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Since the earliest class-based societies, social leveling mechanisms have limited, actively as well as unconsciously, social stratification. Understanding how such power structures have operated in the past and present requires the integration of social dimensions to the political economy in a way that does not assume that elites and/or urban centers drive the course of history. Here, the Middle and Late Iron Age in southern Africa (AD 900–1650) highlight the importance of these local dynamics in tandem with broader regional changes. At a time when protoglobal trade links Africa to the Middle East and Asia, cities emerged up to 1,000 km inland along with the material evidence for hereditary inequality. Yet the population at the trade center of Bosutswe at the eastern edge of the Kalahari responded flexibly to environmental and social variables, which, perhaps unintentionally, limited the consolidation of power in the hands of the elite. The following case study of Khubu la Dintsa, a small agropastoral sit...

Nonstate providers are often more important in the everyday lives of the poor than outposts of the state. In this essay, I focus on one type of provider, sectarian organizations, which are an integral component of politics and welfare regimes in parts of the Middle East and other developing regions. Focusing on Lebanon, I describe how sectarian welfare providers emerge from and help to constitute political sectarianism while tracing what is at stake for the poor. First, by holding public offices and dominating informal channels that mediate access to public benefits, these actors mediate the experience of accessing the “rights” of citizenship. Second, while they provide benefits and services that might not otherwise be available, the modes of allocating welfare by sectarian parties can be discriminatory, notably along partisan and religious lines. Third, sectarian groups politicize the process of accessing social benefits while undercutting the political voice of the poor by weakening alternative channels...

The right to health and life is firmly established in the industrialized world, and advanced age is no longer a reason to deny medical treatment. Yet scarce and expensive medical resources, changing demographics, and expanding societal demands reveal how that right is more controversial than ever before. The case of kidney transplantation in the United States is a quintessential example of a broad health equity predicament in which the potential for greater longevity brings with it the problems of fairness and equity. As those over 70 and 80 come to constitute more of the “public” in aging societies, how then are nations to reconstitute the practice of fairness and the idea of public good? This essay examines this quandary by describing the potentiality we assign to kidneys, older persons, and the organ supply itself and by exploring the effects of that potentiality in three realms: schemes for fairness in the US organ transplant distribution system, living donation from younger to older persons, and the ...

Indicators are rapidly multiplying as tools for assessing and promoting a variety of social justice and reform strategies around the world. There are rule of law indicators, indicators of violence against women, and indicators of economic development, among many others. Indicators are widely used at the national level and are increasingly important in global governance. There are increasing demands for “evidence-based” funding for non-governmental organizations and that the results of civil society organizations to be quantifiable and measurable. The reliance on simplified numerical representations of complex phenomena began in strategies of national governance and economic analysis and has recently migrated to the regulation of non-governmental organizations and human rights. The turn to indicators in the field of global governance introduces a new form of knowledge production with implications for relations of power between rich and poor nations and governments and civil society. The deployment of statistical measures tends to replace political debate with technical expertise. The growing reliance on indicators provides an example of the dissemination of the corporate form of thinking and governance into broader social spheres.

Drawing from notes taken during repeated visits from 1985 to 2002 to one multiethnic sugarplantation company compound in the Caribbean nation of the Dominican Republic and taking inspiration from the cultural theorist Georges Bataille, I present evidence that expenditure to excess is today a widespread human striving and an ethical battleground even among materially impoverished people who inhabit the far termini of global commodity chains. Expenditure (in the Bataillean sense of activities that gain their full meaning through loss, not gain) stands as a source of meaning in the domains of personally enhancing consumption, eros, and ritual. While certain plantation residents conceptually thread together phenomena in each of these activity domains as generators of treasured and celebrated brightness, rhythmic energy, ceaseless flow, and life-affirming spiritual animation, other residents, most prominently the community’s evangelical Christians, denounce the prodigality of customary payday-weekend binges and devotions to the gods of Vodou. I propose that cultural anthropologists may gain a fuller understanding of the motivations and impulses that stand behind recent massive increases in commodity consumption worldwide through study of the immanent, nonrational satisfactions of discretionary consumption and other acts of expenditure. Is excess the problem of the twenty-first century? Expenditure beyond sustainable limits stands behind crises of resource depletion, environmental degradation, and greenhouse gas emissions, which potentially threaten not only to destabilize advanced industrial ways of life but possibly render the planet as a whole unlivable. These crises, paired with growing material inequalities and food entitlement instability, are worsening geopolitical tensions, heightening militarized competition for control of natural resources, and raising new challenges to international governance. A common background to the crises of excess are runaway rates of consumption growth, which, far from slowing, seem destined to be amplified by the spread of the global consumption boom from the industrially advanced countries to newly industrializing states. Anthropology, through its multidisciplinary and holistic methods of study and modes of theorizing, would seem well prepared to speak to the causes and possible remedies for the global crises that make up the problem of excess. Our discipline is particularly well endowed in research questions and strategies relating to the massive growth in commodity consumption that fuels all the other problems. It goes beyond

Focusing mainly on Asia, this article tracks a link between the collective, inalienable land‐tenure regimes currently associated with indigeneity and attempts to prevent piecemeal dispossession of small‐scale farmers through land sale and debt. Collective landholding is sometimes imposed by local groups on their own members as they act to defend their livelihoods and communities. More often, however, it has been imposed from outside, first by paternalistic officials of the colonial period and now by a new set of experts and advocates who assume responsibility for deciding who should and who should not be exposed to the risks and opportunities of market engagement. From the perspective of their proponents, however, attempts to institutionalize collective landholdings are not impositions at all. They simply confirm a culturally distinct formation naturally present among “tribal” or “indigenous” people. Yet rural populations have repeatedly failed to conform to the assumptions embedded in schemes designed fo...

This paper uses data from eight past and present societies practicing intensive agriculture to measure the transmission of wealth across generations in preindustrial agricultural societies. Focusing on embodied, material, and relational forms of wealth, we compare levels of wealth between parents and children to estimate how effectively wealth is transmitted from one generation to the next and how inequality in one generation impacts inequality in the next generation. We find that material wealth is by far the most important, unequally distributed, and highly transmitted form of wealth in these societies, while embodied and relational forms of wealth show much weaker importance and transmission. We conclude that the unique characteristics of material wealth, and especially wealth in land, are key to the high and persistent levels of inequality seen in societies practicing intensive agriculture. We explore the implications of our findings for the evolution of inequality in the course of human history and s...

We present empirical measures of wealth inequality and its intergenerational transmission among four horticulturalist populations. Wealth is construed broadly as embodied somatic and neural capital, including body size, fertility and cultural knowledge, material capital such as land and household wealth, and relational capital in the form of coalitional support and field labor. Wealth inequality is moderate for most forms of wealth, and intergenerational wealth transmission is low for material resources and moderate for embodied and relational wealth. Our analysis suggests that domestication alone does not transform social structure; rather, the presence of scarce, defensible resources may be required before inequality and wealth transmission patterns resemble the familiar pattern in more complex societies. Land ownership based on usufruct and low‐intensity cultivation, especially in the context of other economic activities such as hunting and fishing, is associated with more egalitarian wealth distributions as found among hunter‐gatherers.

Premodern human societies differ greatly in socioeconomic inequality. Despite much useful theorizing on the causes of these differences, individual‐level quantitative data on wealth inequality is lacking. The papers in this special section provide the first comparable estimates of intergenerational wealth transmission and inequality in premodern societies, with data on more than 40 measures of embodied, material, and relational wealth from 21 premodern societies representing four production systems (hunter‐gatherers, horticulturalists, pastoralists, and agriculturalists). Key findings include (1) the importance of material, embodied, and relational wealth differs significantly across production systems, with material wealth more important in pastoral and agricultural systems; (2) the degree of wealth transmission from parent to offspring is markedly higher for material wealth than embodied and relational wealth; (3) aggregate wealth is transmitted to a higher degree among pastoralists and agriculturalists...

Drawing on fieldwork among environmental activists and housing advocates in one of South Asia’s fastest‐growing cities—and the capital of one of the world’s most politically volatile nation‐states—this article explores how and when specific forms of urban housing were problematized and reformed through environmental logics. I ask when and how housing was framed as an environmental problem in Kathmandu. In so doing, I demonstrate that a fuller understanding of housing as an environmental problem rests not only in evaluations of public health parameters, risks of toxic exposure, and disaster vulnerability but also in the shifting ideologies of belonging, morality, and governance that animate urban environmental anxieties in specific cities. I illustrate how categories fundamental to the intersection of ecology and housing were produced, effaced, and reproduced over time in Nepal’s capital. I argue that the making and unmaking of these categories had clear material consequences that are often difficult to di...

The global eminence of the United States is diminishing relative to non-Western economic, political, and cultural formations. Despite its unprecedented military superiority, its compromised recent attempts to assert dominance through armed occupation and economic pressure underscore the growing importance of non-Western cultures and political economics. Amid the proliferation and permutation of neoliberalism abroad-including alternative forms of capitalist development and political and religious self-determination-American efforts to extend its hegemony in the Gramscian sense are opposed by national and transnational self-assertion, states of insurgency, and capitalist competition. Dynamics of resistance and resurgence in various world areas rival and recast American political, economic, and cultural influence. Understanding these emergent processes, which portend the provincialization of America, will be pivotal for sociocultural anthropology in the twenty-first century. Comprehending new developments will require fresh combinations of an anthropological perspective with comparative political economy, international relations, the ethnography of the state, geographies of cultural resistance, and networks of transnational, national, and subnational influence.

It has been argued that targeted development can help to reduce the internal pressures contributing to emigration from Mexico. Focusing development on economically depressed regions, it is suggested, may reduce some of the differences between Mexico and the United States, thus reducing the incentive to emigrate. For the past few decades the Mexican government has been exploring tourism development as a way of strengthening locally depressed economies. The outcome of such development in Huatulco, Oaxaca, has in fact been increased pressure to emigrate because of the restrictions it has placed on access to resources, especially land.

UNESCO's World Heritage program, which aims to encourage participation in the preservation of local cultural and natural heritage and international cooperation in conservation, now includes some 830 sites of “outstanding value to humanity.” The notion of world heritage has been quickly embraced by the tourism industry, and consequently countries in which commodified tourism was nonexistent 20 years ago are experiencing a tourism boom. Examination of the social construction of heritage tourism in two post‐“Socialist” states, Russia and China, suggests that the “treasures of all humankind” there are not so much sites of a “global cultural commons” as laboratories and mirrors of new cultural practices and ideologies that reflect the two countries' different historical traditions, views of development and the “good life,” structures of social order, and positions in the current global order. The story of World Heritage in these two countries reinforces the need to restore the nation, with its distinctive prac...

Biological anthropologists are being urged to pay greater attention to politics and economics in health analyses. Rather than building larger and larger models in which health is merely an output, it is more useful to focus on the way in which political and economic circumstances create local biologies which in turn become a focus for further policy development. Analysis of historical changes in developmental defects of tooth enamel in a group of Warlpiri people resident at Yuendumu, Australia, reveals increases in the frequency of these defects and a changing age distribution from 1890 to 1950. This reflects the changing economic situation and government policies affecting Aboriginal people. Government officials had a particular construction of “traditional” Aboriginal lifestyles that contributed to their policy of establishing settlements. The settlements then served to create a uniform pattern of childhood growth and development which was one stimulant to further changes in policy. In this instance a p...

A new master plan to restructure the city of Kunming in southwestern China in the context of Chinas transition to a progrowth, commercialized consumer society has led to massive destruction of centuryold innercity neighborhoods and the displacement of tens of thousands of families. The combination of a sense of lateness (lagging behind national and global development) and an emerging progrowth coalition between local governments and real estate developers is shaping postMao urban redevelopment. Several forms of civic opposition and popular discontent have been elicited by the restructuring. Although largely marginalized, these alternative views of urban forms and counterpractices help sustain a muchneeded critical point of view that questions and destabilizes the seemingly inescapable machine of development. The insights emerging from the Kunming example help deepen our understanding of latesocialist power dynamics and suggest a new way of understanding stateinitiated projects of modernity and development...

In many subsistence communities worldwide, laborsaving technologies such as mechanized water pumps and grain mills are introduced during the first stages of economic acculturation. These technologi...

The emergence of the new states of Asia and Africa after the decolonization revolutions of the 1950s and 1960s has resulted in a renewed concern with the problems of government in multiethnic, multireligious, and multilinguistic countries. I discuss the issues thus produced, including the viability of states that are not underpinned by a compact and sovereign nation, and the role anthropology can play in clarifying such issues.

Socioeconomic growth is an elite‐directed process that concentrates social power in direct proportion to increases in culture scale. Power elites have controlled social power to their own advantage in at least three different ways: domestically, by means of kinship, politically, by means of rulers, and commercially, by means of the market. Each method produces its own growth trajectory and scale of culture and a distinctive distribution of elite power and household living standards. Ethnographic data on urban property ownership in 27 municipalities in the Palouse region of eastern Washington suggest that when power is commercially organized and villages become towns and cities, there is a dramatic increase not only in the number of prosperous households but even more in the number of poor and maintenance‐level households. Elite property owners, who most benefit from growth, assume a larger role in municipal government, where they can encourage further growth through municipal annexations and zoning change...

Ethnographic characterizations of pastoralists as egalitarian have recently been contested on the grounds that new studies have demonstrated a widespread inequality in livestock ownership, thus proving that the notion of pastoral egalitarianism is a myth. This revisionist rejection of the egalitarianism of pastoralists appears difficult to sustain after examination of the literature. Ethnographic accounts show a wide range of pastoral societies, some more hierarchical and some quite egalitarian, and this variation was well recognized by at least 1940. “Egalitarian” is used in the literature to characterize pastoral tribesmen primarily in a political rather than an economic sense. Differences in livestock ownership were recognized by ethnographers characterizing the peoples they studied as “egalitarian”, but these differences were known not to cause either social stratification or economic class differentiation. To suggest as the revisionists do that all societies and cultures are characterized by inequali...

Farmer or folk crop varieties developed over many generations by indigenous farmers are an important component of global crop genetic resources for use by both industrial and indigenous agriculture. Currently there is a debate between advocates of indigenous farmers' rights in their folk varieties and the dominant world system, which vests intellectual property rights to crop genetic resources only in users of those resources for industrial agriculture. While indigenous peoples at the individual and group levels do have a broad range of intellectual property rights in their folk varieties, they define and use them differently than does the industrial world. Therefore, industrial‐world intellectual propery rights mechanisms are generally inappropriate for protecting the intellectual property rights of indigenous farmers, but some could be used effectively. To meet indigenous farmers' need for protection, new approaches are being developed that embed indigenous farmers' rights in folk varieties in cultural,...

One of the most significant transformations in the emergence of economically and socially complex societies has been the development of social groups with differential access to productive resources. Anthropologists have puzzled over the number of empirical cases suggesting that women have disproportionately lost access to productive resources. This paper follows one such case—the development of textile workshops in Mesopotamia—to offer new insights into the alienation of women producers in the ancient Near East and the development of Mesopotamia's political economies. During the transformation from a series of relatively self‐sufficient communities to a highly integrated complex of rural and urban settlements, a fundamental shift took place from the use of flax to the use of wool for the majority of textile production. This shift has extremely important implications for archaeologists' reconstructions of agricultural production, labor roles, and social relationships. This paper explores the socioeconomic...

2 case studies of the Western Kweneng San and Dobi San in Botswana are examined historically to show that contact with the Bantu-speaking neighbors or dominant societies may take other autonomous forms rather than dependency and abandonment of foraging. Revisionists have argued that hunter-gatherers were absorbed into regional economic networks and ceased to be independent societies however it they continued to exhibit traits of hunter-gathers it was because of their poverty and resistance to domination by stronger societies. This is a spacious argument. The Kweneng San are described as having lived for 200 years among the Bantu-speaking people in the southern Kalahari. Loss of autonomy was neither automatic nor complete. The pre and protohistoric period and the fur trade period are described as having some subservient to effect but institutionalization came later. The San had a flexible social organization and there was fluidity between village and bush. Agropastoralism reduced the Sans foraging base and the fur trade was the link between the San and Kgalagadi. By the 1950s the San became the Kgalagadis labor force when foraging became more precarious. The Dobi San were isolated from 19th century colonial southern Africa as hunter-gatherers and traded with the Goba between A.D. 500-1500. The trade involved indirect contact through the Goba and later the Tswana and direct contact with European hunters and traders. The prehistoric and fur trade periods are described. There were barter systems and mafisa or contracted animal husbandry which afforded the ]Kung a complement of beef to be added to their foraging diet. After 1954 non-San (Hereros) dominated the areas with the ]Kung as herders. There were 2 groups: a foraging mafisa herding and horticulture group living in camps and client groups attached to cattle posts. The pattern of hunter-gatherers remained as one of collective ownership of resources and food sharing. This final dependency from fierce autonomy was a result of the inability of the land to support foraging due to environmental degradation. The relationships between the Kwena San and Dobi San with non San-were different. The internal organization of the San was unaffected. In the discussion of genuine and spurious foragers attention is paid to terminology and distinguishing between fact and discussion. In the transition to dependency it is cautioned that revisionism trivializes the history of these people and inaccurately characterizes the nature of their autonomy. Commentary which supports the general position and provides constructive criticism is provided by replies from by 19 anthropologists.

During the past decade, obesity has taken center stage as one of the most pressing health problems of the new millennium. Health experts and policy makers have termed the phenomenon of relative rapid weight gain at population levels a “crisis” and an “epidemic.” Public discourses have primarily focused on what causes obesity, either blaming environmental factors—such as the prevalence of cheap, energy-dense, highly processed foods and beverages—or blaming individuals who fail to eat healthfully and engage in regular physical activity. The spread of obesity worldwide is attributed to processes associated with globalization, including mass industrialization, rapid urbanization, and the increasing presence of multinational corporations. Experts predict catastrophic health, economic, and social consequences if the trend toward obesity continues; yet, as Brewis points out in Obesity: Cultural and Biocultural Perspectives, public health interventions, which have historically focused on changing individual behaviors through knowledge and awareness, have been ineffective to date. Brewis delves beneath the surface of obesity-crisis rhetoric to examine adaptive, ecological, and cultural perspectives on obesity; discuss what we can learn from prevention and intervention efforts that have consistently failed; and suggest methods for moving beyond the limitations of statistics and cultural theorizing to better understand the complex, dynamic web of intersections between proximate and distal influences within biological, ecological, and cultural contexts. The author’s research on body image and nutrition, conducted during the past 20 years in the Pacific Islands, the United States, and Mexico, is discussed in conjunction with other similarly focused studies to explore historical and cross-cultural variation in obesity rates, risk, and beliefs about body size. Brewis addresses such critical questions as whether obesity is a disease, an illness, or simply a moral panic; why minority and poor urban populations are most at risk; why obesity remains

It has been pointed out that in stratified societies, the evolutionary viability of the state rests in large part on the perfection of institutional structures that protect the ruling class from confrontation with coalitions of educated commoners. This paper makes use of historical materials from various parts of India, as well as contemporary material from one part of India, Tamilnadu, to examine the role of the caste system in preventing the formation of social classes with any commonality of interest or unity of purpose. Analyzing caste from the point of view of those at the bottom, the paper attempts to show that, like social stratification systems the world over, caste has functioned (and continues to function) as a very effective system of economic exploitation. In the context of India's determination to create a socialist state, it appears impossible to bring about significant social change without a breakdown of the barriers between poor untouchables and other poor people. The paper suggests that,...

Although emergency food shortages and famines have been a prominent part of human experience for thousands of years and recur somewhere on our planet almost annually, data describing behavioral and organizational responses are few and scattered. Generalizations, when not speculative, tend to be vague and frequently contradictory. Practical, humanistic, and scientific concern with how people respond when overtaken by nutritional catastrophe provide compelling reason for development of a systematic, empirically based understanding of how social life changes amidst severe, protracted starvation. This paper surveys literature from several fields. By piecing together diverse observations and findings and paying close attention to the chronology of response, it is possible to infer the existence of a series of social transformation in which distinctive patterns of social interaction emerge as starvation progresses from stage to stage. Behavioral adaptations appearing in concert with the physiological alteration...

To the extent that peasants, particularly Indian peasants, are ever considered to be economically mobile, they are generally seen from one of two perspectives: either the Malthusian perspective, which predicts that most landholdings will shrink over time, due to partitioning among multiple heirs; or the Marxian perspective, which predicts that a few landholdings will increase in size at the expense of the vast majority-the latter diminishing, in many cases, to nothing at all. These two perspectives can be used to generate a number of specific hypotheses concerning changes in the distribution of land in rural India. Naturally, some of the Malthusian hypotheses contradict Marxian ones, but there are others which are mutually congruent (the poor will generally get poorer, from either perspective, though the rich also get richer, according to the latter). In this paper, historical and contemporary data collected from a highly commercialized and densely populated village in western India are used to test a num...

Contrary to Marvin Harris's hypothesis, desiccation and population increase in India following 1000 B.C. are highly unlikely to have been the origin of the Hindu ban on cow slaughter and beef eating. In many places in present-day India,"wild" and stray cattle are serious problem to farmers. The sacred-cow concept contributes to a significant waste of beef and inefficiency in cattle breeding. Homes for old cows are basically religious institutions that divert funds from other needs of the nation. Indian cattle to compete with man for food, and most experts believe that there are significant numbers of surplus cows in terms of available feed and bullock-replacement needs. Such surplus cows make economic contributions, but religious belief, expressed in social and political action, cannot be over-looked as a factor contributing to their survival. As John Bennett has noted, the technoenvironmental model used by Harris seems unsuited to use for India. Especially deficient is Harris's ignoring of religion as a ...

This article demonstrates that economic analysis can contribute helpful insights to the understanding of marriage choices in a non-Western society. Polygyny illustrates ideally the relevance of economics to any topic where scarcity constrains the attainment of valued goals. All predictions derived from economic theory are confirmed in the empirical analysis of households in the polygynous city of Maiduguri, in northeastern Nigeria. The novelty of this study lies in the hypotheses generated by considering housewives as producers. The prediction of a life-cycle effect and of no tribal effect on polygyny also indicate the fruitfulness of an economic approach. The results depend crucially on simultaneous consideration of male and female attributes affecting the demand and supply of uxorial and genetricial services. Methodologically, regression techniques prove as useful in explaining polygyny and divorce as they have been in accounting for paradigms of market economies. Judging from R2, the coefficient of det...

Exploring anew the old question of why East African pastoral peoples tend to be conservative, this paper suggests that a de-Westernized cross-cultural application of economic theory, both statics and dynamics, coupled with transaction theory, (social exchange), reveals a distinction between economic development, the exponential growth of a specific economy, and economic change, a shift from one specific kind of economy to another. Economic development is normal in any economy and is favored by Africans as well as ourselves. Economic change, however, the aim of national and international planners, involves opportunity costs such as those faced by the Chagga as they pursue simultaneously two types of production, bananas and coffee, which to some extent compete. The opportunity costs for pastoralists are likely to be much higher than for people whose wealth is principally in land, because pastoralists incur far greater status losses than nonpastoralists in the shift from indigenous to Western economies. The ...

An anthropological study of Zaire's clan structures plays a valuable role in the acquisition of information that is essential to rural development planning in that country. In the final analysis, clan relationships give rise to socioeconomic and cultural behaviour patterns that are at variance with behaviour in a modern type of economy, which is geared to the profit of the individual. The organization of work, of production, and of profit distrition and the concepts of savings and reinvestment contrast significantly with clan practices. Although clan structures constitute only one of many systems of social interaction or association, in the light of the socioeconomic effects observed in this example the anthropological approach can be used to point up obstacles as well as incentives inherent in a given society in confronting problems of socioeconomic development. Nevertheless, the importance of careful study of the populations concerned in undertaking local development and its planning should not overshad...

This article analyzes the changes in the family that have taken place in Turkey, beginning with the structural changes and the collapse of the extended family that resulted from the parceling out of the land, a product of demographic pressure and the new agrarian regime that favors parcelization. But since the extended family no longer predominates in Turkey, the author stresses that economic and structural analysis alone is insufficient to account for the changes affecting family life and proposes a study of the modernization policies and the secularization brought about in Turkey through more than half a century of republican legislation. She also advocates taking culture into account in explaining the situation of the family. It appears that in Turkey there is a cultural tradition with regard to the family involving relationships of interdependence that is not incompatible with industrial development. Since rural exodus and urbanization have not resulted in the dissolution of kinship ties and the famil...

In this paper I call attention to the significance of Southeast Asia to discussions of the nature of state formation. While it is now apparent that certain phases of cultural evolution came early in Southeast Asia, the state was a late and, in some respects, incomplete development. Southeast Asian states do not appear to have developed into the fully centralized, highly stratified, totalitarian regimes held to typify other regions of Asia, such as China or India. I suggest that this is not easily accounted for in terms of recent comparative theories of state formation or in terms of the interpretations contained in the writings of Southeast Asianists. I suggest finally that features of Southeast Asian social organization provide the most useful focus of analysis for explaining what did and did not occur in Southeast Asia and then discuss the question of how these features may have come into being.

This article deals with discussions of economic development among Turkish intellectuals in the 1930s, when the characteristics of a "Kemalist development strategy" were being defined. As an exercise in the history of economic thought, it attempts to show that those discussions anticipated many of the issues of development economics, a special field which appeared only after the Second World War. The discussion challenges the general lack of concern for ideas emanating from underdeveloped countries to point to a hitherto unexplored source of insights that might be useful for a reorientation of development economics. Such a reorientation now seems urgently called for given the increasing perception of a serious methodological crisis in the subdiscipline. To a large extent, this crisis has to do with its ethical and political aspects-aspects that challenge Western scholars struggling with cultural barriers and that intellectuals from underdeveloped countries may be better equipped to deal with. The Turkish d...

As a result of the rise and growth of the Asante state and the development of a complex administration of leisured officials based in Kumasi, the urbanized capital of the Asante empire, there developed, in the 19th century, a "peasantry" in the area surrounding Kumasi with economic, political, and cultural characteristics comparable with those of peasantries elsewhere.