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A list of publications received by the book is presented including "On Scandal: Moral Disturbances in Society, Politics, and Art," by Ari Adut, "A Contemporary Introduction to Sociology: Culture and Society in Transition," by Jeffrey C. Alexander and Kenneth Thompson and "The African Transformation of Western Medicine and the Dynamics of Global Cultural Exchange," by David Baronov.

A list of books about culture, demography, ethnicity, health, politics, sexuality, gender and social psychology, stratification, theory and methodology, urban community, work and organizations is presented including "Narrative and Violence: Ways of Sufferings Amongst Iranian Men in Diaspora," "Computer Games and the Social Imaginary" and "Cognition and Crime: Offender Decision Making and Script Analyses."

The sources cited within this issue are presented including "Religion in the Contemporary World: A Sociological Introduction," by Alan Aldridge, "Buying Into Fair Trade: Culture, Morality, and Consumption," by Keith R. Brown, and "Cult of the Will: Nervousness and German Identity," by Michael Cowan.

To call something "Handbook of Sociology," as Neil J. Smelser is well aware, is to make quite a claim. A handbook is not a gathering of useful papers that belong within the bounds of a given disciplinary territory, as is the case with a ten-year collection of "The American Sociological Review." It is almost like an atlas, an effort to chart the whole of that territory. The publisher of this handbook describes it as a "comprehensive" and "authoritative" volume that "synthesizes the field." That, of course, is how publicists speak, but Smelser understands the task in much the same way, even if his language is more measured. A handbook, he says, should be a "representation of the discipline," "covering the field comprehensively and in a catholic, balanced manner." Most of the participants in the symposium have been considering how faithfully the "Handbook" charts assigned portions of that sociological terrain. This article considers the question in a different way. It looks at what the field of sociology looks like through the window this volume provides.

The absence of such a thing as a "sex role" in the U.S. society is a refreshing thought that has been long overdue and debated in the new scholarship on women. In sociology, "sex role" is often used as a code term for "women," sometimes its theoretical implications are not even utilized by writers who use the term. However, this notion calls attention to differences among societies both in space and over time. One of the problems with the "sex-role" approach to the study of women and men is the inherent difficulty of formulating structural differences among societies, if one emphasizes individuals enacting "roles." For example, societies may differ in the extent to which sexual identity overshadows other aspects of social personality. Variations in appropriate behavior for males and females, acting in a variety of settings, may be much greater in "context-sensitive" societies, such as India, than in more "context free" societies, such as the U.S., where consistency of personal attributes like "masculinity" and "femininity", is stressed. These differences are closely related to distinctions of culture and social structure.

This article presents information on two books "Against the Tranquility of Axioms," by Rodney Needham and "Hermeneutics: Questions and Prospects," edited by Gary Shapiro and Alan Sica. The author reports that these books advocate, on a whole, a unified project for cultural studies concerning tropes and truth, foundationalism and relativisim, ideological critique and cultural interpretation. Both books make old forms of coherence seem fraught with tensions, contradictions, and ongoing change. In this context, researcher Anthony Giddens argues that the orthodox consensus, characterized by positivism, functionalism, and modernization, is now outmoded. Instead, hermeneutics, informed by an awareness of history, has shaped a new project that converges on social thought as an arena for critique and renewal. The author suggests that the project of ideological critique is but one response to the anxiety that, without a firm foundation, anything goes. The emerging emphasis on hermeneutics has reportedly introduced a fresh measure of discomfort, disarray, engagement, and insight.

Human migration commands the greatest inherent fascination, of all the social science studies. Migration as metaphor serves popular explanations of a less glorious social present as cultures abandon the bucolic virtues of autonomous rural life, of the dubious advantages of urban residence and industrial employment. Moreover, the continued immigration of other nationalities reaffirms popular pride in political liberties and economic opportunities even while provoking concern about the long-term economic and cultural consequences of admitting aliens. Migration is quintessentially the stuff of myth and drama and tells a great deal about society. It not only serves to explain origins and formative influences but also represents the consequences for most of the world's contemporary societies of two centuries of spectacular but geographically uneven technological, economic, and organizational development and of the increasingly great inequalities among and within nations that this development has fostered.

This article focuses on author Mark Schneider's observations in the new sociology of culture during the 1980s in the U.S. His principal argument holds that interpreting culture throws one out of the naturalistic register and into an interpretative one, which risks losing precision and demonstrability. The author's work deliberates over a number of theories and interpretative dilemmas that face the new sociology of culture. In one he puts Charles Taylor's book, Interpretation and the Sciences of Man, and Oliver Sack's book, Awakenings, through a number of hermeneutic hoops, concluding that their warrant for reliable knowledge is not very robust--that interpretative work of their styles is a riskily soft foundation on which to build science. In another chapter, the book, The Model of the Text, is paired with canonical expositions of deep play and thick description dating from roughly the same time. With similar motives and techniques, Schneider again shows them to be less useful for cultural analysis that they have commonly been regarded over the last two decades. In his account of the Royal Society of Restoration England, and its symptomatic character John Aubrey. This odd man, who clearly seconds Schneider's ambivalence about the relation of art to science, managed in his harum-scarum life to found modern archaeology and write dozens of solid short biographies. At the end, Schneider makes a valuable distinction that perhaps cultural meaning comes in two main forms, one amendable to naturalistic evaluation, the other, forever tried to mere edification and thus never truly explainable. That is, culture will offer its admirers a certain level of understanding through counting and ordering, but only so much.

The article compares and contrasts the coverage of the new "Handbook of Sociology" with that of the "Annual Review of Sociology." While discussing reactions to the book, however, it was found that there were many common concerns. It was felt that the "Handbook" is limited in its notion of the scope of sociology. It was found that the picture it paints of society to be rather static. A frequent disregard for history, time, and the flow of events was noted. It was surprising that there was an omission of law from the section on institutions. Chapters on culture and on language and symbols were missing. The lack of chapters on communities was puzzling. The parsimonious partition of the substance of sociology into inequality, institutions, and social processes seems a bit low-key in the "Handbook." The "Annual Review of Sociology" uses a 12-category scheme for classifying, and indeed for soliciting articles. The first two of each system are pretty much the same. The third category of the "Handbook" covers much of the same material as the next three categories of the "Review," that is, institutions and culture, formal organizations, and political and economic sociology.

The article focuses on the book "Nihilism and Culture," by Johan Goudsblom. The book is a study of nihilism, broadly conceived as an "intellectual problem" -- "a state of mind in which nothing appears to have value or meaning." The study divides into three parts, the first two of which are relatively short and preliminary in nature. In part 1, the meaning and history of the term "nihilism" are traced through the literature. It began as a term of personal abuse during the time of the French Revolution but eventually gained respectability. In part 2, the history of the concept of "culture" is traced, several modern conceptualizations are analyzed, and the "culturological" approach is outlined. Its object is "to explain specific aspects of human behaviour and experience by relating them to cultural influences." In part 3, the larger part of the monograph, nihilism is examined, first, as a cultural element; second, as something that is promoted by certain kinds of social organizational variables; and last, as something to which the socially detached, culturally sensitive, and thought-prone type of personality is most vulnerable.