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This special issue of the journal "Symbolic Interaction" focuses on theory and method in symbolic interactionism. Quality papers were received from several countries and they have provided theoretical commentary and technical information with which to solve methodological problems. In some cases, the authors of the papers were asked to reduce the length of their articles significantly so that eleven articles were included. These articles have been organized under various issues that are common to all social research but are of special interest to interactionists.

This paper conceptualizes eroticism as emotional experience. I use the Renaissance Faire to illustrate the construction of asexual eroticism along three dimensions: the carnal experience of Faire, its focus on physicality, and intimations of increased interpersonal access. This approach forefronts the complexity of eroticism and situates the erotic squarely in the sociology of emotion, providing a model for understanding a range of emotional, embodied, and nonsexual charges as erotic. More broadly, the analysis seeks to contribute to the study of all emotion as embodied. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to develop a new concept of transverse interaction within an interactionist framework. Transverse interaction is the interaction of living things with the natural environment. This article contends that human-environment interaction is necessarily symbolic, a product of social interaction, and that new concepts are not necessary to capture that phenomenon. Natural meaning may be a contradiction in terms. Professor Weigert's paper on transverse interaction lies in the personal struggle so dramatically illustrated in his argument. His is the dilemma of a scholar who has emphasized the symbolic and constructed aspects of reality who must now come to terms with obdurate reality. He is to be commended for attempting the task. Weigert is a symbolic interactionist pleading for focus on the relationship between humans and their nonhuman environment. The view that humans have transcended the limits of biology through technology is naive and shortsighted. The extremelty limited time that humans have been using advanced technology has resulted in disturbing, perhaps catastrophic, change to every aspect of the natural environment. As human beings, we are still part of the natural environment and our interaction with that environment will our future or determine whether we have any future at all.