Latin America as an area would yield to few if any other regions of the world in its devotion to what it considers the constitutional process and, indeed, the supremacy of constitutions in establishing and ordering the political life of the several states. If the mere number of excursions into the practical exercise of constitution-making were to be considered significant—which it probably is at most only in a limited way—it might lead to the conclusion that the Latins were affected by some form of legpmania. A compilation of Latin America constitutions published a little more than a decade ago indicated that as of the beginning of 1948 the twenty states had written a total of 200 basic laws since their respective achievements of independence. Several additional ones have since been drafted.

The rise of the nations of Asia and, as one ought to add, Africa, and the invention of atomic weapons are two developments which threaten to shake the way of life the Western World has developed. Is there a way to ban these dangers and to provide for the world an harmonious order? These are the momentous questions to which the author of The Meeting of East and West has addressed himself in his new book. Although of the thirty-two chapters of this work, thirty are adaptations of articles published at earlier dates, the book constitutes a coherent whole and an impressive testimony to the consistency of the thought of the author as it has developed during his incumbency of the philosopher's chair at the Yale Law School. As the title of the book indicates, the author is concerned with human experience, i.e. epistemology in general, and more particularly, the relations between epistemology and man's ways of social order as expressed in ethics and law.

The society built up by Overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia has always been remarkable for its wealth of voluntary associations. In the various historical and sociological studies of Southeast Asian Chinese which have appeared the importance of associations has been duly stressed, although in respect of only two settlements have we been given full treatment of their structure and significance. In this paper I shall consider the associations which Singapore Chinese created and modified in the course of the nineteenth century. Studying this earlier period of Singapore history we can see how the Chinese members of the colonial society adapted their social organization to the conditions of a trading settlement in which, while they often amassed great riches, they were not their own political masters. At the end of the paper I shall consider the Singapore evidence within the wider setting of Southeast Asia and put forward certain general conclusions which may be taken up in other papers on the same theme.

The thesis underlying this essay may be summarized as follows: The modern European concepts frontier, state and nation are interdependent but they are not necessarily applicable to all state-like political organisations everywhere. In default of adequate documentary materials most historians of South-East Asia have tended to assume that the states with which they have to deal were Nation-States occupied by named “Peoples” and separated from each other by precise political frontiers. The inferences that have been made on the basis of these initial assumptions sometimes conflict with sociological common sense. It is not the anthropologist's task to write history, but if history is to be elaborated with the aid of inspired guesses then the special knowledge of the anthropologist becomes relevant so as to point up the probabilities.

It is only human perhaps to approach a problem from the point of view of a discipline one knows and to find this approach illuminating and the approach from any other discipline obfuscating. Nevertheless some scholars have been able to utilize without confusion the results of other disciplines. Still others have wisely admitted their incompetence to control the results of the other disciplines and have ignored them entirely and proceeded to deal with their problem in their own way.

The Nagy-Magyar Alföld, the Great Hungarian Plain, lies within the Carpathian crescent, between the last foothills of the Alps and the South Slavic and Transylvanian mountain ranges. The Danube and the Tisza meander slowly through it, carrying their muddy waters to the narrow passage of the Iron Gates. The landscape here—the wide horizons shimmering in the heat of summer with unreal outlines, the crossed well-poles like slanting T's, the endless fields alternately of wheat and maize, the alkali-rimmed lakes, the lack of trees, the occasional stretches of empty steppe with not a single human being in sight—is to anyone from the tree-clad mountain slopes across the Danube a startling contrast. The visitor will soon discover that the character of the region and the traditions of its people have combined in the course of history to create here unique social forms.

Since the end of the first world war scholars have intensified their research on the Cistercian movement and its 12th-century architecture. In this note dealing with the building code and the structures of a minority group an attempt will be made to analyze the historical and theoretical bases which were responsible for the austerity of the Cistercian oratories. The question will have to be asked if and for how long the community was able to achieve and to maintain an ideally neutral type of monastic architecture, which was intended to be of such simplicity that it would not impose any emotions on the viewer.

Purism represents the conscious effort of a culture to reject a commonly accepted iconography and the meanings implicit in its canons of proportion, taste and esthetic, and to substitute in their place a pragmatic solution of the artistic problem involved. What is not always recognized is that this solution must be the consequence of the terms of the problem; and the statement of these terms, indeed the selection of the problem itself, are both culturally determined.