For the last two hundred years, with the exception of a brief interval between the two World Wars, Poland has been either partitioned, or occupied, or governed by proxy. Squeezed between Russia and Germany Poles took nourishment and continuity as a historical nation from remembrance of things past whenever their sovereignty as a political nation was curtailed or abolished. Lately these efforts were inspired by a conviction that even if present day institutions could not be changed, a half-way victory over totalitarianism's attempts to destroy social solidarity would still be won if the community's history were rescued from the regime's ambition to determine not only the country's future but also its past. Thus, the wonderful intuition—that totalitarianism must destroy all context of social reality independent of its own dictate and acquire a copyright not only on what is but also on what had been—came to the Poles not because they read Orwell's 1984, but because for well over one hundred years they nurtured the idea of the Polish nation against all the odds of nineteenth century geopolitics. Once before, when they had lost their national sovereignty, the Poles had locked in on their past spiritually and it worked: Poland was resurrected. But since the Second World War, despite the dogged persistence of the Poles to reclaim their past, to go beyond, revise, and correct the government-approved version of their history manifested during every mass upheaval in the Polish People's Republic, there was never a temptation to reopen the subject of wartime Polish-Jewish relations.

The legitimacy of modern democratic institutions rests on the ideal of popular sovereignty. The purpose of this paper is to examine the contemporary status of this ideal.

Since space limitations do not permit discussion that would place the concept of popular sovereignty in its historical and intellectual context, we simply postulate a definition. People, by whom we mean individuals acting on the bases of their current preferences, are collectively sovereign if the alternatives open to them as a collectivity are constrained only by conditions independent of anyone's will. Specifically, people are sovereign to the extent that they can alter the existing institutions, including the state and property, and if they can allocate available resources to all feasible uses.

Le ier octobre 1949, Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-tung) proclame, sur la place Tian An Men, à Pékin, la naissance de la Chine nouvelle. L'une de ses principales revendications est de « transformer cette Chine arrieéreée et ignorante, dominée par une vieille culture, en une Chine avancée et civilisée, animée par une culture nouvelle ». Son action a-t-elle été couronnée de succés ? Trente ansplus tard, quelle est l'ampleur du changement social?

Anthropologists have been from the very beginning engaged in the study of tribes, and it is in somesense to this study that their discipline owes its distinctive identity. When historians, political theorists, sociologists and others have to deal with tribes, they turn to anthropologists for expert opinion on what tribes are and how they are constituted. In some countries what constitutes a tribe is of concern also to administrators and policy makers, and they too expect advice and guidance from anthropologists. Yet it cannot be said that anthropologists are themselves in agreement about the concept, and their disagreement is, if anything, even larger today than it was in the past.

À travers les âges, l'unité de l'lnde — « India is one » disait Dumont — a été symbolisée par une continuité culturelle enchâssée dans une structure sociale fondamentalement religieuse, comme l'exprimait Srinivas: « The concept of the unity of India is essentially a religious one », mais l'on peut ajouter que la structure de cette tradition a contribué à la projection d'une image unifiée de la civilisation qui a atteint le point de son plus haut développement à la fin de la période Gupta. Non qu'il n'y ait pas eu de changements, mais, vers la fin de cette période, la plupart des traités systématiques dans les champs de la réligion, de la littérature, de l'art, de la science et de philosophie ou de l'éthique s'étaient cristallisés dans ce qu'on a pu recemment appeler la « Grande Tradition ». Les périodes qui suivirent revinrent à une particularisation graduelle des institutions et des valeurs à l'intérieur de la tradition culturelle hindoue et aboutirent, dans certains cas, à des phénoménes de segmentarisation de cette « Grande Tradition ». Le centre de l'effervescence culturelle émigra du nord au sud de l'lnde et se régionalisa, donnant lieu a des mouvements hétérodoxes de reformulation et de reinterpretation des croyances socio-religieuses et des structures rituelles fondamentales de l'hindouisme. Sous la poussée des divers mouvements de bhakti, des saints-philosophes comme Śankara, Rāmānuja, Madhya rapprochérent la « Grande Tradition » du peuple, tout en modifiant son enseignement et en orientant leurs efforts vers un mouvement plus libéral vis-à-vis des Śūdra ou des basses castes; comme l'exprimait Stein: « In the eleventh century […] doctrinal issues come to be related quite directly to the place of Sūdrain the sect » (Stein 1968, p. 83).

Indian muslims have been a large and an active constituent of Indian politics and society for a very long time. Throughout the twentieth century their political endeavours have been directed towards achieving communal autonomy in a plural society. The aspiration to autonomy has been sufficiently strong to unite an otherwise extremely heterogeneous population, divided by language, class, caste and sect. Muslim politics were never monolithic but the dominant tendency was wedded to the cause of autonomy, which entailed a substantial struggle to determine the character and the scope of the state's jurisdiction.