It is the purpose of this paper to consider some of the features of the military officer-corps which make for its uniqueness compared to other professional groups. In spite of the lack in Norway of any militaristic tradition, the corps appears in many ways distinct from the main body of society. To a greater extent than within other occupations, there seems to be a tendency toward uniformity among the military officers on the basis of particular ideals and values. This characteristic has often been related to the supposed social composition of the group. There has been a widely shared assumption that military officers have been recruited from a rather limited milieu, and particularly, that the group has been highly self-recruited. As far as the Norwegian Army officers are concerned, the data about their social background do not support this view. It seems relevant, therefore, to relate the singularity of the group to its educational aspects. Before entering on the main theme of this paper, however, some comment on the social composition might be appropriate.

The Polish Peasant in Europe and America is one of the foundational works of American and world sociology, famous for its innovative qualitative methodology. Its authors proposed new theoretical ideas, including a concept of social causality and a new theory of personality combining a biologistic concept of temperament with a culturalist concept of character. Interpreters of the book still disagree about the extent of each author’s actual contribution to the work and about its scientific status in light of modern sociological theories. This article claims that to understand the book one has to take into account the previous intellectual trajectories of both authors. As a theoretical dialogue between representatives of two contrary approaches, the work may serve as an alternative to the supposed theoretical “convergence” offered two decades later by Talcott Parsons.

Scholarship on the modern state’s symbolic and social infrastructural power typically correlates high state capacity to practices of standardization, homogenization, and integration. Less attention has focused on how this power can be directed towards differentiation and heterogenization, as amply demonstrated in the case of empire. This article develops a framework for analyzing how infrastructural power is employed by modern colonial states and how it impacts society. It argues that formal legitimization structures defined for colonial subunits influence legibility practices enacted within them—what is named and counted and how it is named and counted—and that these legitimization-legibility linkages are significant because they politicize particular boundaries of collective identity in lasting ways within the subjugated society. This model is used to analyze variation within French North Africa between a colony-type linkage in Algeria and a protectorate-type linkage in Morocco, and account for the divergent identity politics and claims-making strategies that emerged within these units. The conclusion considers the broader comparative implications of legitimization-legibility combinations in formerly colonized political units.

Le concept de «communauté» fait partie de ces notions constamment invoquées et tenues pour évidentes mais qui ne réfèrent à aucune signification en particulier tout autant qu'elles renvoient aux multiples sens que les individus et les groupes projettent sur elles. C'est là ce qui attend sans doute les notions qui désignent à la fois une réalité définie et une valeur, un idéal jamais accomplis. La notion de démocratie fait exemplairement partie, au XIXe siècle, de cette catégorie de notions affluentes.

The Uniform Civil Code which, as written in the 1950 Constitution of the Indian Union, should be enacted, still does not (and will probably never) exist. This paper examines the tactics used by the opponents in the Constituent and Legislative Assembly (1946-1951) who succeeded to wreck a proposed “modernisation” of the Hindu Personnal Law, which could have been a first step towards that Uniform Code. In a very clever way, they never claimed to defend the dharma treatises which had codified and legitimated a Brahmanical Social Order for centuries, but only wanted to maintain the multiplicity and diversity of customs and usages of the Hindu people.

This study advances an original theoretical framework to understand the deployment of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in political contention. It argues that we should not look only at the use of ICTs in contention, as technologies are not “born” to be used in and for political activism. Rather, people appropriate and manoeuvre technologies—some but not others—for such purposes, in specific contexts. This study proposes a relational understanding of ICT uses in contention, taking into account their technicalities and their sociality, as well as the transformation and actualisation that occurs between them. It suggests that an investigation necessitates the perception of communication technologies as a repertoire of contention on the basis of affordances that structure the possibilities of the use of technology. The study further presents an application of the framework in cases of protests in mainland China. Through fieldwork and in-depth interviews, this study indicates that the choice of (certain functions of) mobile phones as protest repertoire derives from a confluence of (a) a given social group’s habitus of media use that manifests particular affordances, and (b) the learned experience of the contested means of the past in official mass communication. It concludes that what people do and do not do with ICTs in political contention is significantly shaped by affordances and habitus, thereby revealing the dynamics behind repertoire selection and constraint.

« L'Amérique, il est vrai, découverte et conquise, la route par mer frayée aux Indes et aux Moluques sont des prodiges de courage et de succès qui appartiennent sans contestation aux Espagnols et aux Portugais ». L'intrépide Magellan, « rien ne put lui dérober la gloire d'avoir le premier fait le tour du globe. Encouragés par son exemple, les navigateurs anglais et hollandais trouvèrent de nouvelles terres et enrichirent l'Europe en l'éclairant ». C'est ainsi qu'en 1771 Bougainville, qui accomplit un des plus importants voyages scientifiques autour du monde, caractérisait l'œuvre des découvertes des XVe et XVIe siècles, à une époque où, comme l'écrit son compagnon de voyage, le prince de Nassau, « l'esprit des découvertes se ranime en Europe, les différents ouvrages qui se répandent dans le public y rappellent l'attention des particuliers. Ces nouvelles entreprises vont faire une mémorable époque dans le monde et nous parviendrons enfin à l'entière connaissance du globe. Ces nouveaux Colomb et Cortez ont des champs de gloire aussi vastes à parcourir, mais c'est le siècle de l'humanité, et il faut du moins espérer que les Européens ne veulent plus faire connaissance avec leurs frères de l'hémisphère austral que pour leur enseigner la vérité et les rendre heureux par la vertu ».

Deputy sheriffs make arrests for many reasons: to solve problems, generate statistics, rectify perceived moral wrongs, or enforce compliance with the law. Many studies of discretion in arrests have looked at situational and structural determinants of the decision to arrest. Citizen demeanor, race, gender, and the nature of the crime have all been examined. Turning from these approaches, this study considers the institution of policing, focusing on the relations among deputies to try and explain who makes an arrest, especially when more than one deputy is on scene. Drawing from data collected during a year and a half of ethnographic research as a deputy sheriff in a rural California county, we show that arrests are a form of symbolic capital. Arrests are given, taken, and fought for as deputies struggle to work with each other and compete for prestige and positions within the Sheriff’s Office. Exchanged, gifted, and stolen as a valuable good, an arrest has the power to solidify existing relationships as well as foster divisions. As such, the arrest is a vehicle of social meaning and bonding, and a valued social commodity.

This essay explores the status of moral accounting in relation to contingent misfortune. It does so by comparing the oracular procedures of the Azande of Center Africa to a modern pseudo-psychotherapeutic interaction. Though the first is in principle mystical and the second rational, both forms of inquiry are shown to display a certain indifference to contradiction. The reason for this indifference rests with the consideration that both focus on practical rather than theoretical questions. Nevertheless, in the pseudo-psychotherapcutic interaction the presumption of theory qua theory makes a difference. That presumption comports a principle of epistemological certainty, removing the ground from moral accounting while privileging naturalistic explanation. In this light, contrary to received anthropological opinion, it is the selfcraft of much psychotherapy rather than the witchcraft of the Azande that must count as a closed system.

It is generally held that traditional Indian society was based on the regime of caste and was to that extent a peculiarly closed system. Much of the contemporary discussion of Indian society, including the analysis of social change, uses the caste system as the basic frame of reference (1). I shall try to argue that this is inadequate and that, in order to gain a realistic picture of what is happening in India today, other factors such as class and power have to be considered as independent variables.

In recent years status inconsistency theory and research has come under attack for at least three major reasons:

(a) It has been shown that the effects of status inconsistency, if there are any (cf. under (c)), cannot be detected by following the prevailing procedures of analysis, i.e. tabular analysis (camparisons-of-sums method; cf. Lenski 1954 (1)) or linear equation models (regression approach). By now the criticism in the works of Blalock (1966a, 1966b, 1967a, 1967b, 1967c), Mitchell (1964) and Hyman (1966) is well-known (2).

Given equal income incentives, why does migration from poor countries to rich countries vary ? I apply Boudon's logic of relative frustration and Elster's model of interactions among desire, opportunity and action to interpret sociological findings on the self-sustaining nature of the migration process. I conclude that migration does not occur in the absence of initial opportunity, but that once begun tbe migration process itself increases, both the opportunity and the desire to migrate.

Le mot ethnie a un passé équivoque dans la langue française. Vacher de Lapouge est le premier à l'utiliser en 1896 pour désigner de prétendues «races» distinctes, notion dont la biologie des populations a fait justice. Le terme ne s'appliquait pas seulement aux «primitifs»; il contribua à hérisser des barrières entre les «races» dites inférieures et les «races» dites supérieures. En 1935, G. Montandon, qui se fera l'apôtre d'une certaine conception nazie de l'homme, consacre un livre à «l'ethnie française». Les administrateurs coloniaux utiliseront, quant à eux, le terme ethnie comme substitut de «tribu» ou «peuplade» avec souvent la conviction, fallacieuse, que des caractères anatomiques particuliers entrent dans les particularités du groupe ainsi qualifié. Mais Franz Boas, le fondateur de l'anthropologie culturelle aux États-Unis, réagit avec vigueur. II déclare fermement dès 1932 : « Les résultats des matériaux extensifs amassés au cours des cinquante dernières années ne justifient pas l'hypothèse d'une quelconque relation entre types biologiques et forme de culture » (Boas, 1932, cité par Condominas, 1980, p. 89). Cette conviction sera largement partagée par la majorité des ethnologues, sauf en Allemagne. Dérivé du grec ethnos (peuple) le terme ethnie entre dans le vocabulaire scientifique avec une connotation exclusivement culturelle. Mais ce concept se voit attaqué depuis une dizaine d'années sur le terrain même de l'ethnologie où il s'est developpé. Quelques chercheurs français s'ingénient à démontrer que leurs prédécesseurs, travaillant principalement en Afrique, ont eu le tort de donner consistance à de fausses entités.

Durkheim's manner of thought and his style of expression have certain peculiar features the recognition of which can only clarify the interpretation of his ideas. First, there are certain concepts crucial to the understanding of his thought which need to be elucidated, either because they are ambiguous or because they are unfamiliar to a modern reader. Second, underlying these concepts, there are a number of sharp dichotomies, or “binary oppositions”, on which his thought rests, which need to be made explicit and related to one another. Third, there are a number of characteristic, and often bad, arguments, which likewise need to be brought to the surface and identified. And finally, Durkheim's style often tends to caricature his thought. He often expressed his ideas in an extreme or figurative manner, which distorted their meaning and concealed their significance: hence the relation between his style and his thought must be considered. It is to these matters that this article is devoted.

Toutes les sociétés ont eu une idée plus ou moins précise de ce qu'elles étaient et de ce qu'elles voulaient être. Les sociétés modernes sont les premieres qui pretendent acquérir d'elles-meêmes une connaissance scientifique. La sociologie a vocation d'être la conscience de sociétés assez ambitieuses ou imprudentes pour s'offrir a l'observation détachée et a, la curiosité sans retenue.