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A systematic theory of the nature of suburban social structure within an organizational frame of reference is subjected to an empirical test. Major hypotheses derived from the general theory were supported by the analysis. A methodological contribution was achieved by combining analysis of census data with analysis of sample survey data. A chain of relationships between social structure and politics has been demonstrated through interposition of organizational theory between the regularities of mass data at the census tract level and of individual data at the sample survey level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the sociology in and of China. In the general history of social sciences it is assumed that the marriage between sociology and anthropology comes late, having been preceded by a long courtship. China does not fit this pattern. Almost as soon as social sciences were established there anthropology and sociology were intertwined, to be disentangled in a strange way when Communists arrived. To avoid a tedious recitation of evidence just one witness is called upon, a scholar whose later career in the U.S. makes his testimony underline the Chinese paradox. Writing in China in 1944 Francis L.K. Hsu has said in this paper that the word sociology is used synonymously with the term social anthropology. It is customary to date the beginning of sociology in China by the publication of Yen Fu's translation of two chapters of "The Study of Sociology" in 1898. Later a few original works were produced in Chinese and courses of instruction were introduced in universities, it was not until about the 1920s that sociological investigations of any great weight began to be made.

The article presents a paper about the Whorfian Hypothesis, which was presented at the Thirty-Fourth Annual Meeting of the National Association for Research in Science Teaching held February 24, 1961 in Chicago, Illinois. According to Benjamin Lee Whorf, a person's native tongue which is part of his culture largely shapes his picture of the universe and in manifold ways affects his behavior. The article suggests that the prevalence of animistic, anthromorphic, and teleological explanations can be traced to language.

Focuses on the nursing in other cultures. Incorporation of courses into existing curricula of nursing; Importance of pre-cultural conditioning for self-preparation of professionals to nurse in other cultures; Continuity of nursing education.

The article presents names of several books received by the 1972 issue of the journal "Rural Sociology." Names of the books include "The Human Arena: An Introduction to the Social Sciences," edited by Gilbert Abcarian and Monte Palmer, "The Netsilik Eskimo," by Asen Balikci, "Institutions in Agricultural Development," edited by Melvin G. Blase, "Cities Under Siege: An Anatomy of the Ghetto Riots, 1964-1968," edited by David Boesel and Peter H. Rossi, "Juvenile Delinquency," by Robert G. Caldwell and James A. Black, "The American Population Debate," edited by Daniel Callahan, "Reading in Evaluation Research," edited by Francis G. Caro, "The Cultural Context of Learning and Thinking: An Exploration in Experimental Anthropology," by Michael Cole, John Gay, Joseph A. Glick and Donald W. Sharp, "Resources for Social Change: Race in the United States," by James S. Coleman, "Radical Sociology," edited by J. David Colfax and Jack L. Roach, "Kinship and Class: A Midwestern Study," by Bernard Farber, and "Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order," by Erving Goffman.

The scientist is always related somehow to his subject. Where the subject is human, the relation is social. And where the subject is a complex organization, the relation is likewise complex. This article describes the experiences of a research group in relating itself to a number of military organizations, each composed of 1500-3000 men. The research was conducted over a two-year period at seven U.S. Air Force Bases in England and the U.S. The research was undertaken by the University of North Carolina under a contract with the U.S. Air Force. The problem was (1) to describe patterns of social organization, both formal and informal, of wings stationed at selected Air Force bases, and; (2) to analyze these patterns as factors in unit effectiveness and morale, relying principally on a comparative design.

The author presents his views about the uses and abuses of analogy. He feels that an analogy is a likeness in certain respects between two things which are otherwise different. The use of analogies is not only widespread but in fact intrinsic and essential to mental operations. He introduces two other disciplines in which there is a wish to benefit by analogies with other spheres of work, namely, social anthropology and linguistics. In conclusion, there is, a real distinction between, on the one hand, the experimental way of apprehending the world and its contents, and on the other hand the contrasted ways: the immediate, the intuitive and for some, the religious.

The article discusses the natural habitat of research based on the culture of an anthropologist's sense with emphasis on the application of research on American technology. The ideal of American research has been the disposable truth. Researchers in the universities tend to be ironists and they accept responsibilities under terms which are indistinguishable verbally from the language of the main culture. It is clear that well-supported research of possible use to society will furnish superior instrumentalities of observation.

This article presents a report on the operation of Auxiliary Publication Service. During the period of January 1, 1952 to November 14, 1952, 350 additional documents were accessioned, making a total now on file of 2,742. During the period, 537 copies of documents were ordered and serviced. The following journals and institutions deposited documents during the period: Adjutant Generals' Office, American Journal of Physical Anthropology, American Journal of Physiology and others. This report supplements the paper entitled "15 years of Experience with Auxiliary Publication" presented to the Board of Trustees meeting July 25, 1951 and published in American Documentation, Vol n, No.2.

To the anthropologist working in the field of comparative religious behavior, sociologist James Keene's approach must seem amazing, to say the least. One wonders whether Keene has really missed the main issue at the base of any such research, neo-converts are ipso facto far more highly engagé than people who have inherited a denomination or even those who switch within a closely patterned set of alternatives. Baha'i is a novelty not a very impressive one, to anyone who has seen a surfeit of washed out eclecticisms in different parts of the religious world, Asian, African, and western. If an occidental chooses what is an historical and stylistic novelty in his own area, he will of course take it seriously, else he wouldn't have taken to it in the first place. Keene's analysis is self-fulfilling. His long paper and his impressive tables do not bring anything that a student of the conversion syndrome would not anticipate, except perhaps for statistical precision which is all right, if you like statistics.

In this article the author likes to show that a new epistomological situation has arisen within the field of social anthropology and that one of its consequences is to afford the possibility of a new and closer form of co-operation between the social sciences and biology. This epistemological situation is characterized by two complementary aspects: on the one hand, a theoretical problem is increasingly commanding attention in the front line of research and, on the other, this problem is being tackled in a new methodological context. The problem is that of the analysis of the conditions of reproduction and of non-reproduction of social systems, taking into account the constraints imposed by their internal structures and their ecological environments. These two lines of development have taken on this importance not only by virtue of their methodological innovations, but also because they both accorded particular attention to the roles of the economy in the logic governing the adaptation of societies to their environment and in the logic of their evolution.

A crucial but underdeveloped aspect of generational analysis concerns the importance of class groupings on the development of generation-based issues, and the necessity of examining the way in which superordinate and subordinate class groupings mediate the experience of age-cohort membership. If one distinguishes the demographic (or cohort) perspective on generations from that which focuses on smaller age-based groupings that provide specific impetus for social change (generation units), one can explore the antecedents of generation unit formation among upper-middle class youth of the past decade, and examine the role of social and technological innovation in the creation of alternative generational styles. Four types of generational units among youth are delineated-radicalism, freakism, communalism, and revivalism—and the possibility of generational units among the elderly is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most recently developed methods in anthropological science has been labeled "The New Ethnography." This approach looks on culture as a cognitive organization of material phenomena, as a way of knowing and ordering reality. The task of the researcher is to unearth and understand the logical organizing principles underlying human behavior. This he does by elicting from his informants the questions they formulate about the world around them as well as the answers they give to them. This method has not been employed in the study of religions on a large scale. The few applications have been encouraging because they have brought into focus the religious experience of a particular people. They also show that greater objectivity and accuracy in the analyses of values, beliefs and ideals can be achieved and thus increase the understanding of other peoples' religious life. The new ethnography can supply us with useful guidelines for the improvement and development of the academic study of religion. It also suggests that "empathy" training for scholars in the field might be pursued with advantage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The year 1909, jubilee year of the publication of Charles Darwin's "The Origin of Species," was marked by discussions and controversies about evolution and man's place in nature. Only 38 years had passed since the appearance of his "Descent of Man," a challenging and disturbing concept in that period. On almost the last page of "The Origin of Species" Darwin predicts that light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history. That sentence in the controversial context of 1909 was the source and origin of anthropology. Being involved in social affairs, especially in social changes, the author has been very interested in history. Understanding comes through history as well as through synchronic functional studies of communities and happenings. But whether serving in such honorary positions as the foregoing; or in administering the university department, advancing anthropology and research, and providing means of publication; or working for policy changes in Aboriginal Australia and Papua-New Guinea, the theme is the same, whether the call be to advance science or human welfare, the response must be in the affirmative to the best of ability.

The Western world is witnessing the importing and sale of ever-increasing amounts of primitive art, that is, the art production of the small-scale or tribal peoples of the world who have come into contact with and under influences of all-pervasive modem civilization. However, it is becoming increasingly apparent that a majority of these so-called primitive arts are no longer, either in form or function, the traditional culturally embedded productions of these small-scale societies. Although much has been written for a hundred years or more on the subject of primitive art very little attention has been paid to arts of acculturation also known as transitional, commercial or airport art. These arts of acculturation may be defined as art production, which differs significantly from traditional expressions in form, content, function, and often medium, which also differs from the various forms of art production indigenous to ever-growing civilization. For purposes of this article the author will confine himself to a discussion of the acculturation of arts of primitive peoples, rather than including as well, arts of peasant peoples or folk-art.

Information theory currently designates a wide range of scientific activities. Starting with the familiar publications by N. Wiener and C.E. Shannon, this field of scientific research has been maturing, generalizing the original concepts, and being supplemented by new ideas beyond the frame of statistics. It is, therefore, necessary to limit the subject to the most significant applications of information theory in natural languages. It is proposed to do this by considering only the statistical theory of selective information, which is the new, widely accepted name of Shannon's mathematical theory of communication. The statistical concepts of the new discipline were established through a mathematical re-examination of signal transmission and codification. In fact, it is not surprising that scientists reasonably argue that the term information theory has been used by Shannon to denote the theory of coding. The mathematical machinery of information theory can perfectly well be defined as part of pure statistics and the theory of probability and is, therefore, not bound only to engineering interpretations.

A review of the techniques of empirical social research is called for, especially as there are wide national variations in the degree of their acceptance. The importance of collaborative trends between disciplines, of methodological controversies, of differences between generations of scientists and of scientific organization is underlined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The impact of rapid development on social structure and patterns of mobility must be explored. Yet, there is little relationship between mobility patterns and development. Recent findings show a considerable similarity of career aspirations in very divergent settings. Status concomitants linked to education may vary with the proportion and absolute size of the educated population. Educational attainments should also increase the amount of high achievement orientation. Downward mobility is a feature of emerging industrialization, but little is yet known about its effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The French survey, the first in the series, is the one for which the greatest facilities were available, owing to the contribution of the Conseil Supérieur de Ia Recherche Scientifique and of the Centre National de Ia Recherche Scientifique. Along with the Polish survey, it served as a pilot experiment. A full account of the findings, which go far beyond the scope of this article, will appear in a work to be published in 1962, which will suggest further subjects for future investigations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The new environment of man in industrialized societies is characterized by an increasingly extensive and tightly woven web of techniques, of which, industrial mechanization the whole complex of production machinery and equipment contained in workshops and offices of industrial enterprises is a part. Technical environments in differently organized societies posses, despite disparities, certain analogous features, both in the functioning of their institutions and in individual behavior patterns. It is from the sum total of cultural traits that a civilization is built up. In the present day world it is the combination of culture traits. Besides providing increasing quantities of more and more highly perfected productive machinery and goods, a technological civilization also gives rise to what is called spare time, i.e. time that is spared and, at least on the face of it, clearly differentiated from working time. Technical change brings in its wake, everywhere, spare time, all possibilities of leisure and the pursuit of happiness, of the good life as expressed in terms of the material and moral conditions of the new environment.

The article focuses on the first Italian congress on the social sciences held at Milan at the beginning of June 1958. The two subjects selected were the relations between the various social sciences and their mutual interdependence, and problems of town and country were not best calculated to provide a basis for effective work. Indeed, both themes were obviously too broad to be discussed usefully in the course of a three-day congress, but the choice was upheld in spite of the drawbacks. The first subject-relations between the various social sciences was suggested by the experience of the Italian Social Science Association. Italian culture has always prided itself on its grounding in history and on the concrete nature of its methods research into precise historical situations, as against the abstractness of the naturalistic sciences. It has also raised history to the level of philosophy, this has led, firstly, to a great confusion of ideas and secondly, to banishing the social sciences completely, with the result that, in regard to many subjects and many fields of practical research, not only in sociology but in anthropology, ethnology. One subject frequently mentioned in the congress was the underlying unity, despite certain disparities, of the social sciences and the importance of closer co-ordination between them.

A data bank of British Quaternary plant fossil records has been established in the Subdepartment of Quaternary Research, Cambridge. The bank is based on an exhaustive survey of the literature and includes both fossil pollen and macrofossil records. The information entered on each record card includes, whenever possible: grid reference of site; zone, stage and radiocarbon date of sediment; average frequency of pollen type; details of stratigraphy and archaeological correlations. Examples of how the bank can be used are given. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Investigates the overt fears of Dakota Indian children. Relationship between the method of child-training characteristics to the fears of children; Incidence of conscious fears of persons; Factors influencing the fear of supernatural beings.

The article presents news updates and announcements from the field of rural sociology. Thomas R. Ford has joined the staff of the Department of Sociology at the University of Alabama and Anthropology replacing W.H. Roney. Kurt B. Mayer, formerly of Rutgers University and the New School for Social Research, is Assistant Professor of Sociology under a new appointment at the Brown University. Sidney B. Denman has joined the staff of the Department of Agricultural Economics and Rural Sociology as Assistant Rural Sociologist, at the Clemson Agricultural College.

The article discusses some recent developments in the field of sociology in different universities and colleges of the United States. Professor John Useem of Columbia University, New York, New York recently returned from the South Pacific where he served as a member of U.S. Admiral Chester William Nimitz's staff and later as military governor of Palau. Since his release from the Navy he has been a visiting lecturer here in sociology. He spent three years in the Navy and participated in several invasions of the former Japanese mandates. Professor Joseph B. Gittler has joined the staff of Iowa State College as Associate Professor of Sociology. He will teach theory and develop the sociology of technology. Professor Solon Kimball recently joined the staff of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology and the Michigan State College Experiment Station, as Associate Professor. He will devote half time to teaching and half time to research; hence, is the first anthropologist to be employed by a land-grant college under this arrangement.

This article focuses on the differential rapid growth within social classes in social organization. The differential natural increase of the social classes which is more rapid in the lower classes and slower in the upper classes constitutes a basic phenomenon of social organization. The differential natural increase depends upon a lower birth-rate among the upper classes which is not fully compensated for by their lower death-rate. It is necessary to ascertain the causes of both of these phenomena in order to account for exceptions to the rule. Such phenomena can, in turn, be reduced to social or external factors and to biological or internal factors. The social factors depend upon the advantages of celibacy, or of a restricted family, accruing to the individual in the society. The biological factors depend upon the fact that the stocks from which the population results present evolution through internal forces. The theory of evolution through internal forces thus leads one to expect that the upper classes should become more robust and should be endowed with a lower death rate.

The article analyzes main forms of relationship between various culture traits, characteristics and complexes to outline culture-integration. In each culture complexes, individual components of the total mass of culture object and traits bear a functional relationship to one another and to the whole and the entire complex is thus functionally integrated. There are various forms of integration which differ fundamentally from one another. The numerous interrelations of various elements of culture can be reduced to four basic types. These factors are spatial or mechanical adjacency, association due to an external factor, functional or causal integration and internal or logico-meaningful unity. Spatial or mechanical adjacency means any conglomeration of cultural elements in a given area of social and physical space, with spatial or mechanical concurrence as the only bond of union. All these objects drifted together and spatial proximity is the only bond uniting them. A culture area is often nothing more than a spatial adjacency of the traits and complexes of the area in question.

The article focuses on psychological research in international relations. Six related areas of current and needed psychological research can be identified in the field of international relations: (1) the differing strategies of dealing with group conflict and the effects of these strategies upon conflict resolution--the area of social action; (2) the basis of aggression and violence in the individual personality--the individual motivational approach; (3) national imagery, the image people hold of other countries as well as of their own country--the area of cognitive structures; (4) the role of public opinion in the outbreak of war and the role of public opinion with respect to disarmament and nuclear warfare--the social process approach; (5) the psychological basis of national sovereignty and national involvement--the area of social structure, and (6) the social and psychological conditions conducive to the development of international structures--additional social structural considerations.

Despite formidable difficulties being encountered in the study of national character, substantial progress was nevertheless being made. This article deals with the current emphasis on ways in which national character is modified. This emphasis permeates the approach of each social science discipline to national character. In each discipline empirical methods have been employed to study the process of change.

The study of national character describes the observed or deduced motives and values dominant within a given society at a given time in a way little different from that in which a study in primitive law describes the legal norms and sanctions operative in a given society at a given time. This article seeks to explore the hypothesis that the national character of a society may be modified or transformed over a given period through the selection of personnel for institutions that are in constant contact with the mass of the population and in a somewhat superordinate position, in a position of some authority. The institution proposed to be examined in detail are the English police forces.

Recent work in the national character field beginning with 1940 has drawn extensively on anthropological field work for its models. This article looks into the effects of the anthropological field work models on interdisciplinary communication in the study of the national character. None of the models is appropriate without extensive modification for the study of national character. The only justification for setting psychologist and anthropologists to work on the problem of studying national character is that there is something in their disciplinary approaches that is not being supplied by the other social sciences.

The article discusses resistance to acculturation. A study of people healthy enough to be called self-actualizing revealed that they were not well adjusted. They got along with the culture in various ways, but of all of them it could be said that in a certain profound and meaningful sense they resisted acculturation and maintained a certain inner detachment from the culture in which they were immersed. On the whole the relationship of these healthy people with their much less healthy culture is a complex one. All these people fell well within the limits of apparent conventionality in choice of clothes, of language, of food, of ways of doing things in culture. And yet they were not really conventional, certainly not fashionable or smart or chic. The expressed inner attitude was that it was ordinarily of no great consequence which folkways were used, that one set of traffic rules was as good as any other set, that while they made life smoother they did not really matter enough to make a fuss about.

The article informs that within recent times the contributions of sociologist Emile Durkheim to an understanding of social structure have become increasingly apparent. Yet his service to a clearer understanding of the origin of current economic onceptualizations remains to be appreciated. Outside of his book "Division of Labor," little attention has been paid by the student of economic thought to the contribution of Durkheim to an understanding of social phenomena. The student of standard economic theory has not been one to wander far a field into what to him appear to be the byways of social inquiry. As a result economic inquiry in its underlying social preconceptions remains essentially where Adam Smith delivered it. One of Durkhbim's major contributions was his demonstration that the idea of class arises from society itself. Members of societies are arranged and graded on a basis peculiar to that particular society. Durklieim also noted that these societies project this social stratification into a classification of the universe. All things of experience are so classified. Items of the universe take on the same complexion of grades and ratings that are peculiar to the social organization. According to Durklieim there is nothing in the universe itself to suggest such a system of classification.

The Rastafari cult in Jamaica is a predominantly male-oriented politico-religious protest cult involving the Messianic worship of the Emperor Haille Salassie, and anticipating its return to Africa. This detailed anthropological study of the Rastafari movement interprets the data on the institution itself, and the associated symbol system, in sociological and psychoanalytic terms, and demonstrates how the cult is based on a self-renewing and self-justifying system of belief and action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the contributions of Frederic Ward Putnam, the curator of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University, to the development of anthropology in California. He wrote brief reports based on public lectures concerning his studies of the state's archaeology and published in the "Bulletin of the Essex Institute," "Proceedings of the Boston Society of Natural History," "The American Anthropologist," and the "University of California Publications in Archaeology and Ethnology." His role in founding of the latter journal has already been called

The article presents the significant concepts and beliefs in anthropology and biology for entering college freshmen and the implication to general scholastic aptitude of students in the U.S. The study determines the college freshmen's degree of mastery of some specific elementary and basic science concepts, the degree of prevalence of some misconceptions and unfounded beliefs hindering mastery, and the relationship between the acceptance of the correct and the rejection of the false concepts and beliefs and general intelligence.

Very broadly, the term structure serves to mark off questions about constituents of the object under study from questions about its workings. In sociology (or anthropology or history), therefore, questions about structure can be answered in as many ways as there are held to be kinds of constituents of societies. The old-fashioned answer would be to say that societies are made up of institutions, the fashionable answer would be to say that they are made up of messages. But they can equally well be held to be made up of groups, or relationships, or classes, or roles, or exchanges, or norms and sanctions, or even shared concepts and symbols. Structuralism should not be claimed to constitute a novel, coherent and comprehensive paradigm for sociological and anthropological theory. Whether viewed as a doctrine or a method, structuralism as such does not, on examination, stand for a more distinctive standpoint than a belief in the applicability of rigorous models to social behavior; and this is equally true whether it is taken to apply to societies as a whole, or only to their rituals and beliefs.

Some problems in the interpretation of alien belief systems, which were suggested to this article's author in his own fieldwork on Aladura churches among the Yoruba of Western Nigeria and by the analysis of other belief systems by social anthropologists, in ethnographies and in general surveys are considered. To 'understand' human belief and behaviour is, despite its ambiguity, the universally agreed programme of these studies. Since people are social beings it might seem adequate initially if, when confronted with other people with different social standards of what was right or true, they were able to encompass them in their mental system, to show how others had gone wrong and to preserve and validate their own beliefs. It is in this sense that convinced Communists are able, to their own satisfaction, to show how those who disagree with them are the prisoners of their own social situation, and so to understand them. Any successful ideology must be able to do this with competing belief-systems. The understanding of sociology is rather different, however. Sociology models itself on biology to the extent that just as the biologist aspires to produce a theory to account for the forms of all organisms, none excluded, so the sociologist aspires to account for all belief systems.

The article discusses sociologist Karl Mannheim's generational analysis and acculturation. Studies of American ethnic communities of the past decade have provided with new information on the descendants of immigrants of second and even third generation. Studies of American ethnic communities of the past decade have provided with new information on the descendants of immigrants of second and even third generation. These studies reveal a complexity of the acculturation process never perceived by sociologist W. Lloyd Warner whose conceptualization of this process still remains a classic in the sociological literature. A challenge to Warner's explanation of the acculturation process and a need for a new explanation is well underlined in the succinct summary of findings by sociologists Nathan Glazer and Daniel Moynihan which contradicts Warner's proposition that each subsequent generation loses its ethnic profile as it passes into the American middle classes. To account for the variability and the manifold complexity of the acculturation process it is necessary to abandon Warner and seek an explanation in Mannheim's generational analysis. Mannheim's writing on generations forms one of the foundation stones in his sociology of knowledge. This most original contribution to the problem of generations is found in his conceptual differentiation among various generational groupings.

In this article, the author presents his views on anthropological studies. He proposes the inclusion of approach of anthropology to higher cultures, notably to modern societies, in school teaching. Though social anthropologists and sociologists group themselves by their interest in special subject areas, they also divide up in their allegiance to particular schools of thought. Though the work of social anthropologists may have lifted the discussion of social institutions on to a more general plane, today it is sociology which is the aggressor subject. Anthropologists are called upon by nationalist governments and scholars alike to justify the study of disappearing cultures. The article then discusses anthropology in respect of community studies. The community studies have drawn implicitly upon a model of the perfectly integrated society, the parts of which are interdependent. Another feature of this approach is its stress upon social patterns as standardized forms of behaviour and its neglect of individual idiosyncrasies. The article then talks about the study of inter-personal relations. The shift in emphasis from institutions and groups to norms and networks brings social anthropology closer to problems and theories of the social psychologist. The article concludes that it is not possible to discuss the relations between social anthropology and sociology without imparting a false factitiousness to the two terms.

The article evaluates the notion whether behaving in the field of social anthropology and other empirically based social sciences as one would in a laboratory, looking down a microscope or watching through a one-way screen, is right. The author shows that it can lead to poorer, not better research and that effective fieldwork in part depends on realizing how the field situation differs from the natural science laboratory. Many decades ago ethnographic fieldwork did usually take place under conditions similar to those met with in natural science. Social institutions relate to the model referenced here, in two ways. First, the developmental patterns described by the model are hardly created solely and blindly out of social structure without agents and institutions furthering and working for them. Second, they represent problems that face every society, which also have institutional arrangements for handling the problem. Nowadays the picture is different. The ethnographer is usually greatly interested in the relationships existing between the community or system he is studying and the wider world.

This article is amongst one of the three articles read at the Annual Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in the year 1962. A limited number of terms which are associated with major themes of anthropological discourse, or which have been found to be necessary for concise communication between people engaged in social anthropology are considered in this article. In discussing the vocabulary of social anthropology one must begin with two key words which indicate different aspects of the subject-matter and also different approaches to it. First of such words is culture, which is the whole complex of learned behavior, the traditions and techniques and the material possessions, the language and other symbolism, of some body of people. Anthropologist Radicalize-Brown defined the structure of a society as the sum total of those interpersonal relations to which social norms apply.

Professor C. Levi-Strauss has written of an effort to revive the great French sociological tradition running from Montesquieu to Durkheim as a result of appreciation of and interest in it abroad. The question of the existence of a French tradition or school of anthropology arises at this point. The internationally recognized existence of a British school of social anthropology forgets that the existence of a school in a particular country or city is not an inevitable part of the life of an academic discipline. French academic life is still to a large extent ruled by the old tripartite division between the Facultés de lettres, de droit and de sciences. Broadly speaking, sociology and psychology depend on lettres, economics and political science on droit and anthropology on lettres and sciences. Ethnology, the history of races and societies, has been the predominating discipline in French anthropology and the term ethnologie is still used today for anthropology as a whole though the terms anthropologie culturelle and anthropologie sociale are gradually coming into general usage.

The article provides information about the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in New Delhi, India. The institute was founded with the assistance from the Asia Foundation. It undertakes and promotes research in the political and social structure of India and other developing countries. Primarily, it focuses on the historical, social, and cultural conditions under which the process of development takes place in particular countries. All of its research studies and projects are based on the specialized projects in different fields, undertaken by scholars.