The politicians of the Brazilian Empire (1822–89) have provided the inspiration for a tremendous production of historical writing. Scholars have experienced difficulty, however, in making valid generalizations concerning the career patterns of imperial politicians: recruitment, training, integration, and advancement within the ranks of the political elite. Good biographies furnish useful details about individual politicians and their careers, but do not identify the system adopted by the monarchy for the purpose of developing its own political elite. Generalizations have been based on individual cases, and no adequate treatment of collective career patterns exists.

This paper is about social change in underdeveloped areas. It is based on field work in the European Mediterranean between 1965 and 1967. Hansen worked in the wine and champagne district of Villafranca del Panadés, roughly 30 miles from Barcelona, in Catalonia. The Schneiders were in the wheat and pastoral latifundium zone of Western Sicily. The two regions exhibit quite different patterns of land use and tenure, social stratification and settlement. We were struck, however, by two characteristics which they shared. First, we found a plethora of noncorporate social structures (for the most part coalitions) which organized fundamental economic and political activities of a quite modern sort. In rural Catalonia, coalitions of businessmen, skilled workers and government functionaries are formed within the context of an emergent bar culture, centered in major towns like Villafranca. In Western Sicily, until quite recently, the locus of similar coalitions was the latifundium. As yet, no clearly defined urban tradition has replaced this predominantly rural one

Anthropologists' view of law, as Bohannan (1963: 288) recently summarized, is generally concerned with two aspects: one studies the legal procedures of foreign cultures and discovers and compares inquisitorial and correctional devices, and the other focuses on basic axioms or ‘postulates’ underlying the stated norms or laws of a society. Bohannan amplifies the scope by noting that not only the ‘institutions of counteraction’ should be studied but also the events that precede and follow counteraction, for the anthropologist has learnt that legal institutions are, after all, a product of and constantly molded by indigenous culture. We are better aware of this interrelationship in simple cultures (for examples, see Bohannan, 1957; Gluckman, 1955,1965; Hoebel, 1954; Llewellyn and Hoebel, 1941; Pospisil, 1958; Schapera, 1938; and Beattie, 1957). The anthropologist has attempted to compare and analyze the legal institutions of one society with another, and tried to learn what the natives thought they ought to do, and what they thought constituted a ‘breach’ of norms.

In this article a system of ordering space found among the people of the central and western Caroline Islands of Micronesia will be described, the fundamental concepts of which bear a striking resemblance to particular regulative principles found among various Southeast Asian peoples. If a genetic connection is accepted for these parallels the form taken by Southeast Asian cultures after contact with ‘Hindu/Buddhist’ peoples can be interpreted as a natural outgrowth of concepts already basic to these cultures before such contact. The ethnographic information presented here, therefore, is directed to the comparative analysis of the culture history of Southeast Asia and Oceania and should be viewed in conjunction with the recent work of linguists and archaeologists on this topic (e.g. Benedict, 1966, 1967; Grace, Solheim and Chang, 1964).

Anthropologists have been interested in African societies and cultures for several decades. Few will dispute the contributions which British social anthropologists and others have made to the understanding of African institutions, especially in the domains of kinship and marriage, political organization, and most recently in urban studies. Many of these studies, however, have been avowedly synchronic; they are intended as descriptions of societies at a single time level. Even in those cases where the anthropo- logist has been privileged to conduct research within the same society over an extended period of time, the problems of social and cultural change which he documents generally involve modifications of ‘traditional’ institutions and behavior in the context of colonialism, postcolonialism, and world capitalism. While such studies are extremely important, the processes they describe do not exhaust the limits of the study of change in African society.

The scarcity of skilled professional manpower in developing nations has given rise, of necessity, to a formidable array of para-professional personnel. Khare's description of the touts of Lucknow and the ‘sea-lawyers’ of Gopalpur serves as a useful starting point for discussion in this vastly important but little-treated subject. From a lawyer's point of view, most of the crucial questions are not answered here. How much actual legal business, in terms of letter-writing, negotiations and simple giving of advice, is in fact carried out in the village by the para-legal individuals described? To what extent are their opinions, and ways of operating, similar? Do they, by virtue of pervasive and agreed practice, in fact ‘make’ law? Are they possibly, being closer to the people, more acceptable to the people, more efficient than ordinary lawyers, and cheaper?

The development of the modern Indian legal system provides, as Marc Galanter notes, a remarkable instance of the total displacement of a major intellectual and institutional complex in a highly developed civilization with one largely of foreign origin or at least inspiration and the replacement of the savants and practitioners of the older system by a new elite. The bulk of this modern elite, the second largest body of legal practitioners in the world, comprises the district lawyers or vakils. This paper describes some aspects of social organization among the vakils of Ambala City, a small district headquarters town in the North Indian state of Haryana.