Anthropologists customarily use the term ‘tribe’ to designate two realms of different yet connected facts. On the one hand, nearly all of them make use of it to distinguish one type of society among many, one specific mode of social organization which they compare to others—’bands,’ ‘States,’ etc. There is, however, a lack of unanimity on this point, an outcome of the imprecision, the haziness of the criteria selected to define and to isolate these various types of society. But the discord is deeper yet with respect to the second use of the term ‘tribe,’ when it is used to designate a stage in the evolution of human society.

The Arabic language has a term, “musta'rib” with a long and varied history. In the genealogical schemes of pre-Islamic antiquity, it indicated those tribes in the Peninsula (the northerners, according to the most wide-spread opinion; but there were those who instead, turning the relationship upside-down, designated southerners in this way), who, as opposed to the pure autocthomic Arabs (al-’Arab al-’âriba) were “assimilated” or “assimilating” to the Arabs, in other words “secondary Arabs” or “Arabized.” Then, in Moslem Spain, as is known, the term served to designate that part of the Iberian population which remained Christian in religion, but culturally was Arabic, that is “Mozarab.” And in modern linguistic usage, mustarib along with mustashriq indicate the Orientalist, and more precisely, the Western Arabist: he who takes as object of his studies the Arabs, and in some way tries to become closer and even assimilated to them (according to the prevailing semantic value of the prefix of the tenth verbal form ista-, to which in fact the original Arabic participle refers). Common to all the evolution of the term then is the meaning of one who is not really and originally an Arab, but who wants to become one and be considered one, whether by pretending Arab blood or by assimilating Arab culture.

Romanticism fabricated a poet of vast oracular powers largely from superstitious notions and suspicious philosophies which the Renaissance had gathered up somewhat by chance with the rational part of the Graeco-Roman legacy. The model was surely an imposture and, historically considered, a scandal. Seer, sage, prophet, mage—the pretensions varied, but all were titles to transcendent disclosure in times increasingly committed, at least officially, to a unified scientific view. That the poet could be confirmed to any degree in this anachronistic role was probably owing to the circumstance that the general cultural reflex following the Enlightenment reawakened widespread interest in those dark and excluded passages of the human spirit which mystics and seers were thought to frequent. Poets who pretended to voyance benefited from the muffled but persistent rumor of profound mysteries accessible to the high priests of Kabbala and the Corpus Hermeticum, to Illuminists, Rosicrucians, and Neopythagoreans. Western Europe had never ceased to acknowledge, even in such unlikely periods as the later Middle Ages, the aboriginal priestly and prophetic functions of the poet; but romanticism contrived—out of occultism and neoplatonism, antirationalism and anticlassicism—such a warrant for unabashed oracular saying as Antiquity had scarcely imagined. While perhaps none of the romantic was actually prepared to grant the poet his ancient powers in full measure, few seemed inclined to diminish the stature of the heroic abstraction, who symbolically contested the claims of naturalism and positivism.

Utopian literature is fascinating but impossible to summarize. Of course it is easy to see where its charm lies. We enjoy the “play” aspect of the Utopian convention, the common certainty— essential to both the author's intentions and the reader's pleasure—that we are dealing with a supposition described as a fact. In a Utopian text, we enjoy the power we have of imagining, and especially formulating, another overall framework for human experience—a framework which is specifically defined as being different and described as if it had concrete existence. This is the underlying attraction of a mode of expression which permits the author to talk of serious things in the protected and detached manner permitted by play. Why, then, are summaries of utopias so disappointing? Why does a re-transmitted utopia convey only the idea of an insipid world and an arbitrary creation? Why is it so hard to write about works of this type?

The genesis of civilization has been an enigma for the historian and the social scientist. How does it happen that the homogenous stream of a tribal culture differentiates into the elite and folk traditions? The duality of cultural tradition in civilised societies is widely recognized and is designated by such paired terms as the classical and the lay, the aristocratic and the common, and the great and the little tradition of culture. Apart from architechtonic formulations of the philosophers of history and the various metaphysical and mythological models that we have inherited, this question has to be approached from an empiric angle on the basts of cultural data about ancient civilizations available to us.

It is certainly not easy to decide whether Moslems are right or wrong to take as a point of departure for an analysis of their culture the works of “Orientalists.” As it happens, “Orientalists” are Westerners, and can be defined by foreigners as those whose topic of research is Islam.

We witness today a widespread concern about the relation between man and nature: we have, it seems, reached a limit in the exploitation of the resources of the earth; if we continue to treat nature merely as our inexhaustible source of supplies, the balance between man and nature might be destroyed forever.

What are the historical roots of the ecological crisis? There seems much to say for the thesis that ultimately the Western, more specifically the Christian assumption that man is the appointed ruler of the world, is responsible for our ruthless attitude toward nature. Is not man admonished in the biblical account of creation to rule the earth? The story of Genesis suggests that, from the moment Western Civilization was born, an awareness of the antagonism between man and nature has existed; it underlines the prevalent opinion that nature, whether it be the outside nature of wild seas, rugged mountains, marshes, jungles, or whether it be the instinctual nature inside of us, has to be conquered by man. It is, after all, the function of civilization to protect man against the violence of outside nature and against the untamed nature inside of ourselves and our fellowmen. Civilization emerges, we feel, only where hostile nature has been defeated and made serviceable to our goals. It might be interesting in this context to recall some earlier Western attitudes toward nature.

The wonder with which philosophy begins is first and foremost the cosmic wonder, the wonder which Nature forces on us in its cosmic complexion and in its macroscopic expanse. No doubt the mystery of the starry heavens has compelled man's attention earlier than the riddle of the unfathomable deep surging within. The history of the philosophical inquiry makes it abundantly clear that the reflection on self has no psychological or historical priority. But once philosophic consciousness awakens to the dichotomy of the self and the not-self the accent of philosophic reflection shifts constantly from one sphere to another. The attempt to assimilate the world of Nature to the world of psychic privacy is met with a parallel movement which seeks to reduce the world as experienced from within into the categories of the world as given without. It was the genious of Plato that introduced the concept of a third realm which belongs neither to Nature nor to psychic reality, a world of pure transcendental universals which he called Ideas. But neither the beginnings of early classical European thought nor of Oriental speculation have shown any concern for historical reality. It is true that the concept of perpetual flux dominated the classical antiquity very early but there is a long way from the idea of interminable change to the idea of historical process.

It is common knowledge that the Jews have shown an unusually persistent emotional attachment to their fatherland, notably when they were exiled and dispersed. The sentiment has found many expressions throughout Jewish history and is too well known to require repeated documentation, but a few examples may remind us of its ardent nature.

“By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yes, we wept, when we remembered Zion,” opens a well-known Psalm (137). And the weeping does not meander into a passive nostalgia, but leads to an active determination expressed in the oath: “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.” When the moment of return from Babylon arrives, the experience transcends the confines of reality: “When the Lord turned again the captivity of Zion, we were like them that dream.” (Psalm 126).

In the contemporary Moslem-Arab societies, does the function of the intellectual recall that of the classic scholar, at once counsellor of the great people, honor of the city or of the village, and regulator, through the culture, through judicial consultation or through the education, of the social life? Any analogy too greatly stressed would be hazardous. After having sketched the constitutive movement of the Moslem civilization and its present state, we may then attempt to appraise the situation of the intellectual between the power and the cultural system.

Atoms and space. Clinamen. Individual existence. Isotachy. The contemporary epilogue to Epicurus's physics. The problem of death and fear of death in Epicurus and Einstein. The gods of Epicurus and Einstein's God.

In 1923 a new edition of Lucretius's De rerum natura was published in Germany. The second volume—a translation of the poem into German—was prefaced by Einstein. In it one reads that “Lucretius's book will enchant anyone who is not yet completely dominated by the spirit of our time, and who feels able to take a step back to take stock of the present age, and judge our contemporaries' spiritual attainments.”

Behaviorist theories of language acquisition are the most prominent among current empiricist theories of language. But the inherent weaknesses of behaviorism—whether or not applied to language acquisition or linguistic meaning or the like—do not as such call into question the adequacy of the empiricist conception of language. The issue is central to contemporary speculation about the nature of linguistic competence and the infant's acquisition of language. Empiricism has, in fact, been vigorously challenged in the most sustained way, in a variety of publications, by Noam Chomsky. “From a formal point of view,” Chomsky holds,

The social role, and consequently the social status, of writers has been recently undergoing interesting transformations. They are not yet always taken into account in the sociology of literature, even though that role (or, strictly speaking, roles) in the second half of the 20th century in many respects differs markedly from that in the first half of this century, or, to adopt a conventional demarcation line, before World War II. These transformations have not yet fully crystallized, but it is legitimate to think that we are witnessing processes whose consequences will be better seen in the next century. On the other hand, prior to World War

II the role of writers did not in fact differ so much from that which they performed in the 19th century, if we disregard certain specifically Polish aspects of the problem, which are not to be discussed here in greater detail. Let it be mentioned only that those specific aspects were fairly numerous: the traditions of the old-style intelligentsia as a social stratum; the role of writers as “the conscience of the nation” in the period when Poland was partitioned by the three great powers; the economic and technological backwardness of Poland in the 19th and in the first half of the 20th century; still now restricted development of mass media and mass culture.

Among the many subjects that come within the range of social anthropology, the one dealt with in this article may at first glance seem the remotest from the border area between biology and social anthropology, the least apt “to reveal a basic problem of bio-anthropology.” Is not the realm of myth that of those incorporeal beings called gods? A realm where the laws of matter and of life are abolished? The one in which thought takes seemingly unrestricted flight and shows itself capable of begetting worlds, monsters, stories without visible root in reality?

But the same might be said about dreams; and the detour via dreams may bring us a glimpse of an unexpected shortcut. It is now known that sleep devoid of dreams is not restorative; if one is waked at the outset of the phase in which dreaming occurs, intolerance in both animals and humans is very rapid, and experiments upon animals have shown that this deprivation, if prolonged, can be a cause of death. Hence from the standpoint of survival, dreaming is quite as necessary as sleeping. Now, certain characteristics of myths, characteristics through which they are related to dreams, lead us to wonder whether they are not indispensable to the smooth functioning of waking thought as are dreams with respect to sleep.

By posing the problem of the relation between the degradation of the environment and the market economy, one presupposes a preliminary answer to a more general question: As a result of his “instincts,” is man, by necessity, predatory upon the natural order which surrounds him? If the answer to this question were affirmative, the current massacre of the environment would, at best, represent no more than an acceleration of mechanisms which are as old as the emergence of man, and, if the truth be told, any hope of the relationship between man and nature finding a new balance would be in vain. It is not very likely, however, that the answer would be a positive one. For one fundamental reason, nature is to a large extent a creation of man which has constantly modified itself throughout the history of man, ever since the invention of fire. What we call ‘nature’ is a structured, mobile complex of cycles which relate to our mineral environment and our living environment and which enable man to survive on earth; and it is impossible to ignore the action of man himself within these cycles.

When one considers the extent and scientific and technical character of the work done in the field of communication in the past two or three decades, with a view to evolving a methodology of the social sciences there, one is struck by the impressive number and the no-less considerable diversity of factors which figure in this young, all-affecting discipline, recently freed from the hold of philosophy. Such is the case in all the social sciences and that, moreover, is why Lazarsfeld rightly contends that in sociological matters it is a good idea to multiply the “partial inquiries” in order, one day, to combine them into one all-inclusive sociology.

In recent years many essays have been made public and various opinions have been advanced on youth. I would like to conceive one of the salient characteristics in the consciousness and the behavior pattern of today's youth as “play-orientedness” and center my discussion on that particular inclination. “Play-orientedness” here is not intended to mean merely “activeness in sports and hobbies,” nor is it synonymous with “pleasure-orientedness.” It is a broader term and is rather close in meaning to what is commonly called “the spirit of play.” We might perhaps define it as “play as a way of life,” or an inclination to introduce elements of “play” into one's daily life and make his actual life “play-like.”

The position of classical studies in our time is paradoxical in several respects. When at the end of the so-called Middle Ages a great new interest in ancient Greek literature was aroused by Greek fugitives from the East, spreading from Italy to other countries of Western Europe, the study of the great Greek authors was beset with considerable difficulties. All the manuscripts which the Greek fugitives brought with them or which had been transferred to the West at an earlier time and were now rediscovered, were to some extent corrupted by copyists’ mistakes and/or mechanical corruptions, and even where they were not corrupted their content was in many places not easy to understand because the historical background for the understanding was lacking. In some cases doubts arose concerning the authenticity of works ‘attributed to certain authors. To meet these needs, the methods of textual criticism were developed by the humanists of the Renaissance and later perfected and supplemented by various kinds of historical criticism after a second revival of interest in classical antiquity, which was promoted by Winckelmann in the 18th century.

What we know today of Campanella, largely thanks to the work of Italian researchers (L. Firpo, R. Amerio, A. Corsaro, G. di Napoli, and others), is important for our understanding of the intellectual situation that arose after the decline of the Renaissance—that situation that is best perceived and expressed in Hamlet. Of course, any historico-cultural collision is unique; but the logic of its development may contain elements of repetition. In connection with Campanula's instructive spiritual experience, I shall try to touch on the somewhat broader problem that arises whenever a person who aims to change his society comes into conflict with the dominant institutional and ideological forces of that society, and yet thinks and acts within the limits set by these very forces.

The “modern” only begins to manifest itself when, in answer to the question, What is distinctively human?, Romanticism replies not by referring to man's eternal capacity for reason and universal rationality, but, ‘instead, to his creative originality, to his individuated capacity to feel and to dream uniquely. The modern begins to emerge when man is seen, not merely as a creature that can discover the world, but also as one who can create new meanings and values, and can thus change himself and fundamentally transform his world, rather than unearth, recover, or “mirror” an essentially unchanging world order.