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This article attempts to further the study of gifting in India by examining both the donors and recipients of charity in a contemporary urban context. Considering the case of Anglo-Indians in Madras, many of whom have been the objects of philanthropy since the colonial period, it explores various dimensions of this activity today. For one thing, it notes the highly personalised character of charity, which contributes to the definition and realisation of a moral community of benefactors and their beneficiaries. For another, it seeks to demonstrate how the relief of poverty is a vital ingredient in the definition of Anglo-Indian leadership—as of leadership in India generally—and occupies a significant place in the discourse of community politics. Finally, it seeks to take account of the recipients of philanthropy, exploring some of the ways in which the ideologies and practices surrounding almsgiving bothfragment and unite the poor in their distress, and asks how those in a relationship of almost total economic subjection attempt to assert some control over the conditions of their dependency.

The permanent emigration to the West of perhaps half the Anglo‐Indian population since Independence has had profound consequences for those left behind in India. This article examines the situation of Anglo‐Indians in Madras city and finds that a large segment of the community (the ‘artisan class') has evolved a lifestyle and a mode of self‐definition which centres to an inordinate degree on going abroad, amounting to a culture of emigration. This article argues that to complement the focus on the political economy of migration, attention must also be paid to the local cultural consequences of large‐scale population flows.

The legendary Gurkhas have inspired a considerable literature about their character, quality and exploits under British command. Some years ago, after I returned from fieldwork in an area of east Nepal inhabited by the Limbu people, many of whom had served in Gurkha regiments, I began to read some of this literature for background purposes. It struck me then, although not nearly so forcibly as it did later when I had read Edward Said (1978), and returned to the Gurkha material after a long absence, that these writings have a very distinctive character, constituting a particular mode of ‘orientalist’ discourse.

This article's context is the distinction inform and meaning of land tenure systems as between tribes and peasants, and the role of the state in the transformation of traditionally inalienable tribal lands into alienable private property. The historical circumstances which have shaped and transformed the economy and culture of a particular tribal population ‐ the Limbus of east Nepal ‐ are examined. There is analysis of the programme of land reform introduced by the Nepalese state, whose chief outcome for the Limbus was the abolition of their kipat tenures and the conversion of their lands into private property. The implications in terms of land and identity are considered, and the outcome of heavy dependence on a small class of high caste Hindus who are now their landlords, creditors and employers is outlined.

The line between what is regarded by people as "traditional" and "modern" is constantly being altered by new configurations of power. These essays examine the ways in which such changes are both communicated and created through cultural performances in diverse ethnographic settings. Examples are drawn from a wide range of forms and expressions: divinatory sequences, spirit possession rites, state ceremonials, village feasts, pilgrimages, language-use and craft specialisms. It was Abner Cohen, to whom this volume is dedicated, who first suggested that a dialectical relationship existed between power and symbolism. This concept, as developed in his seminal work, has since become a growing area of study as reflected in this important collection. By questioning some of the directions, the authors make a major interdisciplinary contribution to the study of cultural performance as a key factor in power relationships. The principal stage is Africa, but comparative ethnographic data are drawn from Ireland, Italy, South Asia, and the United Kingdom.

This article examines the 'postcolonialist' argument that, in considering the colonial encounter, analytical attention is most appropriately directed to emergent creolized cultures. Focusing on the Anglo-Indians, a 'hybrid' population in Madras, south India, over a period of several centuries, it demonstrates the porosity of cultural as well as social boundaries and the diversity of cultural practices both within and across the lines dividing the constituent groups which comprise the urban social order. In spite of such a creolized universe, bounded identities and pure cultures have been and continue to be asserted by sections of this hybrid community. The argument is that postcolonial or anthropological attributions of creolist or other similar labels to cultural m6langes must leave space for local discourses which can reveal alternative and even contradictory self-identifications. The success or failure of purist rhetorics which deny a creolized condition is related to local and global power structures.

Sociologists of western religion have devoted much time and effort to delineating the principal characteristics of the denomination. The discussion has emerged very largely from the distinction drawn in 1912 by Troeltsch between church and sect. The latter is represented as radical and egalitarian, at odds with the society of which it is a part, and demanding total commitment from its followers. By comparison, the former is hierarchic and conservative, at one with its social surroundings, and generally less concerned about the varying extent of members' adherence to the corporate body. There has ensued considerable discussion regarding the adequacy of this dichtomy, and a number of refinements and alternative schema have been proposed.

Anthropologists concerned with the study of credit (or other kinds of economic) relationships in non-Western peasant societies emphasize the need to take account of the wider social system in which such relationships are "embedded."' Indeed, it has been suggested that whereas economists are interested primarily in "specialized or single-interest relations," the anthropologist's attention is "focused on the way different relations-economic, political and ritual-are linked to one another."2 If there is agreement among anthropologists as to their primary concern with multipurpose social ties, there is no consensus on the implications of this multiplicity for the provision and servicing of credit in smallscale societies.

The term ‘fundamentalism’ is said to have first seen the light of day in 1920 when the editor of a prominent Baptist paper, alarmed at what he saw as the ‘havoc ’wrought by ‘rationalism’ and ‘worldliness’ in American Protestant churches, coined the term and defined fundamentalists as ‘those ready to do battle royal for the Fundamentals of Protestantism’ (Sandeen, 1970, p. 246; also Marsden, 1980, p. 159).l These fundamentals have from time to time been reiterated by the orthodox Protestant churches. In 1910, for example, the northern Presbyterian General Assembly adopted a declaration of Essential Doctrines: (i) Biblical inerrancy; (ii) Virgin Birth of Jesus Christ; (iii) His substitutionary atonement; (iv) His bodily resurrection; and (v) the factuality or authenticity of miracles. Richard Niebuhr, in the Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences (1937), listed these same beliefs as the ‘five points of fundamentalism’. It is worth noting, however, that in some proclamations of the core doctrines prior to 1910 the Second Coming was included, and Sandeen insists that earlier fundamentalists showed ‘no particular preference for five rather than fourteen, nine, or seven articles’ (1970, p. xiv). So the basic fundamentals themselves are periodically re-constituted — the ‘sacred history’ re-constructed (Sami Zubaida in this volume, Chapter 2). More importantly for our present purposes, the ‘essentials’ may also be re-formulated in as much as in certain periods and contexts some doctrines are left unstressed, while others are elaborated.