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AbstractThis article views changes in the rituals of death in the context of Kyghyzstan's dramatic sociopolitical transformation from a clan-based society, through socialist modernisation, to the ill-defined post-Socialist present. Challenging Soviet ethnographic representations of mortuary ritual as 'tradtional' and timeless, the paper relates changes in ritual to changes in state ideology, ethnic identity and kinship practices. Particular attention is paid to gender concepts in the context of an examination of women's graves. It is argued that women were associated with 'the space of death', but subsequent Soviet citizenship and educational policies changed both gender ideas and those associated with children.

The new states of Africa encounter particularly difficult problems of reconciling pressures for rapid socio-economic change with the orderly transfer of power to new leadership. A number of recent commentaries on the discontinuities and crisis of developing countries have challenged the notion, in large part derived from Western political experience, that some sort of incremental reconciliation between the social effects of development and the political restructuring of society will steadily occur. The models used in comparative politics admit conflict, but they do not go very far in telling us how these forces interact in the policy machinery of a developing country. Moreover, while the primacy of politics continues, it is doubtful if new social and economic forces in the society are welcomed, and sometimes even recognized, by the existing élite.