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This paper deals with the sociological concept of common-sense in a strict relationship with the literary concept of estrangement. The first part makes a transdisciplinary comparison between Alfred Schütz's approach to «commonsense » and Viktor Šklovskij's notion of «estrangement», noticing an impressive series of similarities in the way in which the Austrian sociologist and the Russian literary theorist dealt with perceptive automatisms and linguistic routines of everyday life. As social agents and as subjects of knowledge, we need the taken-for-granted of common-sense as a set of orientation tools in our lifeworld. On the other hand, the distancing effect of estrangement impacts on common-sense's transformational processes as well as on cognitive purposes related to the intellectual practices of arts and sciences. The second part evaluates the consequences of this ambivalent relationship in the making of knowledge processes and scientific researches, focusing on cultural practices of linguistic recognition from a sociological perspective. The final sections include a critical reading of Carlo Ginzburg's Making Things Strange and Norbert Elias' Involving and Detachment, with the purpose of pointing out the methodological importance of reflexivity and its transformative potentialities for social knowledge as a potential use of estrangement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper sets out to establish that, besides the fundamental Schopenhauerian inspiration of the work, declared by the author himself and borne out exhaustively by academic research, the final chapters of the novel Una Vita (1892) converge with a series of studies and theoretical works brought out by doctors and sociologists at the end of the 19th century, from Enrico Morselli (1879) to Emile Durkheim (1897). What emerges clearly from the depiction of the suicidal instincts of the main character of the novel is an unconscious dynamic based on the fulfilment of a moral imperative, in which throughout is reflected and masked his self-destructive narcissism, a condition Freud was to elucidate in Mourning and Melancholia (1917). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 150th anniversary of Alessandro Manzoni's death was celebrated beyond all expectations. The President of the Republic himself wished to commemorate it with a statement emphasising the beauty and relevance of The Betrothed, a novel that should be read in adulthood, when one can most appreciate its great richness. There is, however, one difficulty: his writing suffers the effects of time. More than 200 years have passed since it was first written, a little less since its first published version and more than 180 since its definitive version, and language, like any living thing, evolves, all the more so in a period marked by so many important transformations. This is why I have participated in the Manzoni celebrations by publishing the full transcription in modern Italian. But, as a sociologist, in this work, which lasted more than five years, I first of all grasped the validity of that novel also in its sociological aspects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The object of this paper is training sociologists in «person-centered» ethnographic research, i.e. centered upon the social actor, protagonist of the cultural contexts to study. A training model is proposed, based on two cultural approaches: one being spiritual and the other psycho- logical. More precisely, we refer to the spirituality of St. Ignatius of Loyola (founder of the Society of Jesus) and the psychological approach of Carl Rogers (psychologist of the humanistic approach). The goal is to provide useful operational tools in various stages of ethnographic research, enabling researchers to: a) choose the identities through which to have the best access to the field of study, b) establish face to face interactions that are based on the respect of the social actors involved in the study, c) transform those who are called «subjects» of research, in the classic approach of participant observation, into «collaborators of the ethnographer», d) adapt quickly to sudden changes of the field that often characterize studies of «other» cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay draws a profile of Alessandro Pizzorno, one of the most prominent sociologists of postwar Europe. It focuses on the foundations of his theory which covers a broad set of sociological and political issues that go well beyond disciplines' boundaries. The author traces a genealogy of Pizzorno's theory of recognition from its inception with the early anthropological study on the mask to its more recent and complex sociological elaboration. While criticising the paradigms of rational choice Pizzorno founded his theory of recognition on a sustained dialogue with the social theories of Hegel and Hobbes. The explanatory role of sociology is therefore defined by a thorough and novel reconsideration of the relations between the theorist and the agent. From this perspective, the process of knowing is defined as a process of unveiling a foreign social reality where social life is considered through the metaphor of the stranger, expressing the foundational relation between the Self and the Other. In the author's view, «theoretical pluralism» is what best describes Alessandro Pizzorno's approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Die Stadt is traditionally declared as one of the milestone texts of urban sociology, a pioneering contribution of theory of the city. Urban sociology is recently renewing trough new attempts of theory of the city: proposals of new uses of the notion of right to the city, analyses of globalization and its urban mechanisms; furthermore under explicit reference to the Weberian notion, the role of cities as political actors in the world arena is emphasized. Weber's essay contains nevertheless many further suggestions for a theoretical and empirical development of the research on the contemporary city. We propose here an impressionist reading of this text, with the mere ambition to gather those themes and methodological indications which, accurately elaborated, could yet enrich urban sociologists practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Europe is a secularised society as it is seen and thought? In a recent book by Peter Berger, Grace Davie e Effie Fokas (2008) Religious America, Secular Europe? this question returns to another question, much more intriguing: is Europe an exception in respect of the rest of the world and, above all, in respect of United States of America, following the indicators of the religiosity? (Davie, 2002; Hervieu-Léger, 2003) Or is not this assumed exception an unconditioned reflection of a chronic ethnocentrism of the European sociologists? For Berger we are watching more and more the de-secularisation and also Europe seems to be "round the corner" and to return "to faiths". However, half of Europeans, following the more recent data of the European Values Study, affirms that they pray or meditate once a week and three fourth of them affirm to feel religious themselves. Maybe, they fail to attend mass, but they don't renounce to think religiously and they continue to feel the need a sense of their action. At last, the socio-religious geography is rapidly changing: we can linger to make referendum for the opening of a mosque or for the construction of minarets, but the religious diversity is just evident, A well-informed social theory has to confute paradigms, schemes and conceptual matrix of the past. A sociology of religion that studies only the historically prevailing religions lingering to debate if and what the society if secularised risks not to understand how the society changes, its religious diversities and what they express. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]