Whatever its author's intention, nearly every study of the history of Soviet Russia or of the international Communist movement contributes to the continuing controversy over Lenin's responsibility for all the policies that usually are lumped together under the label of Stalinism. Irving Howe and Lewis Coser wrote in 1957 that ‘from the party of Lenin to the party of Stalin there is a fundamental disjuncture marked by a violent counter-revolution’. In a more recent exchange of views on this subject, George Lichtheim, although he did not say that Lenin would have behaved as Stalin did, said it is his considered opinion that ‘Stalin's policy, broadly speaking, was within the context established by Lenin in 1923’. Lichtheim was referring in particular to Stalin's industrialization plans, but in the same article he makes it clear that his opinion holds for Stalin's policy in its entirety.

Are industrial societies becoming alike? This crucial question, unfortunately sometimes treated as an assumption, has been of central theoretical interest since the appearance of the social sciences. The philosophes, with their optimistic belief in progress, were theorists of convergence because they believed in the perfectibility not of particular groups in society, but of all ‘mankind’. It was a radical, anti-relativistic notion to believe that Man not Men was the basic unit of study, the premise for speculation. For if Man acted the same everywhere, then forms of social organization must share essential analytic properties and be proceeding toward an equivalence of structural arrangements. Morally, good was to be found everywhere. Samuel Johnson remarked that ‘the King of Siam sent ambassadors to Louis XIV, but Louis XIV did not send ambassadors to the King of Siam’. But Johnson sent his literary imagination on a diplomatic mission to Abyssinia in Rasselas, presumably to clear his mind of such ethnocentric cant. The cult of the Noble Savage was not only an aspect of eighteenth-century Romanticism, but an indication that Europeans, even Frenchmen, had something to learn from the simple lives of their primitive contemporaries. Like the philosophes many thought that the state, in the form of the benevolent despot, assured continual improvement, and often saw middling groups of intellectuals as allied with or advisory to the king in this great enterprise. It did not seem improbable that societies would converge to a similar political structure—with a strong state, an intellectual elite, and a mature opinion publique, a phrase that originated in pre-revolutionary eighteenth-century France.

It has been observed by various authors that peasant agglomerations, the so-called ‘agro-towns’ that may number several thousand inhabitants, are fairly common in southern Italy. This pattern, which geographically separates the people from their land, is not restricted to the south of Italy; it is typical for most countries along the Mediterranean.

As anthropologists turn increasingly to the study of complex societies, they are led to reflect on the role that social science plays in national ideologies and the ways in which the current state and development of social science reflect other cultural states and processes. Indeed, such reflections can usefully be turned on our own society. One sees that it is much more appropriate to discard old notions of the distinction between ‘science’ and ‘folklore’ and to regard the social science of a particular society, however sophisticated and presumably objective, as an important part of its subjective ideology about itself and the world and thus a part of its own folk theory about the relations of man to society and of men to men. This paper is a sketch of some of the interrelationships between Yugoslav social science and other aspects of Yugoslav culture, with primary emphasis on ethnology.

Few countries have been as frequently described in terms of national character as Turkey. Even the earliest observers of the Ottoman Empire appear anxious to set their findings into some generalized formula of the Turkish ethos. The term used to refer to these attempts at national stereo-typing in the lingua franca of the Levant was Alia Turca behavior, an expression which has survived into modern Turkish.

This essay can best be considered an anthropological venture in the field of recent and contemporary Spanish historiography. Our aim is twofold: an understanding of the nature of Spanish historical interpretation as it is elaborated by national historians; the examination of certain phases of intercultural contact critical in the formation of a distinct Spanish cultural form.

In a closed and stable society, innovation is likely to be rather feared than welcomed; in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it was sometimes used as a synonym for ‘revolution’; in an open society like our own, innovation is considered a virtue. In discussing the present condition of art, I want to strip innovation of its value connotations and to consider the search for the new as an historical condition of modern art, but not one that makes it either better or worse than the more stable arts of the past. I suggest a biological metaphor as a guide: in the evolution of species, innovation is not necessarily advantageous. If the conditions of the environment are stable, it is likely that mutants in a species will be selectively eliminated. Conversely, in a changing environment, the appearance of new characters better adjusted to the new conditions will improve the adaptation of the species and be favored by the selective process.

We are often told, and it is easy to believe, that the images of abstract art are not drawn from the real world. In the most conventional view of the modern school, abstract painting is a search for free expression of the artist's own vision. The non-representational painter works as he pleases and is pleased by little that he sees. A humorous drawing in a sophisticated magazine shows a studio full of wild canvases, with the artist gazing through the window at a magnificent sunset. He says to a friend, ‘Yes, old man, I admit that it's beautiful. Sometimes I'm sorry it's not the sort of thing I do.’ Authority for the establishment of a public attitude that makes such a joke possible is to be found in the writings of many critics and in the words of artists themselves. Harold Rosenberg: ‘The big moment [in art] came when it was decided to paint—just to paint. The gesture on the canvas was a gesture of liberation from value, political, aesthetic, moral.’ André Malraux: ‘What then was painting becoming, now that it no longer imitated or transfigured? Simply—painting.’ Sheldon Cheney: ‘I cannot do better, in trying to help you to an understanding of modernism, than to point out the devastating effect the realistic movement had on the arts as a whole.‘ Piet Mondrian: ‘In order that art … should not represent relations with the natural aspect of things, the law of the denaturalization of matter is of fundamental importance.’ Clive Bell: ‘Creating a work of art is so tremendous a business that it leaves no leisure for catching likenesses.’ Kasimir Malevich: ‘From the supremist point of view, the appearances of natural objects are in themselves meaningless. … The representation of an object … is something that has nothing to do with art.’ Laurence Binyon, in 1911: ‘The theory that art is, above all things, imitative and representative, no longer holds the field with thinking minds.’ Ortega y Gasset: ‘Painting completely reversed its function and, instead of putting us within what is outside, endeavored to pour out upon the canvas what is within: ideal invented objects.’

The study of overseas Chinese has continued for some time as a series of somewhat unrelated monographs with little comparative analysis. One of the few important attempts at sociological generalization about Chinese communities in Southeast Asia was made by Maurice Freedman in an article entitled ‘Immigrants and Associations’, which appeared in this journal in 1960. In this article, Freedman suggested that ‘the associations which in a small-scale and relatively underdeveloped settlement express social, economic and political links in an undifferentiated form, tend, as the scale and complexity of the society increase, to separate into a network of associations which are comparatively specialized in their functions and the kinds of solidarity they express’ (Freedman, 1960: 47 f.). He proposed a continuum of types of overseas Chinese urban communities. At one end stands Kuching, Sarawak, ‘as the model of a simple and relatively small-scale overseas settlement’, while ‘Later Singapore is … the model of the most developed form of immigrant Chinese settlement in Southeast Asia’ (ibid.: 45). Singapore exhibits a great number of associations, based on criteria of recruitment that allow memberships to overlap to a great extent; the urban Chinese community in Sarawak includes fewer associations and consequently less overlap among memberships. Other studies in Southeast Asia suggest that this continuum might be a useful way of looking at the development of Chinese communities.

Several decades ago, many studies of Indian caste equated this institution with the four-fold scriptural division of society called the varnas. At the present, however, most anthropologists agree that the jati or local endogamous group is the effective unit of caste. Although the varnas have little to do with the organization of caste groups, they do say something about the ideological integration of regions and sub-regions in traditional India. The term varna should not only be taken to refer to the literate, scriptural division. Rather it should mean any indigenous ideological scheme which merges castes into larger status categories or classifications. This paper suggests that such varna schemes are found throughout India, and that their individual distribution demarcates important cultural regions or nuclear areas. These schemes seem to function as ideological or ‘mechanical’ integrating mechanisms for areas which do not have stable and longstanding political and economic centricity (or ’organic’ cohesion). The ideas advanced below are in no sense final, but rather are intended mainly as suggestive of future research. They are tentative propositions aimed at a broader perspective on how regions in India were ideologically bounded by localized status categories of castes.

Study of charismatic movements has become an increasingly large, complex, and rather confusing field. A recent bibliography on modern religious movements in Africa, to which these considerations will be restricted, lists 1,313 items.

In the year 946, in three separate areas of the civilized world, certain changes took place which mark the beginning of a new era. In Iraq in this year a Daylamite Persian adventurer of Shiah persuasion, named Ahmad, seized control of Baghdad and the surrounding Iraqi plains and in so doing established a dynasty which was to last more than a hundred years. About a decade earlier in the French Midi two princes of the house of Toulouse and their Gascon ally and kinsman journeyed north to Auvergne to do homage for their vast holdings in Southern France to the weak Carolingian monarch, Louis IV, the last such homage scions of this house were to render to their Northern French overlords for more than two centuries. Finally, during the same year of 946, in distant Japan, an official of the central government of Kyoto, named Ono, after suppressing the dangerous pirate forces of a certain Sumitomo, issued an appeal against the use of private armies which was resulting in disorder and the inability of the central government to maintain peace and security.

In this paper I shall analyse the rituals for Sanni Yaka (‘the demon of Sanni’). Sanni Yaka is also known as Kōla Sanniya and is a pantheistic deity who incorporates eighteen other demons known as Dahaaṭa Sanni (eighteen Sanni) or simply as Sanni Yakku (Sanni demons; Yakku is plural of Yakā). The rituals performed for the Sanni Yakku appear in a large-scale ceremony known as the Sanni Yäkuma, ‘the demon ceremony of the Sanni’. In my analysis I shall emphasize the dramatic aspects of the rituals, where the demons appear on stage in masked representations. In these rituals a great deal of comic dialogue and obscenities prevail. Their significance has been missed by Wirz who describes one of these rituals, the dolaha pelapāliya (spectacle for the twelve gods) in the following terms: ‘This scene is called simply ‘pelapāliya’, which may best be translated as ‘dance suite’, or ‘musical show.’ … In reality, it is only interposed for diversion and has no deeper meaning’ (1954: 59). A highly sophisticated anthropologist presumably refers to similar comic humour when he says that ‘after more hocus-pocus, Riri Yaka is eventually told that by the orders of the Buddha (Budu anin) and the power of the gods (deviyangē balē) he must accept the dola (offering) and remove his curse from the patient' (Ames, 1964: 42). Almost identical words are spoken to Kōla Sanniya in the Sanni Yäkuma ritual, but we shall interpret and unravel the symbolic meaning of these humorous ritual dramas and consider their evolution and social functions.

Our two authors have taken positive stands on contemporary art. Mr. Ackerman is clearly attached to tradition and ‘values’, and he is troubled by that episodic character of all actuality, which so disturbs the historian's view. Mr. Hafner, on the other hand, does not turn away from actuality, but he seems to smother contemporary art under a blanket comparison with science, whereby artists and scientists pursue a common enterprise in defining the ‘new reality’.

Following a few introductory comments on the concept ‘subculture’ and the likelihood of universally similar responses to the industrialization experience, some generalizations are offered here about a dockworker subculture and the conditions that create it. The generalizations are in the form of propositions, not operational hypotheses—certainly not verified generalizations. They are based primarily on written sources, though the author has conducted interviews in San Francisco and Karachi. In conclusion the problems involved in making this type of cross-culture, cross-time proposition into a verifiable hypothesis are briefly suggested.

For reasons which will appear, the problem of the avant-garde, as presented by Professors Ackerman and Kubler, has caught my interest in unexpected and, I hope, fruitful ways. Nevertheless, both on grounds of competence and because of the nature of my assignment, my present remarks are directed primarily to Professor Hafner's rapprochement of science and art. As a former physicist now mainly engaged with the history of that science, I remember well my own discovery of the close and persistent parallels between the two enterprises I had been taught to regard as polar. A belated product of that discovery is the book on Scientific Revolutions to which my fellow contributors have referred. Discussing either developmental patterns or the nature of creative innovation in the sciences, it treats such topics as the role of competing schools and of incommensurable traditions, of changing standards of value, and of altered modes of perception. Topics like these have long been basic for the art historian but are minimally represented in writings on the history of science. Not surprisingly, therefore, the book which makes them central to science is also concerned to deny, at least by strong implication, that art can readily be distinguished from science by application of the classic dichotomies between, for example, the world of value and the world of fact, the subjective and the objective, or the intuitive and the inductive. Gombrich's work, which tends in many of the same directions, has been a source of great encouragement to me, and so is Hafner's essay. Under these circumstances, I must concur in its major conclusion: ‘The more carefully we try to distinguish artist from scientist, the more difficult our task becomes.’ Certainly that statement describes my own experience.

If I have understood Obeyesekere correctly, his paper on the ritual of the Sanni demons has two major concerns: to describe and interpret the dynamics of a dramatic healing ritual and to identify the symptoms represented symbolically by the Sanni demons. The ritual of the eighteen demons is presented as a dramatic confrontation between the forces of good, the gods, and those of evil, the disease-causing demons. The story line is provided by texts recounting original mythic encounters between the Buddhas and the demons. A degree of abreaction is achieved by the patient who is drawn into the drama as well as by the audience for whom the drama acts as an alleviator of tensions and reinforcer of religious values. After observing that each of the eighteen demons represents a discrete set of symptoms and that the system of Ayurvēdic medicine currently popular in Ceylon is a naturalistic one, Obeyesekere uses comparative linguistic and myth materials from other parts of India to demonstrate that the demons once represented physical rather than psychological symptoms and that psychological content has gradually come to replace an earlier set of organic, naturalistic representations.

Adoption plays a major part in the traditional law of many Eurasian societies. It occupies a large portion of Mayne's Treatise on Hindu Law and Usage (1878). The Babylonian code of Hammu-rabi, the oldest comprehensive set of written laws, gives a prominent position to ‘Adoption and Wet-nursing’ (Driver and Miles, 1952: 383–406). And the institution receives the same kind of attention in the law of China, Greece and Ancient Rome. Theoretically it has been of central importance in the writings of Sir Henry Maine and Fustel de Coulanges, where it is linked to the perpetuation of corporations of agnates over time.

By way of introducing so charged a subject as corruption we do well to remind ourselves that if the traditional rulers of the colonized areas left much to be desired in terms of present standards of public office-holding, the colonizers themselves could scarcely be regarded as models of probity. Colonial office until the twentieth century was regarded more often than not as an investment in an exclusive franchise that was expected to yield a good return to the political entrepreneur who acquired it. In Spain this conception was reflected in the practice of selling certain colonial posts at public auction. Dutch practice in Batavia, although not identical, signified a similar notion of office. Here the colonial administrator owed his superiors a regular charge that could be described as a ‘license to hold office’ in return for which he could anticipate, in addition to his small salary and a share of the district crop yield, more or less open payments from the Dutch business interests he had assisted in the course of his duties.