Recent scholars of the Middle East have implicitly and suggestively noted similarities between contemporary Muslim activists and sixteenth-century Protestant reformers. A more explicit and rigorous argument comparing Protestantism and contemporary Sunni movements in Egypt can yield insights into both movements.

When the English cleric Joseph Townsend visited Spain at the end of the eighteenth century, he was impressed by the apparent tolerance with which beggars were treated and by what he called the “excessively generous” way in which charity was distributed. He cited, with both surprise and disapproval, the Bishop of Cordoba, who daily fed some 7,000 people by distributing 1,000 kilograms of bread.1 This image of Spain as a paradise for the poor persisted until well into the nineteenth century. George Borrow, who travelled through the country in the 1830s trying to sell Bibles without much luck, remarked approvingly that poverty was not despised in Spain as it was in other countries:

Yet to the honour of Spain be it spoken, it is one of the few countries in Europe where poverty is never insulted nor looked upon with contempt.…In Spain the very beggar does not feel himself a degraded being for he kisses no one's feet and knows not what it is to be cuffed or spitten upon.

Traditionally a considerable gap has existed between social anthropologists, on the one hand, and political scientists and historians, on the other, in their analysis of events. Archetypically, social anthropologists have concentrated upon enduring social structure and have tended to steer clear of more recent events in the society under study; yet this suggests that the anthropologist is avoiding the question of how the social structure that he enshrines in the ethnographic present is derived. ‘Social structure’ is a composite of the anthropologist's own observation of native behaviour and native exegesis, the latter in turn being the result of a dialectic between their (the indigenous people's) present perception of events and their idea (or image) of what their society has traditionally been and perhaps ought to be. This is particularly so in those societies that, in Lévi-Strauss' words (1966a:233–4) seek “by the institutions they give themselves, to annul the possible effects of historical factors upon their equilibrium and continuity in a quasi-automatic fashion,” that is, in those societies in which “their image of themselves is an essential part of their reality.”

The notion that “Westernization” is a process that is unconditionally positive in its impact has dominated both Western and Soviet accounts of Russian intellectual and cultural history during the period before the Emancipation of 1861. As a consequence, Westernization has been described as synonymous with progress, rational economic behavior, greater tolerance, civilization, and the advancement of individual freedom. Although this rather uncritically pro-Western approach to the study of Western influences has produced important research and analytical insights, the assumption that a homogeneous Western culture everywhere generates liberal and democratic influences is in fact highly problematic. As I have suggested elsewhere, it is very difficult to make the empirical case that any one Western political or economic model can be applied to Germany, France, and Italy as well as England. And in the Russian context, a belief in the unmixed benefits of Westernization obscures some of the most important ironies and contradictions that characterize Russian economic debates and strategies in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

The pattern of development that emerged in the early stage of industrialization in South Korea, according to the British sociologist Ronald Dore, is closer to the classical (nineteenth-century) small-scale, individualistic entrepreneurial type than the large-scale bureaucratic type that characterizes development in many other countries embarking upon modernization programs in recent years (Dore 1980:292). This arguably stems from the fact that economic growth accompanied by development of a market (in the broader sense of that term) that created opportunities for individual choices and initiatives.

In 1975, the transnational British American Tobacco Company (BAT) set out to rapidly develop tobacco growing in four areas of smallholder production in Kenya. This move, prompted by the Kenyan firm's loss of tobacco leaf supplies from Uganda in 1972 and then Tanzania in 1976, was to prove remarkably successful. Output in the four areas chosen for production of tobacco leaf rose from 209 tons in 1975 to 4,034 tons in 1982, making Kenya self-sufficient in that crop despite a simultaneous sales campaign which doubled the domestic consumption of manufactured cigarettes over the same period. Production has continued to rise since then, with about 8,000 small-holder farmers in the scheme producing 6,000 tons of cured tobacco leaf in 1984.

Confronted with the reality of cargo cults, postcolonial politics, disunited working classes, and the United Nations seminars on racism, theorists of different persuasions have found themselves in the last twenty years having to explain—or explain away—ethnic phenomena. In his recent article in this journal (CSSH 29:1, 24–55), G. Carter Bentley1 points out the deficiencies in the two pervading schools of thought on ethnicity and fruitfully advocates applying Bourdieu's concepts of “practice” and “habitus” to the study of ethnicity. This appropriation of Bourdieu's concept of the habitus to the study of ethnicity is surely innovative, and Bentley argues effectively that we should look at practice for an objective “handle” on ethnicity. Nevertheless, Bentley's approach suffers for two reasons.

In his challenge to the validity and utility of my argument in “Ethnicity and Practice” (CSSH 29:1, 24–55), Yelvington raises a number of issues. He notes, for instance, that I did not, in that article, offer a specific definition of ethnicity, although I did consistently refer to ethnicity as descent symbolism and as fictive kinship. Indeed, I believe ethnicity is, at base, a claim to common identity based on putative shared descent. Wherever we find an “ethnic” category or group of people, we will also find a myth that they all originated in some primordial person, place, or event. Membership in the category or group is validated by pointing to some set of attributes, usually overt culture traits, the members believe they share in common. Given Yelvington's concluding paragraph, it appears we generally agree on what ethnicity is, if not on how to explain it.