. Written records (inscriptions) begin in the fifth century A.D. and give evidence of a high and literate civilization derived from the Indian plain. The inscriptions are written in a chaste and pure Sanskrit not met with in later periods, but the place-names reveal that the bulk of the population spoke an ancient form of the presentday Newars' language, Newari (Malla 1981 (1). Whereas most of the rest of Nepal remained thinly inhabited and rustic till the modern period, the Kathmandu Valley was able to support a division of labour and a sophisticated urban civilization impossible elsewhere in the Himalayan foothills between Kashmir and Assam.

À travers les âges, l'unité de l'lnde — « India is one » disait Dumont — a été symbolisée par une continuité culturelle enchâssée dans une structure sociale fondamentalement religieuse, comme l'exprimait Srinivas: « The concept of the unity of India is essentially a religious one », mais l'on peut ajouter que la structure de cette tradition a contribué à la projection d'une image unifiée de la civilisation qui a atteint le point de son plus haut développement à la fin de la période Gupta. Non qu'il n'y ait pas eu de changements, mais, vers la fin de cette période, la plupart des traités systématiques dans les champs de la réligion, de la littérature, de l'art, de la science et de philosophie ou de l'éthique s'étaient cristallisés dans ce qu'on a pu recemment appeler la « Grande Tradition ». Les périodes qui suivirent revinrent à une particularisation graduelle des institutions et des valeurs à l'intérieur de la tradition culturelle hindoue et aboutirent, dans certains cas, à des phénoménes de segmentarisation de cette « Grande Tradition ». Le centre de l'effervescence culturelle émigra du nord au sud de l'lnde et se régionalisa, donnant lieu a des mouvements hétérodoxes de reformulation et de reinterpretation des croyances socio-religieuses et des structures rituelles fondamentales de l'hindouisme. Sous la poussée des divers mouvements de bhakti, des saints-philosophes comme Śankara, Rāmānuja, Madhya rapprochérent la « Grande Tradition » du peuple, tout en modifiant son enseignement et en orientant leurs efforts vers un mouvement plus libéral vis-à-vis des Śūdra ou des basses castes; comme l'exprimait Stein: « In the eleventh century […] doctrinal issues come to be related quite directly to the place of Sūdrain the sect » (Stein 1968, p. 83).

Indian muslims have been a large and an active constituent of Indian politics and society for a very long time. Throughout the twentieth century their political endeavours have been directed towards achieving communal autonomy in a plural society. The aspiration to autonomy has been sufficiently strong to unite an otherwise extremely heterogeneous population, divided by language, class, caste and sect. Muslim politics were never monolithic but the dominant tendency was wedded to the cause of autonomy, which entailed a substantial struggle to determine the character and the scope of the state's jurisdiction.

One of the more ambitious intellectual projects of recent years is the body of work by Margaret S. Archer which centres on her Social Origins of Educational Systems, published in 1979. Archer's thesis is that modern educational systems are of two basic kinds, centralized and decentralized, and that their character and functioning are conditioned by the social and political conflicts of their formative phases. The underlying contrast is between France and England: this was Archer's starting-point, and in 1971 she published Social Conflict and Educational Change in England and France 1789–1848 in collaboration with Michalina Vaughan. Social Origins of Educational Systems extended this in time, bringing the story down to the present day, and in national coverage, adding Russia and Denmark to the countries examined. A shorter ‘University edition’—reduced to 234 pages from over 800—has now been published which is again restricted to England and France.

Zum wachsenden Interesse, das der Ethnomethodologie entgegengebracht wird, kontrastiert in eigenartiger Weise die Vagheit dessen, was assoziativ mit dem Namen dieses Ansatzes verbunden wird. Zwar nicht mehr nur »Geheimtip« (so Bergmann 1974: 10), aber durchaus noch mit der Aura eines Exotikums umgeben, mangelt es der Ethnomethodologie bis heute an klaren Konturen, an leichter Überschaubarkeit, an systematischer Eleganz. Immer noch sind ihre Theorie und ihre Methoden unklar (so schon Turner 1974: 7 f.), ist ihr Forschungsanliegen und sein Stellenwert in der soziologischen Diskussion schwer auf den Begriff zu bringen, tasten ihre Kritiker sie recht orientierungslos auf vermeintliche Defizite ab und gelangen zu einander oft widersprechenden Ergebnissen (vgl. Patzelt 1984b: 397–492). Diese Undurchsichtigkeit des Ansatzes legte für Kurt Hammerich gar die Vermutung nahe, »daß es führenden Ethnomethodologen […] an Darstellungsfähigkeit, an sprachlicher Kompetenz mangelt oder aber daß die Ethnomethodologie bloßer Firlefanz ist« (Hammerich 1978: 110).