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Life story methods in Europe commonly belong to the field of biographical sociology. This paper points out that biographical sociology is missing from American sociology and describes in-depth two well-known methods in this field in Europe, the narrative interview and objective hermeneutics. The absence of biographical sociology from U.S. sociology should be remedied, it is argued, for the following reasons: First, an analysis of biographical patterns could counteract the heavy emphasis on social structure in American sociology and enrich certain subfields within it. For example, some of the concepts used in European biographical sociology, such as the concept of the 'trajectory' can be related to conceptions of agency set forth by American and British sociologists and thus enrich sociology overall. Second, biographical sociology can help counteract the heavy orientation towards quantitative research in American sociology without falling into the pitfalls of purely interpretive methodologies. And third, biographical sociology can significantly enrich the still missing link between culture and cognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The deep methodological and substantive fragmentation of the social sciences has led to the development of theories that can think larger social wholes only at the cost of disfiguring reductionism. Any effort at creating new synthesizing frameworks must be able to integrate advances made in a wide variety of subfields, and therefore needs to reconsider the ontology of social life as a unifying basis. Given post-structuralist critiques, this has to happen in a critical fashion. Due to its anti-reductionist stance, the social hermeneutics of Vico and Herder offers a good starting point for an ontological re-orientation. However, since their work has also inspired highly problematic essentializations of culture/people as the principal way to connect everyday interaction and large-scale phenomena, a move that has been criticized for very good reasons, their social hermeneutics must be adjusted to the needs of our time. This paper proposes a renewed social hermeneutics that analyzes social life as a dense thicket of action-reaction effect flows mediated by discursive, emotive and sensory understandings. Wherever action-reaction effect flows are replicated in self-similar forms, institutions emerge. Since replication is contingent on stabilized understandings the question arises how understand ing, a process, can come to be objectified as a transposable form. The answer provided here is that repeated validations in action, in comparison with other persons, and in mnemonic invocations pick out and actualize understandings as interpretative devices. But this means that the work of stabilization is deferred to another level, because stabilized understandings require enduring validation, which can only issue from institutionalized social environments. The enduring features of social life must therefore be thought of as the result of a process of institutiosis, in which institutionalized forms buttress each other. Features of institutiosis are identified, which lead to more or less stable arrangements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a historical and biographical perspective, this paper examines the structural elements and cultural signs of contemporary social events and problems in Turkey in order to understand their basic features. Hermeneutics is used in order to understand contemporary Turkey by way of its historical background and prominent biographies. Two basic epic texts were interpreted using Gadamarian hermeneutics with the help of key concepts such as gaza1 and gaza cult. Semiotics is used to examine key concepts as binary opposites. Dialectics is used to understand these concepts as the unity of binary opposites coexisting at the same time and place. It is concluded that the contemporary cultural values and biographies explored are linked to their historical past and Islam seems to be more influential on hybrid identities than on ethnic status. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]