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Cultural interpretations of the sex trade are pervasive in Southeast Asia, in particular, the argument that daughters enrol in sex work to repay a debt of life and support their parents. While useful to illuminate the role of culture in shaping economic action, this narrative carries the risk of viewing people as robots guided by stable and supra-individual forces. Drawing on ethnographic data collected in Southern Vietnam and Cambodia on precarious and indebted Vietnamese families that encourage their daughters to sell sex, this article disturbs deterministic cultural accounts of sex work by describing how families interpret, negotiate and (re)produce cultural scripts through relational work. More specifically, it shows how these families draw from familistic scripts about hierarchy, duty and sacrifice conveyed in popular culture to assemble relational packages. Deeply imbued in affective undercurrents and power asymmetry, these packages allow families to negotiate taboo trades like the repayment of debt through the sale of their daughter's virginity. Overall, a relational work framework provides a better understanding of female participation in the sex trade in Vietnam than explanations based on normative accounts of culture or problematic trafficking binaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary research into the field of body pedagogics has produced a growing number of studies concerned with the embodied character of cultural transmission, experience, reproduction and change. This article advances this sociological development by reinterpreting recent writings on situated epistemic relations (SER) and practical epistemological analysis (PEA) as complementary, methodological, techniques that can enhance these investigations. After outlining existing explorations into the body pedagogics of occupational, sporting, religious, educational and other cultures, the author demonstrates how the interlinked approaches to learning made possible by systematizing SER and PEA can be developed into a new approach that increases the effectiveness with which the theoretical and empirical concerns of studies into embodied acculturation are harnessed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Genomic analyses have shown that only 1.2 per cent of the genome is devoted to protein coding sequences (the most commonly invoked definition of genes), and that much of the remaining sequences are employed in regulation – that is, in responding to signals, first, from the immediate environment of the DNA, but ultimately from the distal environment – from the cytoplasm, from the environment outside the cell, and finally, from the environment beyond the organism. Such signals are not restricted to the simple physical and chemical stimuli that impinge directly on the DNA, on the surface of the cell, or even on the body as a whole: organisms with central nervous systems have receptors for forms of perception that are not only more complex but far longer range. Humans have especially sophisticated perceptual capacities, enabling them to respond to a wide range of complex visual, auditory, linguistic and behavioural/emotional signals in their extended environment. Research has recently begun to show that responses to such signals can extend all the way down to the level of gene expression. The question is this: to what extent are we witnessing (at last) a rapprochement between the natural science of biology and the human sciences of sociology and anthropology, and to what extent do the new promises of synthesis merely reflect an expansion of older reductionist aims, threatening once again to marginalize rather than incorporate the insights of cultural analysis? As in my earlier discussion of the nature/nurture debate (2010), my focus will be restricted to the Anglo-American context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are two parts to my discussion of the sociology of the body. I first examine, via an account of the development of anthropology and sociology, how technology and culture have historically been analysed as mediations between the scarcity of natural resources and the vulnerable human body. Technology has been crucial in providing societies with some control or dominion over nature, including therefore control over the human body, yet is often thought to involve hubris against the gods and a threat to human life. Culture, in contrast, has more usually been seen as nurturing nature, providing humans with a symbolic means of mediating and domesticating their external physical environment. Whereas culture nurtures nature, technology can so easily destroy it. In the second part of my article, I demonstrate how these conceptual distinctions have assumed new dimensions in the contemporary era and analyse these by focusing on the implications of medical technologies for longevity (for example, therapeutic stem-cell research, regenerative medicine, and new reproductive technologies). Medical technology holds out the promise of prolongevity as a new mirage of health, offering life-enhancement or the secular promise of eternal life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of cultural change requires a dialectical theory of culture that does not reduce vectors of change to extra-cultural forces. Despite changes in expert technology that included the uses of ethnographic film to aid the carvers of Melanesian funerary sculptures, which are named malanggan, the carvers typically present their sculpture to either ritual or secular publics who are incredulous at the brief display, but with a difference in either case. This description of the visual shifts in the making and display of malanggan sculpture can be analyzed as a movement from ontological concerns about how people live in relationships, to epistemological concerns with how to communicate about who they are. These shifts in expert visual technique and its relationship to public culture are wholly cultural processes generating cultural change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article builds on recent work on memory and place in the social sciences. One emphasis in the literature on ‘Western’ forms of social memory has been on official, intentional sites of commemoration, such as war memorials and monuments. Based on fieldwork in the north of England with older residents of a former coal mining village, I approach social memory from a different perspective, emphasising the work of memory and its complex interactions with place, absence, social relations and social rupture. Like Village on the Border, this research has taken place in a setting that has undergone significant socio-economic change: the closure of the South Yorkshire coalfields. The embeddedness of local knowledge in social relations emerge in both Ronnie Frankenberg's work and my own and I explore these topics here in connection with what I term a ‘three-dimensionality of memory’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract The paper addresses the problem of the conceptualisation of morality in sociology. The traditional sociological conception of morality was based upon the acceptance of a fact/value dichotomy, implying that sociology portrays the factual nature of morality, which thereby becomes equivalent to group conformity The opposition of fact and value was brought into question by trends of thought that followed from, respectively, Alfred Schutz and Ludwig Wittgenstein. The line from Schutz's ideas led towards their reformulation by Harold Garfinkel, who to large extent integrated the ‘moral’ with the ‘cognitive’. Wittgenstein's influence, through, especially Peter Winch, John W. Cook and Alfred Louch undercut the idea that sociological descriptions were themselves purely factual, rather than integrally evaluative. A third stream is represented by Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor, who adopt the idea that morality must be understood in its social and historical context, and explicitly reject the separation of fact and value in moral inquiry. The fact/value distinction is the source of chronic problems for the sociology of morality. Specifically, a sociological account of morality, that would define the correct understanding of the nature of morality – ie identify what substantive character and content is appropriate to it – is not possible. The disintegration of the fact/value dichotomy also means that the idea that the social context can itself be described independently of normative considerations is an illusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The human body has in recent years become a ‘hot’ topic in sociology, not just in empirical research but also in sociological theorizing. In the latter context, the body has been variously a resource for broadening the parameters of traditional sociological thought deriving from the nineteenth century, and for overturning that paradigm and fundamentally reorienting the assumptions and concepts of sociological thinking. Attempts to abandon the old paradigm and foster a new one through the means of thinking about bodies are many and manifold, and in this paper we trace out the intricate history of moves towards a ‘corporeal sociology’. We identify the dilemmas that have attended these developments, especially as concerns the ways in which new modes of thinking sociologically have tended to founder over the classical sociological dichotomy between social structure and social action. Through tracing out the various moves and counter-moves within this field, we identify a central contradiction that affects all contemporary sociological practice, not just that dealing with the body: an oscillation between judging the utility of conceptual tools in terms of criteria derived from the discipline of Cultural Studies, and evaluating the arguments created by those tools on the basis of the incompatible criteria of classical sociology. The paper challenges sociologists to choose one set of’criteria or the other, for sociological practice cannot be based on both such antagonistic paradigms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the article, the author presents a response to the article "The body in Sociology," by Alexandra Howson and David Inglis, published in this issue of the journal "The Sociological Review." According to the author, Howson and Inglis' paper is both timely and thought provoking. However, the author's contention is that their argument, made through five claims, is fundamentally flawed. The first two concern the emergence of sociological interest in "the body," which, according to the author, are sound. The third is that the work of M. Merleau-Ponty, which has been central to many forms of "corporeal sociology," lacks an account of social structure and is insufficiently sociological in focus to be of use to sociology. The fourth suggests that the work of Pierre Bourdieu, which might be deemed a corrective to Merleau-Ponty, cannot serve this purpose without generating a form of social structural determinism which would undermine the benefits of Merleau-Ponty's contribution. The fifth speculates on whether cultural studies might not provide a more fruitful avenue for those who wish either to avoid determinism or to rejoin Merleau-Ponty. The author's contention is with the third and fourth of these claims, though his view also necessarily has implications for the fifth.

Both the nature of philosophical and sociological discourses are undergoing a profound change, attuned to the gradual substitution of the postmodern sensibility for the cultural climate dominant during the modern age. In particular, philosophy sustained by legislative reason recedes, replaced by a philosophical style informed by interpretative reason; a movement in many respects reminiscent of the Pyrrhonian Crisis of the 16th-17th centuries. The passage from the orthodox consensus of modern sociology to a postmodern sociological strategy parallels this transformation. The present change, however, affects the very relationship between philosophy and sociology. From the search for the foundations of cognitive certainty, the outspoken domain of philosophy guided by the legislative reason, epistemological concerns move to the communicative problems of communally founded cognitive systems - the acknowledged realm of sociological investigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lawrence Scarf (Sociological Review Vol. 36, no. 1) proposes a 'sociology of culture' as the site for a comparison between Weber and Simmel's responses to 'modernity'. It is suggested that in so doing Scarf neglects important differences and similarities between Weber and Simmel's accounts of culture and selfhood. I argue that these are as much a product of specific analytical commitments as of intellectual-historical milieu. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the relationship between sociology and postmodernity. Most current concepts of postmodernity refer solely to intellectual phenomena. In a few cases they reach deeper, into the fundamental preconceptions of contemporary consciousness. Rarely, if at all, they step beyond the boundary of the spiritual, into the changing social figuration which the artistic, cultural and cognitive developments, bracketed as postmodern, may reflect. Indeed, if postmodernity means what the current concepts imply, a reform of culture, of world-perception, of the intellectual stance, then sociology faces the task of an essentially strategical adjustment. Postmodern phenomena, most commonly confined in their description to the cultural, or even merely the artistic level, can be viewed in fact as surface symptoms of a much deeper transformation of the social world, brought about by the logic of modern development, yet in a number of vital respects discontinuous with it. These deeper transformations ought to be sought in the spheres of systemic reproduction, social integration, and the structure of the life-world, as well as in the novel way in which these three spheres are linked and coordinated.

This paper presents a theoretical argument about the relationships between people and architectural space. Customarily, arguments of this type focus on the functional, the instrumental character of these relations. In so doing, they posit causal links between space and behaviour; they treat the former as active and the latter as passive facets of a determinate relationship. We suggest an alternative perspective---one that emphasizes human agency. We contend that people actively endow aspects of their physical environments with meanings; meanings on which they and others may, indeed do act. That is, we stress the symbolic as well as the functional utility of architectural space.
The explanatory potential of this approach is illustrated in two contexts. First, we examine data about the spatial distribution of residents in Homes for old people. These data are analysed with respect to the status--gender and mental designation--of residents and their customary locations in the sitting spaces and the sleeping and dining areas of the Homes. Second, we consider the allocation of space to personnel in office settings. These data are analysed with respect to the hierarchical status distinctions found in the settings and the correspondingly different meanings that status groups attribute to their spatial environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the concept of culture of poverty. There has always been some debate about whether poverty has sufficient impact upon social and cultural forms to try to encapsulate this impact by such terms as culture of poverty or sub-culture of poverty. In recent years, the culture of poverty concept has fallen into disrepute. The article briefly traces the reasons for the concept's disrepute and suggests that it can still be useful. This is the contention of this article that the culture of poverty concept was too quickly adopted, too carelessly used, too harshly criticized and too quickly abandoned. The concept of culture of poverty was introduced by Oscar Lewis, a sociologist, to refer to the way of life of the poor, he observed in Mexico, and later in Puerto Rico. Lewis has said that poverty becomes a dynamic factor which affects participation in the larger national culture and creates a subculture of its own. One can speak of the culture of the poor, for it has its own modalities and distinctive social and psychological consequences for its members.

In recent years, the idea of a 'culture of poverty' has gained widespread acceptance among social scientists. However, sociologists and social anthropologists have not subjected the postulated relationship of poverty and culture to serious examination. In this article, I discuss some or the conceptual and logical problems of the concept of a culture of poverty, as it has been put forward by Oscar Lewis. Secondly, I criticise the way this concept has been applied in a study of a Trinidadian village and thirdly, after summarising the conclusion of my own study of another Trinidadian village, I suggest how sociologists and social anthropologists engaged in community studies can avoid ethnocentricism and overemphasis on 'research problems' and thus further their understanding of the cultures and subcultures they are studying. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to present, by means of a case study, a method for the study of cultural phenomena--in particular the drama, It is not concerned with the purposes or functions of the drama in general or of particular dramas, nor is it an enquiry into the ultimate status of the arts in society. The paper is simply concerned to demonstrate how it was that one form of drama was eclipsed and superseded by an entirely new one.
should be recognised that there exist presently close limits to what a sociologist is able to say concerning such phenomena as the drama, dependent upon his particular theoretical posture. A neo-Durkheimian such as J. S. R. Goodlad[1] is, fairly predictably, concerned to demonstrate that the popular drama is a device for the explication of the social structure, the inculcation of morality, the expression of emotion at repressed items in culture (catharsis), and the reproduction and consideration of conflicts inherent in society. The Marxist, Lucien Goldmann[2], however, stresses the determinacy of the class-moment and the status of a valid work as the expression of a world view. 'Simationalisms' of considerably less subtlety than the Lukacs-Goldmann tradition exist, which usually tend toward nominalism.[3]
But whether we take the drama to be pulled into being by the weight of need the social organism has of it, or to be thrust up from the bowels of the substructure, it seems possible to discuss the drama, its form, and the relation of its form to the agencies producing it, in such a way as to be its mechanic rather than its philosopher. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Geographical mobility has the effect of breaking the control of the community over the individual. In a static society the individual is firmly embedded in the cultural tradition and institutional structure of the community. Religion in a Durkheimian sense both reflects and legitimates the socio-cultural system, and in such a society religion is to be seen as a communal activity; men participate in religious activities because these are prescribed by the community. mobile society. The geographically mobile on the other hand are removed from a community and from the social control that such a group can assert. Time is required for their integration into a new community and the 'frequent movers' may indeed never become fully integrated into a new community. With regard to belief, since there is a close relationship between belief and practices in the British socio-cultural environment, one should not be surprised to find that both dimensions are similarly related to geographical mobility.

This article examines current practices in sociology and anthropology concerned with analyzing social structures as meaningful human products, and will consider in particular the work of the phenomenologists and ethnoscientists. The human sciences are not purged of common-sense rationalities by virtue of their scientism. Models of man are to be found informing much theoretical work, and debates about appropriate assumptions still consume space in the journals. Further, as sociological models have generally neglected or assumed away common-sense situations of practical choice in everyday life, and the issue of how such situations are managed, they are all implicated in implicit reification. The search to break out of this reifying model-construction has taken two distinct directions. The first is concerned with seeking out definitive answers to the epistemologically posed 'problem of meaning', the second with focusing upon formal structures of practical actions. Clearly the notion that one can discern a realm that could be called a culture's or natives' cognitive system, is akin to the old idea that language has an existence 'out there', fundamentally independent of its myriad usages, contexts, and criteria of applicability, all of which are abused, debated and so on at some stage of the conduct of everyday life.

The article presents information on the book "Society and Culture," by Francis E. Merrill. The book is a revised edition of a well-known American introductory text on sociology. It is organized around the central themes of social interaction and culture. The book is clearly written and well organized and has useful short bibliographies.