In this book Abeles develops a fresh perspective on political life in France, both past and present, from the point of view of anthropology.

As a result of the strength and dominance of the centralized state, ritual action in China often takes its logic from political action. In this book Emily Ahern explores the implications of this. She argues that forms of control attempted ritually on non-human persons (gods and other spirits) in China parallel those forms of control which people regard as effective in ordinary life, namely political control, and draws important conclusions from this. She shows that in China it is possible to discard terms such as ???magic???, which imply that acts directed to spirits operate on a different...

In Legislatures in the Policy Process leading specialists in comparative governments reassess the conventional view that legislatures are either marginal to the policy-making process or becoming increasingly so. In the opening chapter, David Olson and Michael Mezey identify three categories of variables--external influences, internal influences and policy attributes--which can affect the policy-making role of legislatures. They specify sixteen hypotheses that describe the relationship among these variables and the policy participation of legislatures. In subsequent chapters, these hypotheses...

Emrys Peters studied the Bedouin of Libya for more than thirty years. The handful of articles published during his lifetime were widely admired and are still essential reading for anthropologists. He left further significant papers unpublished at his death, and the editors have drawn on these for half of this collection, which brings together his major writings on the Bedouin. These seminal essays are not only of ethnographic interest. All Peters' work is informed by a rigorous theoretical intelligence, and his analysis of power in Bedouin society has fascinated many discerning social...

This book brings together several aspects of soliton theory currently available only in research papers. Emphasis is given to the multi-dimensional problems which arise and includes inverse scattering in multi-dimensions, integrable nonlinear evolution equations in multi-dimensions and the dbar method.

Over the last few decades a series of Catholic shrines have sprung up in Sri Lanka which draw hundreds of pilgrims. Although best known as centres for the exorcism of the demonically possessed, their miraculous efficacy also extends to helping people find jobs and preferment, and to alleviating suffering. Dr Stirrat, who has worked in Sri Lanka over a long period, is interested both in how people behave at the shrines, and in the historical and social contexts in which the shrines have appeared. He argues that an understanding of their religious importance is intricately connected with power,...

Defining Science deals with the major role of the historian and philosopher of science, William Whewell, in early Victorian debates about the nature of science and its moral and cultural value. Richard Yeo also examines the different forms or genres in which science was discussed in the public sphere--most crucially in the Victorian review journals, but also in biographical, historical and educational works. Analysis of the whole corpus of Whewell's work suggests that it be seen not only as an attempt to define science, but to clarify his own vocation as its leading critic.

Why do the Nuer stipulate forty cattle in brideprice? Why is the number ten so important in North American mythology? What does the anthropologist Clifford Geertz really mean to say when he talks about the correspondence of Balinese time cycles? Numbers play some part, often quite central, in almost all known cultures, yet until now the subject has never been examined in detail from an anthropological perspective. This book is the first attempt to find out how people in a wide range of diverse cultures and in different historical contexts, use and understand numbers. The opening chapters...

The Ismailis, among whom are the followers of the Aga Khan, rose to prominence during the fourth Islamic/tenth Christian century. They developed a remarkably successful intellectual programme to sustain and support their political activities, promoting demands of Islamic doctrine together with the then newly imported sciences from abroad. The high watermark of this intellectual movement is best illustrated in the writings of the Ismaili theoretician Abu Yaqub al-Sijistani. Using both published and manuscript writings of al-Sijistani that have hitherto been largely hidden, forgotten or...

Drawing on an ethnographic study of a remote community in the Auvergne, Dr. Reed-Danahay challenges conventional views about the operation of the French school system. She shows how parents subvert and resist the ideological messages of the teachers, and describes the ways in which a sense of local difference is sustained and valued, even in the official educational discourse. A significant contribution to the anthropology of education, this book offers fresh insights into the ways in which French culture is transmitted to the coming generation. Dr. Reed-Danahay also provides lucid and...