Impressive Scholarship Research Articles

The Disabled State

Harlan Hahn's review of Deborah A. Stone's The Disabled State (November/December 1985) does this book and its potential readers a disservice. Admitting its impressive scholarship, Hahn puts the book down on the ground that it does not comport with his values. His view is that disability is primarily a product of a disabling environment created by government policy. .; he wants Stone to admit that unemployment and other problems confronting disabled citizens are primarily created by discriminatory practices in an inhospitable environment. . Yet it is precisely Stone's understanding that, except at the extremes, disability is not something out there in nature, obvious and agreed upon by everyone, but rather a variable product of change in social definitions that makes her contribution a seminal one. Portraying people with whom one disagrees as advocates of inflicting serious harm is not likely to increase understanding or improve public policy. Aaron Wildavsky University of California, Berkeley

Rules and Processes: The Cultural Logic of Dispute in an African Context.

Rules and Processes is at once a compelling essay in social theory and a pathbreaking ethnography of dispute in an African society. On the basis of a sensitive study of the Tswana of southern Africa, John Comaroff and Simon Roberts challenge most of the orthodoxies of anthropology. They argue that the social world, and the dispute processes that occur within it, are given form and meaning by a dialectical relationship between sociocultural structures and individual experience. The authors explore in a novel way the relations between culture and ideology, system and practice, social action and human intention. They develop a model that lays bare the form and content of legal and political discourse in all its variations-a model that accounts for the outcome of conflict processes and explains why the Tswana, like people in other cultures, conceive of their world in an apparently contradictory manner-as rule-governed yet inherently open to pragmatic individualism; orderly yet inherently fluid and shifting. Rules and Processes offers a fresh and persuasive approach to our understanding of the dialectics of social life. A work of impressive scholarship in which theoretical sophistication and ethnographic richness are convincingly matched.-Ian Hamnett, Times Higher Education Supplement.

Measuring the British Slave Trade to Jamaica, 1789–1808: A Comment

IN recent years there have been significant developments in the historiography of the Atlantic slave trade. Scholars such as Philip D. Curtin, J. E. Inikori, and Roger Anstey have improved our understanding of the volume and character of the trade, and have stimulated further inquiry into the topic as a consequence of the variance in their findings.2 The latest contribution to this investigation is Herbert Klein's The Middle Passage: Comparative Studies in the Atlantic Slave Trade (Princeton, 1978), in which he continues to develop the important comparative perspective of slave-trade scholarship.3 This is a work of great scope, and despite Klein's impressive scholarship, lacunae in the data remain. However, in the case of the Jamaican slave trade it is possible to fill some of the gaps. In both value and volume, the slave trade to Jamaica reached its peak between 1783 and i8o8. Within this period, the years from I789 to i8oi witnessed the largest volume of imports. It is here, however, that several lacunae are apparent in Klein's study. Table 7.6 is entitled 'The Number of Africans Arriving in Jamaica and Re-transported off the Island, I 704-I 8oo', but while Klein cites data for all the quinquennia from I 704 to I 788, he omits the years from I 789 to I 795. As the table is prematurely terminated at i 8oo, the final years of the trade are also unrecorded. In addition, the data for the years I 796 to i 8oo undercount both the number of arrivals and reshipments from the island.4 In my study ofJamaican slavery (part of a larger comparative study of sugar and slavery in Jamaica and Louisiana), I have uncovered the data which Klein found elusive. Table i presents the annual arrivals and reshipments for the years from I 789 to the closure of the slave trade in i 8o8. Because of the character of the data-base it is not possible to give a complete

Between Martyrdom and Collaboration: A Book Review Article

Religion and Atheism in the U.S.S.R. and Eastern Europe, edited by Bohdan R. Bociurkiw and John W. Strong,1 is a very important work containing essays which on the whole are of unusually high academic quality. The volume, conceived at an international symposium at Carleton University, Ottawa, in 1971, explores from the perspective of several disciplines the post-World War II religious situation in Eastern Europe. There are four parts to the volume: two articles on communism and religion from the Christian and Marxist points of view, seven articles on religion in the U.S.S.R., two transnational surveys of Catholicism and Judaism, and nine essays covering some aspect of religion in each of the Eastern European countries other than the U.S.S.R. The work is truly outstanding in its field and is an indis pensable resource for the complex issues examined. It is impos sible to do full justice to the impressive scholarship and insights disclosed. The limitations of the volume are imposed primarily by the vastness of the problems encountered, the dynamic changes occurring, and the difficulties involved in attempting to transcend one's own ideological context and ascertaining the facts within another system. Sir John Lawrence states in the introduction that a critical gap in the evidence leads some outside observers to imagine a sharper polarisation between 'col laborating' state Churches and 'underground' Churches than really exists (p. xi). The European secretary of the Lutheran World Federation, Dr. Paul Hansen, in his 1976 annual report addresses himself forcefully to the Western missionary organiza tions that convey the impression that the true Christian life is

Pleasure, Knowledge and Sensation in Democritus

W hile historians of philosophy, ancient and modern, have generallY and rightly considered the main interest of Democritus to lie in his metaphysics and epistemology, the bulk of the fragments of his writings deal not with these but with ethical topics. It is, therefore, of obvious interest to enquire what connexion, if any, may be discerned between the ethical writings and the main body of the atomistic system. Further, this enquiry, as undertaken by modern critics, has produced considerable divergence in its results. Thus on the one hand Dyroff 1 was unable to see any connexion at all, while Bailey2 is content with the conclusion that the ethical doctrine, whicl was in itself in no sense a coherent system, had only a loose connexion with the main atomistic theory. In contrast, Natorp3 held that the ethical theory is closely integrated with the cosmological, a view which has been developed with impressive erudition by Vlastos.4 In this paper I attempt to show that while there certainly exists a close connexion between the two main strands in Democritus' philosophy, the exact nature of that connexion has not been adequately outlined by either Natorp or Vlastos. To be more precise, their mistake seems to me to lie in looking for the connexion in some description of the ultimate end of human action as conceived by Democritus, rather than in the relation of his accounts of moral and of theoretical knowledge.

Toward Understanding Stuttering

This little book is an excellent example of how a complex subject can be treated simply, effectively, and without condescension by one whose knowledge is sufficiently broad and deep. Dr. Johnson has done more research on stuttering than any other worker and writes from a background of impressive erudition and experience. In this booklet he discusses how the problem of stuttering develops and what can be done by parents to prevent trouble. This is a good book to give parents who are concerned about the non-fluent speech of preschool children. It will give the practicing pediatrician a sound basis for understanding the problems it covers.