In 1959, when struggling to characterize the Black Carib community in which I had recently done fieldwork, I coined the word ‘neoteric’ to refer to societies which are neither primitive nor peasant, in which traditions are absent or very shallow, and which may be said to have arisen only recently in time. I picked the word from Roget's Thesaurus, selecting it because it seemed a good, short, catchy synonym for ‘new’.

In this paper we wish to postulate and examine kinds of relationships between ritual dramas, ceremonials, and culture change. A number of individual studies concerned with this question deserve to be seen as focusing upon a unitary phenomenon. By this we have in mind ceremonies or ritual dramas which symbolically mediate structural conflicts or oppositions either within a society or between societies. Max Gluckman (1954) and Hilda Kuper (1947, 1964) among others have pointed out that rituals of rebellion symbolically alleviate conflicts at the level of the social structure of a single society, for example the Swazi of South Africa. In doing so the ritual intensifies identification with the traditional social structure in spite of the conflicts within this structure. C. Geertz (1957) and James L. Peacock (1967, 1968a, b) point out that the traditional Javanese slametan ceremony tends to increase neighborhood, or kampung, social integration. Geertz shows that with urbanization and modernization the neighborhood becomes socially and economically differentiated and that in this situation slametans tend to force interaction between individuals who no longer share specific cultural beliefs and symbols and thus increase rather than reduce hostility and anxiety. Peacock extends this argument to ludruck, an urban proletarian drama. In ludruck, Peacock argues, the individual is led to identify not with his kampung (neighborhood) nor with a traditional village set of values but rather with the urbanite and his urban set of values. Turning to Latin America we may cite the study of Maya Passion Plays by June Nash (1968).

Agricultural or nonindustrial civilization is customarily defined by social scientists in terms of urbanism and a dual social organization. Such a definition is not recent and, like many other concepts in Western thought, can be traced back to the Greeks, to Strabo for example, if one wishes to do so. Another way of considering the definition is in terms of two complementary societal components, neither existing without the other. One component is an elite in an urban setting with an elaborate high culture or Great Tradition based on literacy, and the second is a large rural peasantry with a Little Tradition or illiterate folk manifestation of the Great Tradition. However, civilization with its elite and peasants is also found when cities are absent, as in Mayan Mesoamerica; nonexistent or not vital, as in early Dynastic Egypt; or atrophied into uninhabitable ruins, as in Ethiopia. Indeed, cities were neither numerous nor large throughout the time of Bronze Age civilizations. Cities and civilizations are thus not always related. As shown above, the latter may exist without the former, and in preliterate western Africa urbanism existed without civilization.

The notions of ‘the sacred’ and ‘the profane’, coined by Emile Durkheim and reinforced by Mircea Eliade, have become indispensable for the historian of religions. No matter how details may vary, every society, every human tradition singles out certain things, acts, words or places as totally distinct from others. In these special things, acts, words or places ‘real reality’ (Eliade) is present, made available or conveyed, and therefore they differ from all ordinary, profane reality.

Most theories of revolution seem to agree that certain preconditions must be met if a revolutionary situation is to arise. The peculiar contribution of Ernesto Che Guevara to understanding revolutions is that according to him such preconditions can be created [1: 4]. Few men in the world today would be better qualified than Guevara to sustain such theory with empirical evidence from his own participation in revolutions. After his experience in Guatemala, Cuba, the Congo and, perhaps, other parts of the world, Guevara was considered, by friends and enemies alike, as one of the world's top-ranking guerrilla fighters of the twentieth century. By the time he started a new daring experiment in Bolivia he was reckoned as one of the most articulate theorists in the field. The death of Guevara in the mountains of Bolivia on October 9,1967, brought commotion and mixed feelings to his enemies and admirers the world over. His enemies were exultant, first because the dreaded Guevara was dead, and second because his death was ‘clear evidence’ that his theories were wrong. His admirers were sad because he was dead, but were also elated because the puzzle of his disappearance had been unraveled and because his death at the hands of Bolivian rangers trained by a U.S. military mission, far from being ‘evidence’ that his theories were wrong, was ‘evidence’ that they were right.

In his rejoinder to my essay, ‘Egypt and the Myth of the New Middle Class’, Professor Halpern clings to a limited and dysfunctional concept. The concept of NMC was of limited use in 1963 when he wrote The Politics of Social Change in the Middle East and North Africa; since then, it hasproved to be a misleading tool for explaining the politics of change in the Middle East, yet Halpern persists in reaffirming it. For seven years, Professor Halpern has been arguing the same tautologies. On the one hand he proposes a theory of a new middle class; on the other, he explains why the NMC still has not evolved. The NMC concept is so fundamental to his book that I, for one, have examined it closely—and have found its validity and usefulness limited. Halpern writes of the need for a new theory of the relationship between social classes and system-transforming change in the modern age, but he offers no good descriptive and analytical data to support his thesis. In fact, as we shall demonstrate later, his thesis is shaken by a confrontation with rigorous empirical and correlative analyses. A cursory review of recent literature shows us many recantations by authors who once applied Grand Theories to Comparative Politics. In the spirit of the era post-Committee for Comparative Politics-neo-scholasticism, I have consented to write a rejoinder. Let me state at the beginning that I will refrain from comments on Halpern's new vintage, ‘The Dialectics of Modernization in National and International Society’, although in his rejoinder Halpern insists that the NMC has been reaffirmed and reappraised in his ‘Dialectics’. This would require more than a rejoinder. In order to review or refute Halpern's new work, I would need to write a new article, and scarcity of time does not allow me this luxury.

An official, albeit implicit, Chinese critique of Che Guevara's methods in Bolivia in 1966–67 can be found in Peking's praise in 1969 for a Bolivian Communist Draft Peasant-Agrarian Program. Peking stresses Bolivia's feudal character and its domination by American imperialism. That is, the revolution should ally with bourgeois nationalism. Consequently it must be based on a minimalist program to attract a maximum of support. The National Liberation Front in Vietnam follows that course. The Cuban revolution of Fidel Castro took that road. Nonetheless, R6gis Debray insists that ‘Cuba remembered from the beginning that the socialist revolution is the result of an armed struggle against the armed power of the bourgeois state’. While Peking Review agreed on the need for an ‘armed struggle… rely[ing] firmly on the peasants’, it did not propose making the middle classes the main target of that fight. By stressing socialism instead of alliance with nationalistic capitalists, Che isolates himself from a potential source of support and forces those rich entrepreneurs to help reactionary militarists and landed oligarchs whom they may abhor. Nationalist anti-imperialism is a major issue in Latin America as most everywhere else in the world. Yet there is no necessary reason why narrowly based Che-style guerrillas must win the nationalist mantle. It has been the bourgeois parties and interests in Latin America which usually have expropriated Yankee businesses. It is the native national bourgeoisie who are most obviously hurt by Yankee competition. But if the guerrillas cannot appear as the nationalists, they will not win the thousands upon thousands of patriotic youth needed to educate, organize, lead and die.

The traditional Yoruba city has proved a refractory concept in the otherwise ordered universe of urban enquiry. Most students of Yoruba culture have felt obliged to treat the permanent and compact aggregations of population which were, and are, characteristic of south-western Nigeria as urban forms while yet recognizing that they differ in important respects both from the present-day industrial and commercial city of the West and from the several genres of city occurring elsewhere in the traditional world. Among the first to attempt to assign a precise status to these settlements was Professor William Bascom. Measuring them against the yardstick of Louis Wirth' minimal definition of a city as ‘a relatively large, dense, and permanent settlement of socially heterogeneous individuals,’ he concluded that the urban status of the larger Yoruba settlements was in doubt only in respect of the last of these criteria, namely heterogeneity.

In my previous response to Amos Perlmutter, I was compelled to use seven pages of this valuable journal to reaffirm what I had already written on the new middle class in The Politics of Social Change in the Middle East andNorth Africa (Princeton, 1963). Perlmutter had distorted my ideas beyond recognition in his ‘Egypt and the New Middle Class’. In his rejoinder, published above, he neither acknowledges nor challenges any of these seven pages of correction. The second part of my previous response contained the preliminary statement of a new theory which expanded and reinforced these earlier conclusions on the new middle class. This new theoretical framework has since been articulated at somewhat greater lengths in ‘A Redefinition of the Revolutionary Situation’, Journal of International Affairs (Vol. XXIII, No. 1,1969, 54–75) and will be published next year as The Dialectics of Modernization (Princeton). Perlmutter dismisses this part of the analysis as ‘so mystical that I refuse to deal with [it] here‘. So cavalier a critic ought at least to be armed with the capacity to read. But he fails at this basic skill a second time.

In recent years I have been engaged in research in the social anthropology of religion. In the course of investigating the changing religious beliefs and practices of Jewish immigrants in Israel from rural Tunisia and Morocco I initially sought to conceptualize the phenomena encountered in terms of ‘secularization’. This study is a consequence of the problems that arose.

To the extent that the social sciences have been concerned with thestratification of Latin American societies they have shown a well-knowntendency to dichotomize their structures into a small upper class of wealthy and powerful landowners and a poor and powerless lower class hetero-geneously composed of rural workers, urban proletarians, petty traders, artisans, and the like. As a rule, the emergence of new classes and thegrowing internal differentiation of emergent or traditional classes are somewhat reluctantly admitted only as the societies of Latin America have demonstrated the ability to depart from their agrarian tradition and topursue the irreversible course of modernization. There has been a strong inclination to ignore or to minimize those aspects of the social structure which suggest a higher degree of complexity than the stereotype of a two-class system seems to indicate.

Weber, in his comparative studies of religion, characterized millennial eschatologies (embodying beliefs in a just redistribution of fortune through a future revolution in this world) as one possible type of solution to a problem of meaning which he considered central to all religious traditions—the problem of explaining the world's imperfections. Taking this type of solution as his point of departure, he arranged the other types in a logical order. Thus when the supervention of the messianic kingdom in this world appeared to be unduly delayed, a second type of solution became necessary and possible, a solution in terms of other-worldly expectations of heaven and hell. This second solution itself entailed difficulties of its own: when heaven and hell were conceived as intermediate realms of existence, there still remained problems regarding the eternity of salvation (and damnation); and, when they were conceived as eternal realms of existence, there arose, especially in the context of theistic beliefs, the difficulty of reconciling the punishment of human errors with the conception of a benevolent and powerful creator of the world who would ultimately be responsible for these human actions himself. The third, fourth and fifth types of solutions were seen as responses to this problem, a problem which in Christian theology came to be known as ‘theodicy’ or the problem of reconciling the two fundamental attributes of God, universal benevolence and omnipotence, in view of the existence of evil. The third type of solution, best exemplified in the Protestant doctrine of predestination, preserved God's omnipotence and resolved his lack of benevolence by placing him beyond the ethical claims of his creatures.

Students of modernization commonly assume that, whatever else from the West may be rejected or modified to fit particular cultural and political preferences, science and technology are essential for any conscious effort to transform a traditional society. Indeed, despite the Western origins of modern science, would-be modernizers in Asia and Africa can reasonably claim that science is now universal. The degree to which it is possessed and practiced in various countries may differ, but in principle the spirit, methodology, and fruits of modern science are cosmopolitan, not bound to any particular culture. They are the legitimate property of all men aspiring to be modern. And from Tokyo to Nairobi all such men have passionately sought to possess them.

Historians generally dislike lost causes. They seek to explain what happened, rather than what might have been, and have consequently neglected the story of political emigrations. Granted, the study of dmigres is full of methodological pitfalls for the unwary: biased accounts of past issues, outright forgeries of documentary evidence, personal recriminations that serve to distort political reality, and a pervasive mood of bitterness, acrimony, nostalgia, and endless hope. Yet it is an important story, not only because of its intrinsic merit as a political phenomenon worth studying, but also because of the effect that exiles have had both in their place of refuge and in their homeland when they have been able to return. He who would ignore the émigrés might do well to recall that the experience of exile helped fashion the political careers of Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky, as well as of Charles II and Louis XVIII.

The cultural patterning of perceptions has long been an accepted fact. Theways we see and hear are learned. Special institutional mechanisms thatserve to perpetuate such traditional patterns exist in all societies and haverecently received attention by those interested in their transformationthrough modernization. Thus in order to study ‘The Primitive World andits Transformation’ Robert Redfield felt it necessary to focus upon what hecalled ‘the social organization of tradition’. He placed major emphasis upon those institutions that traditionally had perpetuated and elaborated the great philosophical and religious traditions of ancient civilizations, while keeping them integrated with the little traditions of peasant villagers. This was accomplished through drawing upon the creative impulses of the little tradition as sources of new stimuli to serve as points of departure for further elaboration of the great tradition. These would reinfluence the little tradition, establishing a chain of mutual interdependence.

Jerrold E. Levy's comments on my article on the Sanni Demons in the April 1969 issue of this journal betrays serious misconceptions regarding the nature of Ayurvedic medicine. Levy says that Ayurveda makes no distinction between mental and physical illnesses, that it has little preoccupation with symptoms, and that it has little actual efficacy. The first is concerned with the doctrine of Ayurveda; the second with its practice; and the third with its effects. I shall demonstrate that these three views of Ayurveda are false.

The Second World War became a world war only in December 1941. By that time not only the extent but also the character of its warfare had changed, with the German invasion of the Soviet Union. Thus 1941 was even more of a turning-point in the history of the Second World War than 1917 had been in the history of the First. Most historians of the Second World War would agree with this assessment. Thus it is perhaps not surprising that relatively little interest has been devoted to the history of the everyday lives of European peoples during the years 1939–41, during what could be called in retrospect (perhaps hopefully so) the Last European War.

When the British first became involved officially in the Malay States in 1874 they were represented there by a very small and oddly assorted group of men quite separate and different from, and only loosely controlled by, the official colonial establishment in the Straits Settlements. By the time of the Japanese occupation this had grown to a group which was very large by normal British colonial standards and had become much more homogeneous, conformed much more closely to general Colonial Office type, and also ruled in the Colony. It is the aim of this paper to trace this development, with an eye to the part played by the M.C.S. (as the Malayan Civil Service was always called) in Malayan history during the early twentieth century. I would myself contend that the corporate role of the M.C.S. was so important that this period of Malayan history, and especially the events of the 1920s and 1930s, cannot be understood without it. But I shall not here have time to explore this role fully, merely to indicate the sphere in which it was important and how it came to be so. The main themes will be the growth in numbers, the emergence of a distinctive esprit de corps, and the efforts, largely successful, to maintain a certain degree of independence–or at any rate internal self-government–which sometimes led it into disputes or open clashes with Whitehall, with the High Commissioner in Singapore, or with the rest of the European community in Malaya itself.