In spite of recent criticisms the concept of ethnicity should be retained in anthropological analysis to designate more or less coherent cultural entities. These entities will be fluctuating of course, due to their position in a larger social space where women, goods, ideas and institutions are exchanged. Ethnicity is not, as some have argued, a colonial invention, but an incontestable anthropological fact, where identity is nurtured by otherness. Ethnicity does not of itself have a political vocation: traditional African states were more often than not pluri-ethnic. The ‘national’ phenomenon, the convergence of the State and ethnicity is rare in pre-colonial African history. The nation-state is a modern phenomenon, the product of a more or less arbitrary manipulation by an elite having a certain number of ethnic features: a political re-modelling of collective identity.

This paper discusses the symbolic significance of the entry of Mozambique in the British commonwealth. British and Portuguese colonial cultures in southern Africa are contrasted and compared to reveal the tension between the dogmas of ‘assimilation’ and ‘segregation’. This tension also permeates the post-colonial situation in Mozambique, producing strong assimilationism during the socialist period and an increasing desire to combine adherence to western culture with a concomitant celebration of local ‘tradition’. As Mozambique to-day draws closer to British and north American notions of multiculturalism and ‘ethnic difference’ the article shows how these in a sense represent the logical contemporary sequels of segregation in the past.

The Kutchi Saraswat Brahmins have served in the past many business communities, perticularly the Lohana, Bhatia and Bhansali. After having explored the relations these communities had between each other and with these Brahmins, the article focusses upon the existing contemporary links these last and the Kutchi Lohana of Bhuj and Pune. Since the Kutchi Saraswat have often followed the Lohana in their successive migrations, their networks tend to be coextensive and this is ascertained by crossing the data from the censuses made by their caste associations. The study combines data from field surveys and several caste publications.

This paper makes an ethnographic contribution to the recent debates surrounding Intellectual Property. Using detailed material, it shows how intellectual resources are part of the wider whole that make up the viability of named places and kin groups among Nekgini speakers (Papua New Guinea). Identity and ownership are bound up with control over owned knowledge. This is complicated by the fact that rights to intellectual resources there do not reside in individuals, nor in simple collectivities. Some points are drawn from this ethnography to relate it to other writings on IPR, particularly those published in Social Anthropology. Comment is made on the consequences of advocating IPR, with its ultimate referent in the individual, in such situations

Modern manufacturing concepts are new to the developing countries like India where massive industrialisation has taken place only in the last two to three decades. Beset with problems of productivity and quality, Western and Japanese management concepts are being tried vigorously with little success. It is almost becoming apparent that such concepts as the Japanese JIT can succeed best only when practised by Japanese people in Japanese environment. Does this mean that the culture of a country and indigenous perceptions need to be integrated to evolve a model that will succeed in a particular region?

A recent pilot study done in South India revealed the presence of such a link. It proposes that the conflicts between modern and indigenous concepts at the workplace should be the object of an in-depth study and that if approached from an anthropological point of view could provide a successful model of such dynamics.

Indian indigenous economic concepts are supplemented by comparative fundamental concepts both present in Japan and Europe.

Entering the field. New perspectives on world football. Edited by Gary Armstrong and Richard Giulianotti. Oxford: Berg. 1997. 319 pp. Hb.: £14.95. ISBN 1 85973 198 8.

Until a few years ago, dedicating an academic volume to the anthropology of football would have seemed a mere diversion, little more than an intellectual whim. In spite of their important social repercussions, sports in general and football in particular were considered minor, even irrelevant, objects of study. Condemned by the majority of intellectuals as an ‘opium of the people’ at the service of the authoritarian or democratic powers that be, academics ceded the sporting terrain to other more or less organic intellectuals, such as sports journalists and a few assorted essayists and writers (such as Eduardo Galeano [1995] and Manuel Vazquez Montalban [1995], who have published poetic accounts of football and its metaphors). Until recently, only one of the many aspects of the football scene, not surprisingly its most problematic and morbid, had captured the attention of social researchers: stadium violence associated with hooliganism. One might ask, then, echoing Marc Augé (1982: 59), if ‘the timidity of the human sciences with regard to important modern day rituals is not due to the fact that those who would observe and analyse such rituals are too close to them?’ However, as Fabio Dei (1992: 7) has pointed out, ‘the anthropological relevance of football is related to its strong affinity with a series of classic themes in the discipline: ritual, sacrifice, violence, symbolic communication, etc’. Why have anthropologists, specialists in distant peoples and exotic rituals, taken so long to visit tribes much closer to home, yet perhaps no less exotic? By considering the football tribes of Manchester United, Flamengo or Football Club Barcelona, anthropologists can observe modern forms of totemism and segmentarity.

Carnivals, rogues and heroes. An interpretation of the Brazilian dilemma. By Roberto DaMatta. Notre Dame/London: University of Notre Dame Press. 1991. 279 pp. Pb.: £13.50. ISBN: 0 268 00794 2.

The Brazilian puzzle. Culture on the borderlands of the western World. Edited by David J. Hess and Roberto DaMatta. New York: Columbia University Press. 1995. 306 pp. Pb.: $12.50. ISBN: 0 231 10115 5.

Brazilian anthropological studies of that country's modern, highly urbanised society are varied in subject and theoretically diverse. The emergence of this distinct sub-discipline in the seventies coincided with the harsh years of military rule, and it is perhaps little wonder that the question of national identity, directly or in a more diffuse way, seems to pervade most research in this area. Were not the military, in a sense, occupying their own country? What was one to think of elites that turned their back on the problems of the common people? Who are we, the Brazilians? What is ‘Brazilianness’, brasilidade, or as Roberto DaMatta puts it, ‘What makes brazil Brazil?’