Many fixed and movable festivals in ancient Mexico were occasions for human sacrifice. The sun in particular was offered hearts and blood, ostensibly because its vitality and, therefore, life itself depended on such oblations. Numerous festivals also included ritual cannibalism, apparently because it was thought to facilitate communion with the gods.

Neither the unremitting imposition of alien ways nor the faithful preservation of local ones, colonialism proceeds by the melding of imperial practices with indigenous social forms, creating new arrangements that look like old ones. Moreover, colonialism is an intersubjective, interpractical relationship; as a growing number of historical and anthropological studies have shown, the natives are unlikely to be passive receivers of imposed forms. However difficult their circumstances, the colonized busily construe and misconstrue the colonizers and their social practices, manipulating both to their own advantage. What follows is a “working misunderstanding.”

This article has had a long incubation. Three stimuli operating in different ways over a period of time account for its genesis: my exposure to anthropological writings on the Bible, my field work research in Israel, and my teaching of social anthropology in Swansea. Education in England, both secular and religious (by the latter I mean attendance at Hebrew classes outside of school from age seven to thirteen, culminating in my bar mitzvah), had exposed me to both the Old and New Testaments but had failed to raise any enthusiasm or interest on my part. Only when I began to study anthropology as an undergraduate did I begin to consider the biblical stories that I had heard in my childhood and youth. One of my first, serendipitous discoveries was Isaac Schapera's paper, “The Sin of Cain” (1955), in which he examines the first case of fratricide recorded in the Bible and postulates why Cain was not punished in the usual manner for engaging in homicide. He argues that precisely because Cain murdered his brother he evaded the usual penalty: he placed his group in the dilemma of compounding the loss of one of its members if it were to practise retaliation, nor could it agree to accept compensation since it would be in the position of accepting from its members and then paying out again to the same members. Into this impasse God enters, truly a deus ex machina, to resolve the problem. Schapera supports his argument by examples derived from ethnographic studies that recorded similar problems of homicide, especially fratricide.

Sir Edmund Leach has ranged far in his anthropological interests. As a prime inheritor of the sociological tradition in British anthropology, he has done field work in Burma, Sri Lanka, and Borneo. During the last two decades he has expanded his interests to include a wide variety of cultures and has widened his theoretical vision under the influence of the structuralism of Claude Levi-Strauss. Having studied the Old Testament in a lively and controversial collection of essays published in 1969, he has returned to the text of the Bible in his latest book. The volume includes four essays by Sir Edmund as well as two short chapters by D. Alan Aycock. It is characteristically iconoclastic of Leach that the two have never met, and, while he offers high praise of his co-author, he nevertheless manages in the introduction to criticize one of Aycock's contributions to the book.

Historians have long debated the importance of religion as a determining factor in relations between Christians and Muslims during the Middle Ages. On the one hand, each side consigned adherents of the enemy's religion to eternal damnation. Religious animosity provided the casus belli of crusade and jihad; Christian and Muslim met each other on the field of battle with great frequency. On the other hand, Christian-Muslim relations also included peaceful commerce, institutional borrowing, and even cultural exchange. Christians and Muslims spent more time fighting their coreligionists than making war on each other. Churches continued to exist in the lands of Islam, and mosques survived under Christian rule as well. Such evidence has led some historians to minimize the degree to which religious intolerance influenced Christian-Muslim contacts during the Middle Ages.

This essay is about torture and the culture of terror, which for most of us, including myself, are known only through the words of others. Thus my concern is with the mediation of the culture of terror through narration—and with the problems of writing effectively against terror.

Beginning in 1613, when the Prussian royal family converted to Calvinism while the vast majority of its subjects remained part of the state-regulated Lutheran church, the Hohenzollern kings found themselves living with an anomalous religious situation. Royal discontent with this circumstance had always existed, but efforts to bring about a change failed until, in the years after the Napoleonic Wars, Frederick William III resolved to take decisive action. A pious man and conscientious theologian, the king was deeply troubled by the continuing existence among large numbers of his subjects of rationalism and religious indifferentism, legacies of the Enlightenment. Moreover, reflecting on the defeat of Prussia by the French in 1806, he was also committed to national regeneration, which seemed blocked not only by the lack of religiosity he perceived, but by the disunity inherent in the religious gulf which separated Reformed monarch and Lutheran subject. In 1817, with the three-hundredth anniversary of the Reformation in mind, he proclaimed the intention to merge the Reformed and Lutheran churches of Prussia, and proceeded actively to involve himself in framing a common agenda for the doctrine of the new church. Serving God and the state in one bold stroke, the king was doubtless proud of the decision, and the large majority of his Lutheran subjects and their pastors unquestioningly accepted it.

The historiography of French colonial educational policy and practice has advanced considerably over the past decade. Not long ago W. Bryant Mum-ford's allegation, “Africans learn to be French,” was taken literally, and most scholars presumed that France, either out of cultural arrogance or blind reflex, brought metropolitan schooling in undiluted form to her colonies. We know better now. Recent studies of education in French West Africa and Indochina have suggested that colonial schools were not only adapted to the colonial context, but taught the students a great deal about their own societies. This article focuses on the knowledge that the two basic school levels, the elementary and primary, distributed about indigenous society in two French colonial federations—French West Africa and Indochina—in the period 1918–38 and speculates as to why the content and distribution of that knowledge took the forms they did. The discussion is based on analysis of texts in use in the primary schools, government curriculum guides, and student school notebooks. It begins with a brief survey of the structure of the educational system and curriculum of the schools as a whole, then proceeds to an analysis of the presentation of indigenous society in the schools.

The use of internal colonial theories to examine racial developments within the United States of America had become almost fashionable by the late 1960s. A decade later, a study of the political economy of Wales described the internal colonial approach which it criticized as a “new variant of a time-worn model.’ Amongst historians, however, the internal colonial concept does not appear to be as familiar as it is to other social scientists. This article is addressed to historians who do not subscribe unreservedly to Alfred Cobban's belief that sociologists are their natural enemies, and amongst whom some might still be considering the implications of Fernand Braudel's contention that a “general history always requires an overall model, good or bad, against which events can be interpreted. ‘No theory, no history.’” The purpose here is to indicate some uses and characteristics of theories that the internal colonial concept has promoted, to comment briefly about some of the methodological issues which these theories present, and to suggest some benefits that the concept might have for certain types of social and historical enquiry.