Afro-American cults are characterised these days by a movement towards re-Africanisation, which seeks its legitimacy in mythical Africa. But this idea of Africa is the object of a continuous reinterpretation. Ethnologists which studied these cults, in particular the Afro-Brazilian ones, played a central role in the invention of a tradition which seems to have become the main pivot in these religious phenomena today. Membership in these cults by most of the researchers makes the mechanisms for the construction of a dominant model of tradition even more complex.

By looking at the history of the Polish lustration — the policy of checking the past of candidates for important positions — this article argues that although the lustration law has been finally passed at the end of 1998, Poland's dealing with the past is still full of unresolved and deeply ambivalent problems due to the nature of its postcommunist transition and the nature of the newly constructed political institutions. These conditions were shaped by the relative strength of the Polish anti-communist opposition, which credibility within the society permitted it to accept a compromise with the old regime. The undetermined character of many of Poland's political institutions have accelerated the use of the issue of retrospective justice in the partisan politics, which in turn has limited the opportunity for consensual policy, and therefore has reduced societal trust of the political parties, while at the same time increased the demand for the purification of the political system.

Retroactive justice against perpetrators in post-totalitarian, as distinct of post-authoritarian, democracies is constrained by the absence of human resources for the rule of law and the weakness of civil society. The limited application of lustration and other sanctions in postcommunist countries is understood in the context of politics of transition, political actors, motivations, constraints and beliefs. With special attention to the Czech Republic, the ineffectiveness of lustration is exemplified by the damage inflicted on post-communist societies by the nomenklatura and the former secret police.

While the progressive European politicians are on the lookout for a new model of ‘third way’ capitalism with a human face, after the (temporary?) defeat of the Swedish, Dutch welfare state reform occupies a prominent place in many commentaries.Although it attracted only international attention in the mid- 1990s, the ‘Dutch miracle’ has its basis in policy changes in the early 1980s. For a full explanation of the Dutch experience we must go back at least fifteen years, and study the combination of problem loads, power shifts, institutions, politics and ideas, in three ‘tightly coupled’ policy domains of the Dutch welfare state: industrial relations, social security, and labour market policy. The return to wage moderation took place in the early followed by a series of reforms in the systems of social security in the late 1980s and early 1990s. From the mid-1990s, finally, the adoption of an active labour market policy stance, in order to enhance overall efficiency and create a new domestic balance between wages and social benefits, gained political currency. In this article we present a stylised narrative of these policy changes—what happened, how it happened and what it meant. We demonstrate that these three policy shifts, although embedded in different corporate actors, were interrelated; they created the conditions and the demand for one another, and neither of these policies could have been successful on its own.

A scrupulous analysis of the French translation of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism reveals an acculumation of errors which seriously alter Weber's analysis in its nodal articulations (articulation of relations of causality and affinity, intrication of ideas and interests, schemes of mediation between beliefs and behaviour). The same problem arises in relation to its central conceptual mechanism (concepts of profession-vocation, of life style, of confirmation) and in relation to its theological lexicon. The analysis concludes with the urgent necessity for a new translation.

Tocqueville's two major works, Democracy in America and The Old regime and the revolution, have fared very differently in English translation. The Lawrence translation of Democracy in America is essentially accurate, except for a handful of mistakes. The classical translation by Gilbert of The Old Regime was excessively free and rhetorical, but did not betray lack of understanding of French language or history. A new translation published by University of Chicago Press suffers from the opposite flaws. While trying to follow the original very closely, the translator got many things wrong because of a demonstrable lack of proficiency in French.

The social organisation of the Na of China is exceptional in that marriage occupies a marginal place and the concept of kinship appears to be absent. This poses fundamental questions for the anthropology of kinship. For Cai Hua this puts into question the universality of marriage, Radcliffe-Brown's definition of the elementary family, and Lévi-Strauss’ theory of alliance. The article is based on the theoretical presupposition which interprets the residual presence of marriage solely as the result of cultural borrowing and provides as a principle the original absence of the institution in this society.

With the astonishing resurgence of nationalism in various parts of Europe subsequent of the end of the Cold War, attention has once again been focused on the normative issues posed by the politics of nationalism. This article wresdes with some of these normative issues by reviewing a profund theoretical dialogue conducted between two British neo-Marxists, Tom Nairn and Eric Hobsbawm, going back to the 1970s. The article also gives some attention to Ernest Gellner's sociology of nationalism, which heavily influences Nairn's sociological understanding of nationalism (though Gellner in no way shares Nairn's enthusiasm for neo-nationalist movements). The article concludes, in response to Gellner, that no amount of sociology can relieve us of the obligation to engage at the normative level with the challenges posed by nationalism.