For comparison of the fates of kings reflect on the misfortunes of Saul. Mired in political chaos and beset by foreign kings, Israel came to perceive an advantage in monarchy. Accordingly the people asked the prophet Samuel to find them a king so that they could be like other nations. The Lord, through Samuel, fulfilled this desire, and (Yahweh being a jealous God) the people were warned of the consequences: “This will be the sort of king who will govern you”—he will take your sons and daughters, the best of your cornfields, vineyards, and cattle— “when that day comes, you will cry out against the king you have chosen; but it will be too late” (I Samuel 8:11–19). Yet there was also to be a constitution of a sort: “Samuel … explained to the people the nature of a king, and made a written record of it on a scroll which he deposited before the Lord” (10:24–25). Royal power, though great, was still M have its limits

Studies of the role of land tenure in the economic and social history of China are flawed by the unexamined assumption that the sale of land by impoverished farmers was the only process that generated high rates of tenancy and concentration of ownership of land. Debt-sales are assumed to occur as part of a cycle of immiserization in which a peasant population outgrows its landed resources and owner-farmers are forced to sell their lands and become the tenants or hired laborers of wealthy landlords. This essay demonstrates the improbability of such a scenario and establishes its opposite: that rates of tenancy and concentration of landownership rise, not in periods of economic decline but in periods of prosperity, and not through debt-sales but through the alternate processes of reclamation, migration, and changes in the mode of landlord farm management.

Segismundo's services [as notary at the registry office] had, indeed, been admirably suited to the time and place. … He cheerfully registered all the children that ap-peared before him as having been born in the County of Ilheus, State of Bahia, Brazil. … How could one be bothered with such miserable legal details as the exact place and date of a child's birth when one was living dangerously in the midst of gun fights, armed bandits, and deadly ambushes? What did it matter, really, where the little Brazilian about to be registered was born? … He simply took the word of these friendly immigrants and their witnesses—respectable men whose word was worth more than any legal document—and accepted their gifts. … By that venerable hand, on a certain afternoon many years ago, little Nacib [a Syrian immigrant] was turned into a native-born Brazilian.

Cookbooks, which usually belong to the humble literature of complex civilizations, tell unusual cultural tales. They combine the sturdy pragmatic virtues of all manuals with the vicarious pleasures of the literature of the senses. They reflect shifts in the boundaries of edibility, the proprieties of the culinary process, the logic of meals, the exigencies of the household budget, the vagaries of the market, and the structure of domestic ideologies. The existence of cookbooks presupposes not only some degree of literacy, but often an effort on the part of some variety of specialist to standardize the regime of the kitchen, to transmit culinary lore, and to publicize particular traditions guid- ing the journey of food from marketplace to kitchen to table. Insofar as cookbooks reflect the kind of technical and cultural elaboration we grace with the term cuisine, they are likely, as Jack Goody has recently argued, to be representations not only of structures of production and distribution and of social and cosmological schemes, but of class and hierarchy (1982). Their spread is an important sign of what Norbert Elias has called “the civilizing process” (1978). The increased interest of historians and anthropologists in cookbooks should therefore come as no surprise (Chang 1977; Cosman 1976; Khare 1976a, 1976b).

Contemporary Indian law is, for the most part, palpably foreign in origin or inspiration and it is notoriously incongruent with the attitudes and concerns of much of the population which lives under it. However, the present legal system is firmly established and the likelihood of its replacement by a revised “indigenous” system is extremely small.

Totem: the iconic representation of a specific ordering of plant and animal species. Clan: the representation of a group identity. Totemism: the relationship between totem and clan. From Emile Durkheim and his nineteenthcentury antecedents to Claude Lévi-Strauss, the discussion of totemism has addressed the way in which people classify themselves with reference to the animal and plant world. This discussion began with the observation among different exotic peoples of the widespread practice of arranging certain animal and plant species into a pattern that, while differing from culture to culture in content, seemed to indicate a consistent formal relationship between totem and clan. The iconic representation of so-called nature—the totem—seemed invariably the model for the representation of intra- or intergroup identity—for the clan.

Farmers used to grow, process, store, and merchandise food and fiber. Such “agriculture as an industry in and of itself or as a distinct phase of our economy,” however, has long become a legacy of the past (Davis and Goldberg 1957:1). Farmers today stand in relations of growing complexity with various “others” for the purpose of agricultural production, i.e. farm suppliers, banks, research centers, processors, storage operators, distributors, and the government. In other words, farmers work in the complex web of relationships created by all these individuals and institutions. In this context, “contract farming,” a topic of growing interest among social scientists, seems to epitomize, perhaps most clearly, such complex production relations maintained by many farmers today in various corners of the world.

The publication of Sir James Frazer's Totemism and Exogamy raised as many problems for anthropologists as it tried to solve: namely, why do symbols that stand for any social group become imbued with religious, ritual, social, and mystical significance, and how do these totemic conceptual systems relate to systems of action? More often than not, symbols of group unity—whatever the group—possess more than one dimension, and these dimensions are often hard to differentiate analytically and ethnographically. In the mainstream of anthropology symbols and their use have been deemed to reflect patterns of social organization. Within this paradigm the majority of authors treat the choice of symbol as either essentially arbitrary or deterministically compelled. We find that the old paradigm of symbol as a reflection of something essentially social—cultural inversion, as some authors would have it, or vaguely and vulgarly determined as others put it—is rather suspect.

The literature on women's role in economic development in the third world indicates that as agrarian societies industrialize, women tend to take on ever greater responsibility for agricultural production, in addition to their reproductive and household duties, as working age men and, in some cases, women seek wage labor to supplement insufficient farm production (Boserup 1970:80–81; Bossen 1984; Deere and León de Leal 1981; Ward 1984).

The terms poruka (suretyship or collective responsibility) and poruchnik (surety, guarantor) rarely appear in pre-Mongol Russian texts. Formal poruka seems to have expanded enormously only after the Mongol invasion. The institution clearly flourished in Muscovite Russia, where q“surety bonds” (poruchnye zapisi) were drawn up to cover debts and contractual obligations, military and administrative service, payment of fiscal levies, obligatory labor, trial procedure, personal conduct, public safety, political allegiance—and even matters of conscience and orthodoxy (“spiritual suretyship”). In all those areas, individuals or groups of people could, as “sureties,” be held responsible for the conduct of others, the “principals.” Sureties faced harsh penalties—fines, forced labor, corporal punishment, and worse—for their principals' misconduct or failure to fulfill certain obligations.

Segmentary state was the concept coined to fit Alur society into the theory of political anthropology of the 1940s. Fortes and Evans-Pritchard made the first giant step in the comparative analysis of African political systems, but supposedly centralized states and stateless segmentary lineage systems were the only ones to receive full consideration. Nadel had already distilled the voluminous Eurocentric literature on the theory and philosophy of the state, overburdened as it was with Hegelian growth, to produce a precise empirically oriented and workable definition of the state for anthropologists. Alur society did not fit or even approximate anywhere within the range of the model provided. But the model formulated in 1956 under Alur inspiration was an awkward and cumbersome derivation of Nadel's rather than a clear model in its own right. It would be simpler and better to define the segmentary state as one in which the spheres of ritual suzerainty and political sovereignty do not coincide. The former extends widely towards a flexible, changing periphery. The latter is confined to the central, core domain.

Throughout the vast literature on British and general imperialism, the emphasis is largely upon the winning, then subsequent loss, of political control by the imperial power in colonial settings. Consequently, debate about the accession to that power has revolved largely about the great triad of considerations: economic necessity, strategic calculation, and civilising zeal. Similarly, discussion of emergent nationalist movements has hinged upon remarkably similar lines: Was the leadership of those movements motivated solely by ideologically inspired desires for independence, by the ambition to command the new sources of economic wealth developed under imperial rule, or by a simple thrust for political power to protect other interests? These are generalisations certainly, but, to take India as a case in point, much of the modern historiography has been concerned to demonstrate either how Britain “lost” or how the Indian National Congress “won” that power. But among such generalisations upon the British imperial experience, one interesting question has gone begging.

The search for medieval parallels and for medieval roots in New World history has become a fascinating genre. My own university has produced one of the major figures in this field, Lynn White, Jr., and has recently honored another, Luis Weckmann. With the Columbus centennial rushing toward us, we may expect more exercises in their spirit. Such an approach is not farfetched or whimsical. We are the heirs of medieval technology and mentalities. In both, as White has reminded us, the United States may be “closer to the Middle Ages than is Europe.“ And the great historian Shelomo Goitein, after spending most of his working life in pre-Nazi Germany and then in Israel, upon moving to the United States was startled to recognize the medieval flavor of our social structures and mentalities; as a lifelong student of the Middle Ages, he found that “one feels quite at home“ here.

I am extremely fortunate to have discussed issues of hegemony, consciousness, and class transformations with Nan E. Woodruff, who brought Southern and European perspectives to my own Peru-centered understandings. Julie Saville, a scholar of emancipation and reconstruction in the United States, made me aware of the fine points of cultural resistance and taught me not to underestimate its strengths. Jane Collier also taught me much about chiefdoms and their internal tensions. And thanks to the anonymous reviewer for interesting and helpful suggestions. This article was presented in various incarnations at several professional gatherings. I am grateful to have benefited from the insights and criticisms of co-panel members and audience. “Contradictions in Inca Ideologies" was presented at the Sixteenth Annual Meeting of the Canadian Ethnology Society (Montreal, 1984); ‘Politics of Reproduction and Inca Expansion’ was pre- sented at the Annual Meeting of the American Ethnological Society (Wrightsville Beach, 1986); and ‘Politics of Reproduction and the Inca Construction of History’ was presented at the Symposium on Andean and Lowland South American Cosmologies, organized by the University of Chicago (Chicago, 1986). Generous grants from the Doherty Foundation, Wenner Gren Foundation, and Organization of American States allowed me to conduct research on the Incas in Peru from June 1975 to December 1978. I will always be grateful to them for affording me that special opportunity.

Worshippers of the goddess Ma Tsu constitute Taiwan's most encompassing ritual community. The cult's close association with Taiwanese history and cultural identity is well known to Sinological anthropologists. Every year pilgrimage groups (usually organized by local territorial cults) converge on cult centers at Pei-kang, Hsin-kang, Chang-hua, Lu-kang, T'u-ch'eng, and Tainan, among others (see Figure 1). These centers compete actively for cult supremacy, and the arguments invoked in this rivalry are mainly of an historical nature. The question I explore here is, Why is history so important in establishing the authenticity and charisma of this goddess?

Both these quotations are products of considered reflection made by men upon the “nature” and place of women within Australian society. Withnell is president of the Perth chapter of the Coffin Cheaters and currently writing a Ph.D. thesis on the “subculture” of biker clubs. Sturgess, a barrister perhaps best known for his prosecution of Lindy Chamberlain in the second inquest into the disappearance of her daughter, at the time of the newspaper article was the one-man commission of inquiry into child abuse in Queensland. Both statements express commonsense Australian cultural understandings of women, which are also available within Australian myths of national identity. My intention in exploring these myths is to elucidate a more complete range of the cultural conceptualisations of women than is provided by these statements and, at the same time, account for the prevalent limited and often negative