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This paper is an effort to understand Hogarth's unique position in early eighteenth century London, so as to grasp the rich complexity of his work. It begins by tracing two rival competing positions in the sociology of art, derived from Becker and Bourdieu, before taking a closer look at how Hogarth's work conjures up a new vision of the world, providing shape and meaning to the nation's changing understandings of morality, society, and the city. A fundamental transformation in the field of representation appears halfway through the eighteenth century and the interweaving of art theory, national identity, and systems of patronage are at the centre of this dynamic period. It is no accident that in Hogarth's world the main targets are those who seek to transgress their stations in life and cross class barriers. By combining two different sociological approaches to art the study builds a more nuanced picture of the artist and his work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on recent research to explore the changing cultures of racism in English football. Starting from a critical analysis of key themes in the literature on football it seeks to show that existing analytical frameworks need to be reworked if they are going to adequately account for the complex forms through which racism is expressed in contemporary football cultures. In the course of this analysis we question some of the ways in which the issue of racism in football is collapsed into broader accounts of 'hooliganism' and other forms of violence among football fans. From this starting point the paper draws on some elements of our empirical research in order to outline an alternative way of framing the issues of racism and multiculturalism in football. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper aims to facilitate more adequate critical engagement with current affairs events by journalists, and with current affairs texts by audiences. It draws on social theory to provide the intellectual resources to enable this. The academic ambition is for the framework to be adopted and developed by social thinkers in producing exemplary critical readings of news and current affairs texts. To this end it is offered as a research paradigm. The paper situates its argument in relation to the wider literature in media and cultural studies, acknowledging the subtle skills required to appreciate the relative autonomy of texts. However, it draws attention to the lack of an adequate perspective with which to assess the frames, representations, and judgments within news and current affairs texts. To address this lacuna it proposes the conception of a social-theoretical frame, based on a number of meta-theoretical approaches, designed to provide audiences with a systematic means of addressing the status and adequacy of individual texts. Social theoretical frames can reveal the shortcomings of media framing of the contextual fields within which news and current affairs events take place. Two illustrative case studies are used to indicate the value and potential of the approach: the analysis of a short newspaper report of the return of protesters to Cairo's Tahrir Square in 2011, and a critique of four current affairs reports from various genres on the political turmoil in Thailand leading up to the clashes of May 2010. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While many aspects of social life possess an emotional component, sociology needs to explore explicitly the part emotions play in producing the social world and human history. This paper turns away from individualistic and anthropocentric emphases upon the experience of feelings and emotions, attending instead to an exploration of flows of 'affect' (meaning simply a capacity to affect or be affected) between bodies, things, social institutions and abstractions. It establishes a materialist sociology of affects that acknowledges emotions as a part, but only a part, of a more generalized affective flow that produces bodies and the social world. From this perspective, emotions are not a peculiarly remarkable outcome of the confluence of biology and culture, but part of a continuum of affectivity that links human bodies to their physical and social environment. This enhances sociological understanding of the part emotions play in shaping actions and capacities in many settings of sociological concern. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociologists theorizing the concept of ‘generation’ have traditionally looked to birth cohorts sharing major social upheavals such as war or decolonization to explain issues of generational solidarity and identity affiliation. More recently, theorists have drawn attention to the cultural elements where generations are thought to be formed through affinities with music or other types of popular culture during the ‘coming of age’ stage of life. In this paper, we ask whether developments in computer technology, which have both productive and cultural components, provide a basis for generational formation and identity and whether generational discourse is invoked to create cultures of difference in the workplace. Qualitative data from a sample of Information Technology workers show that these professionals mobilize ‘generational’ discourse and draw upon notions of ‘generational affinity’ with computing technology (e.g. the fact that people of different ages were immersed to varying degrees in different computing technologies) in explaining the youthful profile of IT workers and employees' differing levels of technological expertise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The focus of this paper is on the notion of ‘addictive consumption’, conceived as a set of discourses that are embedded within wider socio-historical processes of governance and control. It examines the discursive convergences and conflicts between practices of consumption and notions of addiction, which it notes are consistently represented in terms of the oppositional categories of self-control vs. compulsion and freedom vs. determinism. These interrelations are explored with reference to the development of notions of addiction, and their relation to shifting configurations of identity, subjectivity and governance. Finally, it suggests that the notion of ‘addiction’ has particular valence in advanced liberal societies, where an unprecedented emphasis on the values of freedom, autonomy and choice not only encourage the conditions for its proliferation into ever wider areas of social life, but also reveal deep tensions within the ideology of consumerism itself.

This paper revisits Parsons's conception of the 'sick role' and examines the relevance of his writings on the cultural understanding of sickness to the consumption of health in the contemporary era. In terms of current developments, I focus on the development of pro-active approaches towards the healthy body, and the growth of 'information rich' consumers of health care. These have become prominent themes in sociology, and while Parsons's writings are usually viewed as anachronistic I argue they remain highly pertinent to understanding the emergence of informed, body conscious lay people. If Parsons's analysis of health is more relevant to current circumstances than many critics assume, however, it is not unproblematic. The residual categories associated with the sick role obscure the continued utility of his work on the general cultural values informing health care. It is Parsons's analysis of these values, I suggest, that needs rescuing from restricted understandings of the sick role and highlighting as an important resource for contemporary theorists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that to understand the legitimacy of a culture we need to investigate its relation to the archive, the site for the accumulation of records. Archive reason is a kind of reason which is concerned with detail, it constantly directs us away from the big generalization, down into the particularity and singularity of the event. Increasingly the focus has shifted from archiving the lives of the good and the great down to the detail of mundane everyday life. One implication here is that rather than see the archive as a specific place in which we deposit records, documents, photographs, film, video and all the minutiae on which culture is inscribed, should we not seek to extend the walls of the archive to place it around the everyday, the world? If everything can potentially be of significance shouldn't part of the archive fever be to record and document everything, as it could one day be useful? The problem then becomes, not what to put into the archive, but what one dare leave out. Some of the implications of these questions were considered by Georg Simmel, in his argument that there has been a build up and overload in the production and circulation of objective culture. This is now beyond our subjective capacity to assimilate and order, given the finite limits of the human life course we all face. It is something which confronts the individual with irresolvable dilemmas over selectivity, with each particular choice amounting to a wager which inevitably closes off others. Related questions about the difficulties of handling cultural completeness, were also addressed by Jorge Luis Borges in his discussion of the Library of Babel and the Aleph. Yet both could hardly have anticipated the full implications of the electronic archive: the development of new technologies for storing, searching and communicating information through the Internet with its databases and hypertext links. The electronic archive offers new possibilities for speed, mobility and completeness of access to cultures which have become digitalized, which raise fundamental questions about ownership, intellectual property rights, censorship and democratic access. The implications for culture are clear: the new electronic archives will not only change the form in which culture is produced and recorded, but the wider conditions under which it is enacted and lived as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with aspects of the work of Elias: how he dealt with the rise of Nazism and the Holocaust, and how they fit into the general context of his theory of `civilizing processes'. In response to critics such as Bauman and Burkitt, we seek to clarify what Elias argued in his theory; and to show how, particularly in his book on The Germans (1996), Elias was able, using this theory, to shed light on the origins and growth of Nazism and its consequences for Cennany and the world at large. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam, are a group of countries that have boundaries with each other and lie between India and China. In all but Vietnam, Theravada Buddhism is the predominant religion. Apart from these resemblances, the pattern of cultures and of political trends is variegated and complex. Thailand, however, is relatively homogeneous in culture and tranquil in politics. Yet in spite of its notorious charm, it has not attracted many field investigators. The major exception to this is the work of the Cornell University Thailand Project, and especially its study from 1948 to 1958 of the village of Bang Chan near Bangkok. From the improvised fieldwork in a north-east province the impression one gets is that some factors that divide and cause conflict within other societies are absent or at least well concealed in Thailand. The Thai intelligence is pragmatic rather than theoretical and hitherto sociology has had no very great appeal in Thailand. Of countries in the list, the one most fitted by temperament and intellectual tradition to produce its own sociologists is probably Vietnam. Unfortunately the widespread political disturbance is an adverse factor.

Institutions regulate social life through formal rules and sanctions. These are distinguished from another source of social regulation, the informal incentives and constraints inherent in cultural currents and customary practices. Informal practices may be based not simply on cultural forces, though, but expectations regularised by informal rules and sanctions, which may operate as informal institutions. One approach holds that informal institutions arise out of formal institutional voids. Another holds that informal institutions operate in response to situations in which formal institutions frustrate the interests of individuals and groups who engage informal institutions to augment, compromise, or subvert formal institutions. After developing the concept of informal institution, the article goes on to indicate how an informal relationship pervasive in modern China, guanxi, may be understood as an informal institution. It is shown that by drawing on the case of guanxi the scope of the concept informal institution can be extended and also that our understanding of guanxi is enriched when the concept of informal institution is applied to its analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces the concept of "flexible reactivity" to describe and analyze a form of economic actors' response to multiple judgment devices. Using the example of government regulation in the Tuscan wine industry, we show that wineries can in part comply with the government's quality classifications system while, at the same time, also offering products outside the official classification system. Through this research, we provide novel insights into the role of judgment devices and contribute to a more nuanced understanding of organizational responses to institutional pressures. Extending prior institutional‐complexity research, our study illustrates that organizations' reactions to judgment devices are not limited to only the two options of either acquiescence or defiance. The third option—flexibile reactivity—encompasses an explicit combination of acquiescence and defiance at the actor level. Our findings shed new light on how organizations can cope with contradictory external demands such that contrasting logics compete for organizational resources and breed heterogeneous and continuously shifting product offerings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critical cosmopolitanism is an emerging direction in social theory and reflects both an object of study and a distinctive methodological approach to the social world. It differs from normative political and moral accounts of cosmopolitanism as world polity or universalistic culture in its conception of cosmopolitanism as socially situated and as part of the self-constituting nature of the social world itself. It is an approach that shifts the emphasis to internal developmental processes within the social world rather than seeing globalization as the primary mechanism. This signals a post-universalistic kind of cosmopolitanism, which is not merely a condition of diversity but is articulated in cultural models of world openness through which societies undergo transformation. The cosmopolitan imagination is articulated in framing processes and cultural models by which the social world is constituted; it is therefore not reducible to concrete identities, but should be understood as a form of cultural contestation in which the logic of translation plays a central role. The cosmopolitan imagination can arise in any kind of society and at any time but it is integral to modernity, in so far as this is a condition of self-problematization, incompleteness and the awareness that certainty can never be established once and for all. As a methodologically grounded approach, critical cosmopolitan sociology has a very specific task: to discern or make sense of social transformation by identifying new or emergent social realities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociological understanding of generations can be enhanced by avoiding defining them rigidly as chronological cohorts but rather linking people's accounts of their generational experience with an historically informed political economy. It then becomes possible, for example, to understand the complexity of generational politics. This paper uses data on the ‘War Generation’ taken from the Exeter Politics of Old Age project to link an empirically based political economy of generational inequality with a cultural sociology of generations. The ‘War Generation’ recognizes itself and is referred to by others in terms of a common identity. It is also an historical generation; its values, attitudes and, above all, sense of national solidarity and mutual obligation were forged in the direct experience of war. But it is also divided by divergent economic interests in property and pension rights based on the historical experience of the life course by successive groups and this segmentation can be observed in political action. The political culture of the War Generation manifests both continuity and change. Understanding these dynamics requires listening to people constructing their worlds, understanding their full range of historical experiences, and analysing the conditions for their conflicts and their cohesion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Working broadly within the late-Durkheimian tradition of cultural sociology, the symbolic boundaries of the Australian national community are conceptualized in terms of a typology composed of two dimensions: `friends'/'enemies' and `internal'/'external'. The typology is operationalized, and the specific empirical content of the four cells examined using quantitative data from the Australian National Social Science Survey (1984-85). The paper investigates how emotional attachment to the Australian national community causally effects attitude formation on three national issues; monarchism, aboriginality and multiculturalism. Also, the social determinants behind variation in emotional attachment to orthodox symbolic conceptions of the Australian national community are systematically investigated and measured. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept rationalization considers those intellectual processes endemic to developments of systems of meaning and symbolism. Rationalizing processes foster greater conceptual coherence and clarification, and, in the determination of knowledge, place increasing reliance on rational procedures. This paper constructs a model of rationalization, presenting as an illustration a study of the English testimonial oath, a component of the law of evidence. The meaning, definition, and conception of a valid oath, as well the associated rules of testimonial qualification, have altered significantly since the seventeenth century. The logical and orderly erosion of religious elements together with the emergence of exclusively legal criteria demonstrate the utility and significance of rationalization for understanding cultural developments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many social theorists have pointed to problematic aspects of viewing the 1960s youth culture as an enduring form of social movement;[2] however these analyses spring largely from the traditional sociological frame that sees the frustration and deprivation of a population leading (more or less) directly to the rise of social movements.[3] McCarthy and Zald, in their recent and cogent discussion of resource mobilization and social movement organizations,[4] have pointed to the fact that this focus upon frustrations and deprivations is in opposition to the focus of practical theorists (such as Lenin, Mao Tse-Tung and Saul Alinsky), who have emphasized the ways in which particular social structures make the tasks of resource mobilization more or less difficult.
This theoretical analysis, viewing the relation of social movements to their beneficiaries of grievance base not as given, but as fully problematic and contingent, offers an opportunity for the examination of specific social movements within a new, and possibly more fruitful, frame. I wish in this paper to address the question of whether there is an enduring base for contra-cultural social movements[6] across generations of the young. Can a social movement persist beyond the life span of one generation when it recruits from what is claimed to be a short-term and transitional category? and if there is persistence, to what extent and upon what is this persistence contingent? Focusing more specifically, I shall examine the head shop as a social movement industry,[7] and its relationship to resource base and movement mobilization within and without the youth contra-culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the extent to which parental values differ between social groups in the UK at the start of the twenty‐first century. The study of parental values is an important area of sociological enquiry that can inform scholarship from across the social sciences concerned with educational inequality and cultural variability in family life. We draw on data from the Millennium Cohort Study to show how parent's social class, religion, religiosity, race and ethnicity, and education are related to the qualities they would like their children to have. Our rank‐ordered regression models show that parents in service class occupations place significantly more importance on 'thinking for self' than 'obey parents' compared to those in routine manual occupations. We also show that although class matters, the relationship between education and parental values is particularly strong. Parenting values also differ by parental racial and ethnic background and by levels of religiosity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses sociology in terms of complementary strengths and areas of expertise as a team sport. Topics include consideration of combination of cultural and social structural factors to enable and constrain different causal processes and outcomes; failing of cultural narratives contribute to social crisis; and successful religious and humanistic discourses helps in creating good narratives in future with moral lessons to life fostering identification and empathy.

The article focuses on the culture and class in cultural sociology after the neoliberal moments. Topics include discussion of the critique and ethos of neoliberalism, criticizing the materialism and consumerism of Western society, and invention of the term individualism to describe the outlook of Americans in the 1830s. It also mentions Advances in artificial intelligence to push computerization further in the near future.

The article explores different ways to conceptualize the relationship between choice and culture. These two notions are often constructed as opposites: while sociologies of modernization (such as Giddens') portray a shift from cultural traditions to culturally disembedded choice, dispositional sociologies (such as Bourdieu's) uncover cultural determination as the hidden truth behind apparent choice. However, choice may be real and cultural simultaneously. Culture moulds choice not only by inculcating dispositions or shaping repertoires of alternatives, but also by offering culturally specific choice practices, ways of choosing embedded in meaning, normativity, and materiality; and by shaping attributions of choice in everyday life. By bringing together insights from rival schools, I portray an outline for a comparative cultural sociology of choice, and demonstrate its purchase while discussing the digitalization of choice; and cultural logics that shape choice attribution in ways opposing neoliberal trends. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: I propose an agenda for empirical research on decision, choice, decision‐makers, and decision‐making qua social facts. Given society S, group G, or field F, I make a twofold sociological proposal. First, empirically investigate the conditions under which something—call it X—is taken to be a decision or choice, or the outcome of a decision‐making process. What must X be like? What doesn't count (besides, presumably, myotatic reflexes and blushing)? Whom or what must X be done by? What can't be a decision‐maker (besides, presumably, rocks and apples)? Second, empirically investigate how decision/choice concepts are used in everyday life, politics, business, education, law, technology, and science. What are they used for? To what extent do people understand and represent themselves and others as decision‐makers? Where do decision‐centric or “decisionist” understandings succeed? These aren't armchair, theoretical, philosophical questions, but empirical ones. Decision/choice concepts’ apparent ubiquity in contemporary societies calls for a well‐thought‐out research program on their social life and uses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of increasing cross-border mobility and the associated interconnections and diversities, 'cosmopolitanism' has become a key concept in sociology. Understood as individual real-world orientation, many authors consider a central cause for cosmopolitanism in physical-corporeal mobility, in particular transnationally. However, the significance of virtual and imagined mobility, such as via television or the Internet, is increasingly emphasized. Nevertheless, it has so far been little examined how and with which relative strength physical-corporeal and virtual-imagined mobility are associated with cosmopolitan orientations. Unlike previous studies, the two forms of mobility are considered simultaneously. On the basis of existing studies and theoretical considerations, it is assumed that the dimension of global orientation is influenced rather by physical-corporeal than by virtual-imagined mobility, whereas the dimension of cultural openness is influenced rather by virtual-imagined than by physical mobility. One reason could be the different potential of the mobility forms to respond to perceived conflicts in the confrontation with the Other. The hypotheses are preliminary tested using data from an online survey that allows both to distinguish locals, (national) shuttles and transnationals, and to query media use. An exploratory principal component analysis confirmed, as in other studies, that global orientation and cultural openness are distinct dimensions. The results of the multivariate analyses largely support the hypotheses and indicate that in investigations of cosmopolitanism, the processes of identity-related self-categorization should be distinguished from pure socialization processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The scholarship on aesthetics and materiality has studied how objects help shape identity, social action and subjectivity. Objects, as 'equipment[s] for living' (Luhmann 2000), become the 'obligatory passage points humans have to contend with in order to pursue their projects (Latour 1991). They provide patterns to which bodies can unconsciously latch onto, or help human agents work towards particular states of being (DeNora 2000, 2003). Objects are central in the long term process of taste construction, as any attachment to an object is made out of a delicate equilibrium of mediators, bodies, situations and techniques (Hennion and his collaborators (Hennion and Fouquet 2001; Hennion and Gomart 1999). In all of these accounts objects are the end result of long-term processes of stabilization, in which the actual material object (a musical piece, a sculpture, an art installation, a glass of wine, the oeuvre of Bach as we know it) is both a result and yet a key co-producer of its own generation.Whereas the literature has been generous and detailed in exploring the processes of assembling and sustaining object-centered attachments, it has not sufficiently engaged with what happens when the aesthetic elements of cultural artifacts that have produced emotional resonance are transformed: what do these artifacts morph into?What explains the transition (or not) of different cultural objects? And relatedly, what happens to the key aesthetic qualities that were so central to how the objects had been defined, and to those who have emotionally attached to them? To answer these questions, this article uses as exemplars two different cases of attachment, predicated on the distinctive features of a cultural object - the transcendence of opera and the authenticity of a soccer jersey - that have undergone transformations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A response is provided to the article "A post-genomic surprise. The molecular reinscription of race in science, law and medicine," by Troy Duster, which appears within the issue. The article discusses Duster's perspective on the relationship between molecular biology, DNA, genetics and race, including his opinion that rather than focus on alleged racial differences from genetics, social and culture histories of racial and ethnic groups should be researched. An overview of the relationship between health and race, including in regard to health disparities and the role that diet plays in causing diabetes, is provided.

The present study explores the determinants and lifestyle correletes of musical preferences among a large sample of high school students in Toronto, Ontario. Our work is informed by theory and research on cultural stratification and adolescent subcultures. In terms of cultural stratification, we engage with Bourdieu's (1984 ) and Peterson's (1996) conceptualizations of elite taste, while subcultural theory encourages us to focus upon more dissenting tastes and to explore connections between musical tastes and peer group activity. Our findings suggest that racial and ethnic identity, school experiences and cultural capital are significant sources of variation in musical tastes that loosely correspond to existing typologies; they also confirm what has often been inferred – that musical tastes and peer group cultural practices are closely linked. Our findings are then discussed in the light of current debates about the nature and dimensions of listening audiences for music. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article attempts to engage with a tendency in the theorization of social change and self-identity, evident in the work of a number of contemporary social theorists, to place an extended process of reflexivity at the heart of modern identity. As symptomatic of 'neo-modern' accounts of selfhood, critical readings of Giddens, Beck, Castells and some aspects of social theory more generally, and their account of modern reflexivity's relationship to culture, are assessed. In light of these criticisms, ways in which culture might still play an important part in the shaping of identity are considered. The relationship between language, culture and reflexivity, drawing from philosophy, sociology and G. H. Mead's own brand of social psychology, are all utilized in establishing a critique of the role Giddens and others designate for culture in the constitution of the contemporary self. By potentially repositioning self-identity in its connection to culture, the overall bearing of reflexivity upon the processes of self-identity is thus questioned. It is argued that a culturally-situated, yet fluid and multifarious account of self-identity is a necessary analytical and normative alternative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Police culture is used as the substantive focus for a critique of the conception of culture as a set of rules that generate action, and as a basis for developing an alternative model. Ideas from anthropological and literary theory are used to propose a conception of culture as a figurative resource made available through stories that construct a sensibility out of which action arises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The first two professors of sociology in England thought their major research task to be to examine the writings of historians, anthropologists and others in order to write comparative and evolutionary histories of mankind. The first wave of expansion of sociology after the war changed this emphasis. Small scale studies, using detailed primary, sources, traced short-term developments in a selected area of interest. Studies of' the here and now dominated sociology for some time. Twenty years later a second wave changed the emphasis again towards theoretical speculation, although the concept of time now held primary place, just as it had before the war. Historical sociology nevertheless languished until the impact of second-wave feminism, with its emphasis on women having been hidden from history, gave it an impetus which promises much in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Paternalism and patronage are two relationships which have received little systematic attention or rigorous analysis in the sociological literature. The categorization of phenomena as examples of paternalism or patronage is often unsystematic and slipshod as a result, and there have been instances of the two being confused with each other. One consequence has been the failure to develop an analytical framework which identifies the formal characteristics of the two relationships in such a way that diverse examples of each can be categorized. A second consequence has been an inadequate appreciation of how widespread the relationships of paternalism and patronage are, and of the extent to which they are to be found in a wide variety of cultural settings and historical epochs. This article undertakes the classification of the formal properties of the relationships on a number of dimensions, in order to highlight their points of similarity and difference. The article also considers a variety of empirical evidence drawn from different cultures, in order to demonstrate the substantive usefulness of the typology for comparative sociology and the real significance of the two relationships. This comparative approach involves some specifications of the conditions under which the two occur.

This article identifies the cognitive bases for exasperated, enthusiastic and ambivalent reactions are identified, by way of an examination of one of his most influential ideas, the concept of the total institution. In the Weberian definition the modern state is identified as a compulsory association with a territorial basis in which the system of order is binding to a very large extent over all action taking place in the area of its jurisdiction. For K.R. Popper, the criterion for a totalitarian state is that its might must permeate and control the whole life of the people in all its functions. Yet S.I. Benn and R.S. Peters, in referring to the democratic state as an umpire deciding between conflicting claims, describe it as the only association exercising an all-embracing jurisdiction within a given territory. What is thus implied is that same place, same authority and all aspects of life are ambiguous phrases. In practice, E. Goffman so defines same place as to accommodate prolonged solitary confinement on the one hand, and enjoying the sunshine in the extensive grounds of a T.B. sanitorium on the other.

The search for universals means not so much stepping over the borders of cultural communities, as discovering construction principles common to the Spheres of the human praxis apparently belonging to entirely different realms. In other words, universal principles instead of common denominators, theory instead of endless rearrangement of disarrayed empirical records follow immediately. It is quite possible that in non-linguistic cultural sub-systems, like in language, the value of each element depends entirely on their opposition to other elements, on their being different from other elements. They are therefore characterised not by any positive quality of their own but by their oppositional quality and differential value. Common misinterpretations notwithstanding, a chance to bridge the conceptual chasm between statics and dynamics, synchronic and diachronic dimensions, is also built into the analytical equipment of the modern linguistics. The numerous statements to the contrary, frequent as they have been, have been born out of the understandable, though not necessarily convincing, passion of the devout preachers of an undoubtedly revolutionary idea.

This article reviews some of the competing theses in the argument about the content of and degree of heterogeneity in British West Indian culture, and then relates their various hypotheses to some empirical findings on attitudes in Trinidad and Tobago. The focus is on four sociological interpretations of West Indian culture, the thesis of cultural pluralism, the thesis of cultural consensus, the argument about cultural variation and the thesis of increasing modernism. The basis of cultural pluralism is the view of culture as a system of major institutions. The basis of the cultural homogeneity is the structural functionalist theory. The intra cultural variation is repeating across the society, giving both variation and integration to the culture. Discussion on the thesis of cultural consensus, cultural pluralism, value variation and increasing modernism is presented. As a thesis about the organization of West Indian culture, cultural modernism meshes even better with the Trinidadian data than does the thesis of cultural variation. Only on the man-nature orientation do the trends in the Trinidadian groups approximate those in the thesis of cultural modernism.

In response to the observation that the current state of theoretical and descriptive development of the concept of role distance has led to a paucity of research and to an abundance of confusion, following aims are pursued in the article: to try to resolve some of the vagueness and ambiguity inherent in the initial definition and explanation of role distance and to suggest a few ways in which research can be carried out on this phenomenon. A concise definition of role distance is presented and differentiated from role-distance behaviour. Additional distinctions are made between kinds of role distance and between types of role-distance behaviour. Research in this area is hampered by the time consuming necessity of gaining an intimate knowledge of the culture or subculture where role distance is to be studied and by the fact that the occurrence of role distance is probably relatively infrequent. It is suggested that the best strategy to meet these obstacles is to incorporate this research interest as part of a larger participant observer study. By way of illustration some observations on role distance among jazz musicians are presented within the framework of six modes of role-distance behaviour. They were found to hold both major and minor role-distance attitudes and to take true and false role distance on various occasions.

The author was pleased to see that his article "Role Elements: A Link between Acculturation and Occupational Status" stimulated Ronald J. Silvers to further consideration of the problems of acculturation. Mr. Silver's main criticism of my view of acculturation is that it takes into account only structural factors, or in other words, that it fails to pay attention to volitional and other factors which he lumps together under the headings economic, political, religious, etc. He concludes, therefore, that according to his theory, the actor resembles a stiff, mechanical organism responding only to an external social environment. Had he troubled himself to examine the data carefully, he would have seen that the author did in fact test his sample for such factors as authoritarianism, acquiescence, scatter, extremity, need-achievement, Machiavellianism and major value orientations. These psychological and value dimensions were measured independent of the degree of acculturation by means of the F Scale, the V Scale, the Mach IV Scale. In addition, to the author's interview with each respondent, provided him with extensive information on his family background and on his own and his family's religious and political beliefs both in the U.S. and in Hungary. Moreover, one of the subscales he used as a measure of acculturation, the dependent variable after all, did take into account volition, i.e. the individuals desire to become an American.

This article is amongst one of the three articles read at the Annual Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in the year 1962. A limited number of terms which are associated with major themes of anthropological discourse, or which have been found to be necessary for concise communication between people engaged in social anthropology are considered in this article. In discussing the vocabulary of social anthropology one must begin with two key words which indicate different aspects of the subject-matter and also different approaches to it. First of such words is culture, which is the whole complex of learned behavior, the traditions and techniques and the material possessions, the language and other symbolism, of some body of people. Anthropologist Radicalize-Brown defined the structure of a society as the sum total of those interpersonal relations to which social norms apply.

The article focuses on Islam and social stratification in Northern Nigeria. Northern Nigeria covers an area of roughly 250,000 square miles of savannah country in the south, merging into desert scrub in the north, and supporting a sparse population (the average density is 53 persons per square mile) which is mainly scattered along water courses in villages and hamlets of varying size. Under centralized British Administration since early in the nineteen hundreds, the region has been divided into Provinces, but as these overlap the boundaries of traditional Emirates and Chiefdoms. Ethnically, the population consists of one major cultural group of Hausa-speaking people, who constitute over a third of the total population. These are now very largely Moslem, and, so far as can be gathered from their own oral and written chronicles. Prior to British Rule, there had undoubtedly been Islamic influence in the independent Hausa chiefdoms, as there had been throughout the Hausa States before the Fulani rising of 1804.

The article focuses on European culture. The whole story of mankind seems to have been one unbroken chain of such attempts, many of which admittedly failed, or instead of producing rapid and successful results, led to involved detours by which something was eventually improved, whilst many succeeded only in creating new difficulties. Nowadays the contexts in which the term "European" seems appropriate are legion, not only in the economic field, but also in the closer cultural sphere. The fact that there exists something that can only be described as "European culture" is after all proved by the existence of such splendid institutions as Europe House in London. There certainly is something, which may be called a European mentality or European way of thinking. One does not dispute the existence of something merely because it is difficult to define and can be viewed from many different aspects. Moreover, the nationalism of individual Europeans does not conflict with a European cultural consciousness any more than it conflicts with the idea of the human race or a common humanity encompassing the whole world. It is a proof merely of the validity of a cultural area wider than the individual nations but smaller than all mankind.

The article discusses judgments of merited prestige in Great Britain. Judgments of merited prestige are employed because, unlike conventional prestige ratings, they necessarily reflect the values of the judges. Interviewees were presented with the series of merited prestige choices. The result shows that consistent with the preceding generalization is the observation that occupational class differences are generally smaller in estimates of actual social standing than in judgments of merited prestige. A shift from asking for judgments of merited prestige to soliciting estimates of actual social standing produces convergence of the classes toward description of a fairly uniformly perceived social structure. Established members reiterate the culture to one another explicitly in the guise of folk wisdom and implicitly by making the culture the unspoken premise upon which their judgments and actions are based. The concept of culture further implies that communication of the standard patterns of the group is normative rather than neutral. Thus there is pressure placed on the individual member to take over the patterns of the group.

This article discusses the relationship of bilinguals and cultural marginality. bilingualism does not necessarily entail cultural marginality or a schism in the soul. Thus in Java, the noblemen speak Noko, the commoners Kromo. But the two orders understand each other's language, and each uses the other's language in addressing him. In this case, bilingualism is an integral part of the cultural set-up, social stratification being reflected in a linguistic bifurcation. The two languages are part of the same culture, or two aspects of the same culture, and are far from symbolizing any cultural conflict. Very often, in situations of cultural marginality, the satisfactions accruing from the very processes of acculturation, are sufficient compensation for the renunciation of the old culture. The would-be members of the colonial elite anticipate a greater degree of security from the values of the alien culture. But individuals are seldom prepared to throw in their lot with an alien regime unconditionally. The bilingual has, in fact, to correlate himself consciously between two worlds and establish not only outward links with them but, within himself, between them. Many bilinguals are acutely conscious of their cultural marginality--an awareness which threatens the unity of their personality. The dilemma of bilingualism and cultural marginality, and their historical concomitants reappear. Many of these linguistic problems can be resolved if a purely instrumental world-language with no condensation symbolism, such as Esperanto or Basic English, is adopted throughout the Commonwealth.