It is no accident that the study of comparative politics, and especially thestudy of political development, has been dominated by scholars from themetropolitan countries, or by those trained in metropolitan universities.This interest in the politics of the subordinate world has resulted in aseries of case studies, which we have assumed have added substantially toour knowledge about these hitherto neglected areas. However, untilfairly recently, little attention has been paid to the underlying assumptionsand ideologies of these metropolitan scholars, and the distortions, consciousand unconscious, introduced into scholarship on these areas underthe guise of scientific and value-free methodologies.

Purdah, meaning curtain, is the word most commonly used for the system of secluding women and enforcing high standards of female modesty in much of South Asia. Purdah is an important part of the life experience of many South Asians, both Muslim and Hindu, and is a central feature of the social systems of the area. The crucial characteristic of the purdah system is its limitation on interaction between women and males outside certain well-defined categories, which differ among Muslims and Hindus. Muslim purdah restrictions do not apply within the immediate kin unit,but only outside it, while Hindu purdah is based on a set of avoidance rules between a woman and her male affines. Muslim seclusion begins at puberty, Hindu seclusion strictly speaking begins with marriage.

In this paper I propose to apply the situational perspective in examiningthe interdependence between cultural values and actual conditions offamily behavior in Latin America, first by singling out significant inconsistenciesand contradictions between the cultural definition of the femalerole and social actuality and second, by identifying some of the situationalcircumstances that are responsible for this divergency.

Clothing is a bundle of cultural symbols that has been dealt withsomewhat eclectically and indiscriminately in the anthropological wash.Some writers have speculated on the origins of clothing, stressing suchqualities in human nature as modesty and vanity; others, more materiallyoriented, have emphasized utility; others again have listed separategarments, the materials of which they were made, and the techniquesemployed; and some have paid attention to broader historical and sociological dimensions. In a pioneering study, Kroeber used documentary evidence to correlate fluctuations in women's fashions (using indices of skirt length, width of waist, and depth of decolletage) with major social and political upheavals (Kroeber, 1919, 1940), but perhaps because of the nature of his data, as well as his particular orientation, he made no reference to the persons involved, and overlooked internal cultural variations and conflicts of style. These issues received more attention from scholars trained in the Malinowski tradition of fieldwork, and they described clothing worn by different persons in different situations; those who worked in areas where people of different cultures were brought in contact in the colonial situation indicated the meaning of changes in style of clothing over time. General textbooks draw attention to the correlation between clothing and social status and to such facts as the cost of clothing, its technology and its aesthetics.

One need not be an anthropologist or a cultural historian to remark that social dancing these days seems to isolate the individual in a trance-like self-absorption which virtually disconnects him from the world and even from his partner. Indeed, the dance of the day—like other art forms—is often a good reflection of the values of a given time and place. Today's developments, both in the dance and in society, provide more than the usual scholarly justification for looking back to one of the earliest manifestations of individualism and escape in the dance and its association with the values of liberty, equality and uncertainty which followed upon the French Revolution. The dance was the waltz; the dancers, at first, were the middle classes, soon to be joined by both upper and lower classes; the time and place are Central Europe, and soon the whole Western world, at the beginning of the nineteenth century.