Informed by nearly six years of teaching experiences in high poverty schools of New York and Amsterdam, this ethnographic comparison examines the following question: Even though they often say they “know better”, why do so many teens from low income neighborhoods behave in aggressively disruptive ways that contribute to the further destruction of their own schools? This article suggests that the long dominant oppositional black culture approach to such questions related to life in distressed urban schools promotes overly mentalist and therefore superficial analyses. A more fully incarnated, collectively impassioned, relational, and processual way of thinking about the gradual socialization and immediate coping processes behind the further devastating of physically violent schools is offered. Interrogating the state and process that students in both settings referred to with terms like “coming hard”, this article brings to life the temporarily seductive yet ultimately maladaptive embodied stress responses of two male students effectively forced to sever visceral connections to themselves. Probing deep into how hardening was both habituated and situated on opposite shores of the Atlantic Ocean can help us advance our grip on—and perhaps even our attempts to deal with—the ways in which teenagers’ feelings of empathy and abilities to “think straight” are crowded out during the moments that matter most in and around our worst schools.

Deaths of sovereigns or political leaders are generally accompanied by dramatic representation and celebration of the political order over which they have presided. The circumstances of death, funeral rites and destination of the corpse (cremation, burial or public display) proclaim the value and necessity of the ideas embodied in the ruler's office. However practically deficient or scandalous any particular ruler's interpretation of that office, the activities which surround his death reaffirm the invulnerability of the transcendent order to any local or temporary individual failings. Sometimes, however, the circumstances of a sovereign's death can be appropriated by his opponents not merely to decree that death but to destroy the ideological underpinnings of the political system itself: the trials and executions of Charles i and Louis xvi were not simply the punishment of individuals for specific crimes but rather symbolic destructions of monarchy itself staged by Cromwell and the conventionnels (Walzer 1974). Such occasions have been rare. A radical political opposition can expect at most to intervene in the timing of the ruler's death, by assassination, but draw no benefit from this, since it is likely to be even more effective than peaceful death in stimulating public affirmation of the existing order.

In this special issue, we unpack law and finance entities and consider their co-construction, entanglement and interchanging relationship. Adopting a processual sociology lens, we aim to connect micro-technical devices and controversies to the macroscopic big picture of financialized capitalism. We combine analytical tools from pragmatic sociology, emphasizing how social reality and institutions are (re-)enacted through trials, with a dynamic and historicized sociology of the state and the juridical field. Four avenues illustrate our research program on the sociology of financial law. First, we focus on how this juridical space is co-produced by public and private forces, organizations and initiatives. Second, we look at how financial law displaces and endogenizes core regalian purposes traditionally associated with the state. Third, we show the forms of asymmetries that pervade law enforcement in financial cases. Fourth, we address how power intervenes in normal and exceptional times, such as financial crises. The legal and financial co-production of political regimes shapes economies and legitimate forms of social distribution.

In spite of recent criticisms the concept of ethnicity should be retained in anthropological analysis to designate more or less coherent cultural entities. These entities will be fluctuating, of course, due to their position in a larger social space where women, goods, ideas, and institutions are exchanged. Ethnicity is not, as some have argued, a colonial invention, but an incontestable anthropological fact, where identity is nurtured by otherness. Ethnicity does not of itself have a political vocation: traditional African states were more often than notpluri-ethnic. The ‘national’ phenomenon, the convergence of the State and ethnicity, is rare in pre-colonial African history. The nation-state is a modern phenomenon, the product of a more or less arbitrary manipulation by an elite having a certain number of ethnic traits; a political re-modelling of collective identity.

When the Lord told Moses that his people should love the stranger as themselves (Leviticus 19:34), who was the stranger?

‘Who does not know Turner's picture of the Golden Bough ?’ asks Sir James Frazer at the beginning of his journey into the underworld of primitive magic and superstition called The Golden Bough. And indeed who does not know Frazer's work itself, if not in the full twelve volumes edition, then in the continually reprinted abridged version, or if not by academic reference then as a popular classic entrenched in modern culture?. This paper re-examines this text according to the presence of two discrepant readings of it. The investigation of this discrepancy makes use of the idea of ‘intertextuality’ according to which meanings of a text are located within the discursive traditions to which the text responds and within which it participates actively in the production of meanings. Superficially, The Golden Bough is easily perceived to occupy a place within a web of discourses: folklore, the history of religion, classical studies, social anthropology, as well as literary criticism and even literature itself. We are concerned here with social anthropology and literature/literary criticism, in terms of their uses and treatments of the work; also, significantly with the object discourse of the work.

Von der deutschen Universität wird vielfach entweder gar nicht oder in apokalyptischer Erregung gesprochen (1). Je mehr die Kritiker von der Krise reden und schreiben, desto ungestörter scheinen die Träger der Universität und ihre Dienstherren die ihnen aufgetragenen Geschäfte zu verwalten. Für den, der in die soziale Wirklichkeit der akademischen Institutionen steuernd eingreifen will, ist offenbar weder die eine noch die andere Haltung angemessen: Wäre er der Meinung, daß die Universität in ihrer gegenwärtigen Form alle Wünsche und Aufgaben erfülle, dann bedürfte es seines Eingriffs nicht; glaubte er andererseits, der »Zusammenbruch« der deutschen Universität stünde unmittelbar bevor, dann könnte er sich allenfalls noch als Chronist dieser Katastrophe betätigen. Wenngleich tatsächlich mancher deutsche Soziologe in diesem Sinne erst mit der einbrechenden Dämmerung seinen Flug beginnen möchte, wollen wir hier versuchen, einige Aspekte der deutschen Universität im hellen Licht des Tages auf die Möglichkeit der Reform hin zu prüfen. Und weil dieses Unternehmen nachgerade zum Gemeinplatz geworden ist, soil es hier präziser darum gehen, die Punkte zu lokalisieren, an denen die Institution der deutschen Universität zum Nachteil ihrer Träger und Umwelt erstarrt bzw. für neue Entwicklungen offen ist, indem wir die Richtungen erörtern, in die die Entwicklung der Universität tatsächlich geht und eigentlich gehen sollte.

Im Mittelpunkt der folgenden Betrachtungen steht ein Begriff, der wissenschaftlich zuerst von der Psychologie, genauer : der Marktpsychologie, in Anspruch genommen worden ist, der aber darüber hinaus alle Aussicht hat, zu einer fruchtbaren Kategorie auch der Soziologie zu werden. Allerdings ist es — außer für die Zwecke der Konsumforschung — bis jetzt den Sozialwissenschaften noch nicht gelungen, die Bedeutung des Image-Begriffs klar zu umreißen. Mit Recht konnte Ralf Dahrendorf kürzlich feststellen : »The terms ‘image’ and ‘self-image’ have become rather fashionable of late, although one suspects that this fashion has not added either to their denniteness or to their usefulness« (1). Aber die wachsende Beliebtheit von Begriff en wie »soziales Image«, »soziales Weltbild«, »Gesellschaftsbild«, »Selbstverständnis« u.ä. scheint doch darauf hinzuweisen, daß hier eine Sache von wesentlicher Bedeutung gemeint ist. Allen diesen Begriffen ist gemeinsam, daß sie sich auf ein subjektives Element im gesellschaftlichen Gefüge beziehen, dem offenbar ein besonderes Gewicht beigemessen wird.

A process of Agrarian Reform offers a unique opportunity for the observation and analysis of the subjective world of a peasant population. Class conflict is often intensified, and the peasantry is brought into contact with previously remote or even unknown state institutions; some of the most fundamental assumptions of peasant culture are questioned and thus brought to the surface by new institutions, new patterns of authority and mdependence, and new economic and social relations within the peasantry itself. A variety of forms of economic organization, political relationships with landlords and with the outside world, either co-exist or emerge in rapid succession, creating a comparative framework ready-made for at least an approximation of the relationship between changes in institutions and economic structures and changes in consciousness, despite inevitable overlap and lag between different forms of consciousness.

This article discusses the room for accommodating religious diversity offered by the particular configuration of secularity existing in Denmark. Theoretically, the article adopts Jose Casanova and Mark Chaves’ proposals to separate analytically between the core elements of secularisation, and to leave open for empirical analyses the development and potential connections between these in different geographical and geo-political contexts.

From this perspective, the article discusses the conditions for accommodating religious diversity offered by the peculiar combination prevailing in Denmark of a low level of structural differentiation combined with a high level of rationalisation, generalisation, and privatisation of religion. The article argues that the legal inequality existing in Denmark between religious communities stemming from the existence of a state supported church (i.e. a low level of differentiation) matters less for the accommodation of religious diversity than do widely held and strongly embedded popular sentiments and imaginations of the public sphere as strictly secular (i.e. a high level of rationalisation, generalisation and privatisation of religion).

I shall deal in this paper with the Jagannath temple of Puri which nowadays constitutes one of the biggest remaining North Indian temple and pilgrimage centers. This town of 60,000 inhabitants still draws approximately one million pilgrims annually from all over India. Puri is situated on the seashore of the Bay of Bengal and is the greatest temple town of Orissa, an Indian province lying adjacent in a westerly direction to the province of Bengal. The present temple was constructed in the eleventh century, and the God's name, Jagannath, which translates as ‘ruler of the world’, spells out well the intent of the founders of the temple, the Ganga, the main dynasty of medieval Orissa. The name was appropriate, because the history of the Gangas shows that they dedicated their kingdom to Jagannath and they only ruled as regents or ministers on behalf of their deity. In the context of the overall Indian high tradition, Jagannath is regarded as the ninth incarnation of Vishnu. The sculpture that is actually worshipped in the temple is singular in the Indian setting. It is the only wooden idol which receives veneration, and in addition, this sculpture is, compared to the conventional blue-stone images of Vishnu, of a particularly crude, quasitotemistic style. This strange, iconographic artifact has never deterred the Oriyas from lavishing a splendid ritual in honour of their Overlord. In the course of thirteen daily main rituals, the God receives three meals, the main lunch consisting of fifty-six different dishes (the temple kitchen houses 270 hearths and ovens); he is dressed and undressed four times a day; and some 10,000 priests organized into 108 different service-groups attend to his needs and desires.

Who now reads Max Müller ? Almost nobody, I suspect. If the readers of this article know Müller's name at all, they likely encountered it in some review of the various (and now discredited) theories of myth and religion that were popular in the nineteenth century, and such reviews hardly encourage anyone to seek out Müller's original work. Typically, these reviews present only a very brief and very general summary of Müller's ‘solar mythology’, and then go on to disparage Müller's work, often in a fairly extreme language. Thus, Munz (1973: 75) calls Müller ‘the most flamboyant of all nineteenth century philologists’, Puhvel (cited in Larson, 1974: 4) calls Müller's theory of myth a ’Victorian gingerbread’, and Thompson (1946:371) even suggests that ‘any modern reader who examines it [Müller's theory] begins todoubt his own sanity’.

The controversy between Pasteur and Pouchet on spontaneous generation (1859–1864) has received great interest in the sociology of scientific knowledge. This paper shows that some statements were shifted by Pennetier's biased version (1907). The study of the correspondence between Pouchet and the members of the Academie des Sciences reveals that Pouchet was on intimate terms with many members of this institution, and also that the two commissions appointed in 1862 and 1864 did not collude with any Pastorian lobby. The discovery of Pouchet's forgery leads to a quite different estimate of this controversy. Pouchet's defeat can be explained by his repeated retreats in front of the commissions, his dogmatic faith in heterogeny, lobbying by the press, and an immoderate need for glory. Beyond the lack of replies to the rationale against heterogeny, such a transgression of the norms of scientific ethos seems to have been a source of irritation among the Academicians.

Diet regulations and food prohibitions in the Koran are to be considered as parts of a system. Apart from alcohol and drugs, all of them deal with meat consumption. It is argued that meat has a symbolic connection with exchange and sociability as well as with otherness.