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These studies clearly suggest that religious attitudes and death attitudes are related to one another. It is the purpose of this paper to raise further questions about this relationship, questions having implications for several areas of sociology, especially for the sociology of knowledge. The sociology of knowledge is concerned with how one's social situation affects one's world view. Its basic assumption has been enunciated by Mannheim who approvingly quotes Marx' belief that "it is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but on the contrary their social existence which determines their consciousness" (1964: 125-126). If this assumption is correct then one would predict that the nature of the relationship between death attitudes and religious attitudes would vary depending on the social background of the subjects. This possibility, however, has not previously been explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A genuinely sociological theory of social change is lacking, but the literature of the social sciences abounds with the elements of such a theory. The present paper deals with one of these elements, namely the change from tribalism to urbanism as a major instance of social change. For this purpose the concepts of culture and civilization are examined, and a plea is made to restore the concept of civilization to its rightful place in the vocabulary of sociologists and anthropologists. In doing this, the intention is not to reduce social change to the process of urbanization, but rather to isolate the sociological element which makes for social change within the supersession of a familial by a territorial society, wherever it occurs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]