Although national self-determination emerged as an international legal norm with the formation of the United Nations (UN) in 1945, its implementation continued to be resisted by European colonial powers for decades after. This raises the following question: how was European colonial rule challenged at the UN? This article contends that existing accounts of decolonization have not fully theorized the processes through which colonialism was contested at the UN. It fills this gap by demonstrating the critical role of argumentation, narrativization and discursive struggles through deploying the crucial “Question of Algeria” that was debated between 1955 and 1961. It demonstrates that the Algerian question yielded two opposing discourses—an anticolonial internationalist discourse and a metrocentric civilizational discourse—with both drawing on distinct ideas about human rights and development. The analysis explains the eventual triumph of the former as states increasingly rallied behind the Algerian cause.

This research aims to describe the process of integration of Luxembourg’s Portuguese. To achieve this, we first conduct a summary review of the sociological literature about integration. Once the conceptual framework established, we measure and link the two essential aspects of integration: the socio-economic integration and the acculturation. To complete, we confront the Portuguese population resident of Luxembourg to those residing in Portugal in order to highlight the degree of acculturation of Portuguese immigrants and their descendants with the Luxembourg society. This research has required the use of data from the Luxembourg European Values Study (EVS) of 2008 as we measure acculturation from questions about the values of individuals. We prove that compared with their parents, the descendants of Portuguese immigrants, regarding their native social environment, are experiencing upward social mobility associated with the development of an “hybrid” cultural identity, composed of values both of the country of birth of their parents and of Luxembourg.

Current interpretations of James Frazer's work overestimate the importance of the three stages theory (Magic-Religion-Science) and of individual reflection in the philosopbes sauvages. The Golden Bough is more about the idea of a universal and spontaneous psychological atmosphere, beyond the distinction between Religion and Magic. Frazer prefers to characterise this atmosphere through the explicit content of rites and beliefs, often neglected by twentieth century religious anthropology.

This article examines the well known practice in pre-colonial Africa of the pawning of humans. This practice, also found in Asia, should be distinguished from slavery, despite its similar characteristics. The author enumerates relevant principles and establishes concrete boundaries. A number of misunderstandings are thus elucidated and the concept is clearly explained.

Changes in labour market conditions over the last ten years have led to renewed speculation about the future of collectivist attitudes. In Britain, the most striking change has been the sharp rise in the level of unemployment which doubled between 1979 and 1981. However, many commentators have also suggested that profound changes are occurring in the character of employment, in particular through the rise of more precarious types of work. On one estimate, fully a third of British employees could now be considered part of the ‘flexible’ workforce (Hakim 1987). Overall, there has been an increase in the level of insecurity and a marked accentuation of financial inequality.

This essay analyzes the relationship between two ideas central to the social sciences and religion: charisma and objectivity. My goal is to interpret a longstanding theoretical dispute regarding objectivity in the social sciences by referring to sectarian charisma and its challenge to the legitimacy of ecclesiastical authority. In illuminating a religious pattern revealed in the confrontation between social science theory and political philosophy, I suggest that objectivity represents a form of ‘secular’ charisma. I describe the cross-cutting relationship between charisma and objectivity and examine both the religious implications of objectivity and the epistemological implications of charismatic phenomena.

Despite Durkheim's powerful argument that suicide is caused by social forces only (Durkheim 1966), recent studies have viewed suicide as resulting from a combination of psychological and environmental factors, as springing from the suicide's personality conjoined with his immediate social setting. ‘Suicide is both a personal and a social act’ (Reynolds and Farberow 1976: 33). Social forces alone cannot explain why only a few people commit suicide nor can psychological factors by themselves provide the necessary set of conditions for individual suicides. Certain syndromes are widespread: illness, loneliness, bereavement, shame lead to suicide in many parts of the world. But each society's structure and institutions determine the environmental setting and constellations involved in suicide. How does the society regard illness? Who will be lonely? In what relationships is loss most sharply felt? What constitutes shame? Social forces define the various trouble spots and categories and groups of people most at risk in the society. Their interplay with psychological factors outlines who will commit suicide.

Nul ne saurait prétendre qu'il a pris connaissance de toute la litterature publiée aux États-Unis depuis 1945 sur les problèmes stratégiques, encore moins de la littérature mondiale qui, presque toujours dépendante de la littérature américaine, n'en présente pas moins, dans plusieurs pays, une certaine originalité (1). En lisant la littérature américaine, je me suis toujours préoccupé du contenu, des analyses et des conclusions, jamais de Phistoire proprement dite, c'est-à-dire de l'origine de chaque idée, de l'ordre dans lequel les théories ou doctrines ont été élaborées, de l'influence exercée par tel des analystes sur ses collégues ou sur les hommes d'État.

In this analysis of elements which break the continuity of natural spaces (gullies, forests, rivers, hills) or constructed spaces (bridges, paths, crossroads, borders, milestones) we see that they are primarily considered as crossover places between different worlds. Places where spirits and ‘experts in exstasy’ circulate. Among these are the Calusari, esoteric groups whose practices recall those of shamanism. The analysis of their rituals reveals the importance for traditional societies of the notion of ‘limits’.

Ever since Durkheim, the relationship between ritual and sociability has been a primary theme of theoretical reflection in sociology. The article highlights a number of aspects relating to that theme and explores the question of whether ritual change – posited by the author as an historical evidence – can be adequately understood in this way, notably in terms of its societal implications. In the second half, the author presents a detailed analysis of a number of issues that emerge when ritualisation is considered as a continuous historical process. The prerequisites and mechanisms of ritualisation are at the core of this reflection, in particular in exploring how routine action, ritual experience and symbolic auto-declaration can be deployed in the context of the creation of social ties.

Political sociology has from its very inception had an overriding concern with the nature of political order and stability, and the threats to that stability. Ever since ‘the entry of the masses on to the stage of history’, at the time of the French Revolution, one source of that threat has regularly been seen as the industrial working class. That has been so, whether the threat was perceived by the liberal centre and conservative right; or whether is was converted, by the left, into a definite promise to overthrow ‘bourgeois’ stability. In both cases, in the anxious speculations of Mill and Tocqueville as much as the triumphant predictions of Marx and Engels, a key role was marked out for the developing working class of nineteenthcentury Europe.

ObjectivityandThere is No Such Thingas a Social Science make an odd pair: one is a substantive historical discussion of a philosophical concept central to philosophy and to scientific practice and debate which provides an explanation of the history of the development and changes in the concept; the other is a defense of a philosophical position which in effect denies that any such explanation is possible, and attacks “the craving for explanation” as a philosophical disease whose major symptom is social science itself. Galison and Daston, the authors of Objectivity, are historians of science whose approach is connected to the “social study of science” without explicitly adopting any of its methodological theses. But in taking on the concept of objectivity they go to the philosophical heart of the scientific enterprise itself.