Il est des problèmes d'histoire qui, par l'ampleur des questions qu'ils soulèvent, aiguisent la modestie du théoricien et l'incitent à s'en détourner, par peur de tomber dans la construction intellectuelle grandiose, réfractaire à toute vérification empirique. Si Ton s'en tient à la civilisation occidentale, trois mutations majeures tombent dans cette zone d'ombre de la réflexion: l'apparition du système de la cité, la chute de l'Empire romain d'Occident et surtout les origines du système capitaliste. L'explication de cette retenue est simple et tient à la nature de la raison historienne. Celle-ci fonde sa démarche sur l'élaboration de schémas intellectuels qui découpent le flux infini des sociétés humaines en unités isolables, susceptibles d'une saisie conceptuelle. Il s'ensuit que les systèmes d'explication fonctionnent éventuellement bien pour chaque unité prise en sa singularité (puisque c'est le système qui constitue son objet), mais achoppent sur les mutations profondes qui peuvent affecter une société. En effet, toute réflexion sur les ensembles historiques les plus vastes (la société antique, la société féodale d'Occident…) sous peine de se perdre dans la juxtaposition éclectique d'exposés partiels, est condamnée à construire et à percevoir ces ensembles à partir d'un point de vue unique, dégagé par un procès de développement unilatéral d'un de leurs aspects majeurs (la cité, l'empire, le capitalisme, le sous-développement…). On aboutit forcément, à l'issue d'un tel cheminement, à la construction de la structure de cet ensemble, c'est-à-dire au système logique qui rend compte de ses composants et de leurs liens nécessaires; or une structure est nécessairement statique (1), même si l'analyse dégage les possibilités de variation d'une structure donnée. Il s'ensuit que la nouveauté radicale dans le devenir des sociétés humaines, par nature et par définition placée à la jointure de deux ensembles distincts, cette nouveauté n'apparaît pas et ne peut pas apparaître dans le champ de la conscience historienne. L'on masque le problème, en négociant la mutation qualitative en modifications quantitatives et, pour peu que Ton ait entendu parler de Hegel, le tour est joué.

In every stratified society there are groups of people, mainly from the lower strata, who aspire to rise in social status. In order to realize their aspirations they adopt various means: some change their occupation for one carrying more prestige; some give their children a good education and try to place them in positions superior to their own; some emulate the behaviour and style of life of those whose higher status they aspire to reach; some try to gain admittance to the social circles mostly frequented by high-status people; some change their residence and some surround themselves with status symbols hoping that they will influence the ‘raters’ appraising them. For this process which goes on among various low-caste groups in India, Srinivas, an Indian sociologist, coined a separate term, ‘sanskritization’. With the opening of the doors by many under-developed societies for the introduction of modern technology and industrialization, status seeking has become one of the preoccupations of millions of people.

The efforts of rural communities around the world to survive in the face of economic and demographic decline dramatise the bio-cultural processes on which human regeneration routinely depends. This paper explores the very conspicuous symbolic aspects of regeneration in a village in Catalonia, Spain, and traces the long term physical and material processes that underlie them. Scrutiny of two different festivals reveals a passionate concern to renegotiate deeply fractured generational relationships. Having exported its fertility to the towns and cities, the community is now working to incorporate newcomers and devise new livelihoods. Public rituals have done much to sustain these efforts at regeneration, but how they may resist the “sterile growth” of Mieres as a village of mostly empty second homes is a provocative new issue.

Puritanism has been a fertile field for sociological inquiry. Studies of puritan thought have established its secular implications for economic and political life, for science, medicine and modernity. Indeed, puritanism occupies a place in the development of sociological analysis similar to that of the French Revolution in historiography. As much can be learned from studies of puritanism about sociology as about society. One lesson concerns the problem of historical scholarship in sociological analysis: too often sociologists rely not only on secondary historical accounts, but on outdated accounts and assumptions long abandoned by professional historians. Another lesson is that sociologists do not always follow their own advice. Sociological studies of puritanism devote far less attention to contextual factors than might otherwise be expected from practitioners of a discipline stressing the existential conditioning of ideas. Interpretations of a secular ethos in puritanism are used to explain why puritanism appealed to certain groups or promoted certain patterns of worldly behavior. Unfortunately, puritanism like the Bible can be ‘read’ plausibly in a number of ways to support different interpretations. Interpretations of the content of puritan thought thus must include an analysis of the organizational and social context in which Calvinist beliefs were developed and disseminated by clerics. Interpretation can be checked by contextual analysis; but such analysis requires precisely that critical style of historical scholarship so often absent in sociological analysis.

Sociology can be introduced to students not as a story of “great men” but as a practice shaped by the social relations that made it possible. (R.W. Connell, “Why Is Classical Theory Classical?”)

Hardin argues that ethnic conflicts can be analysed without reference to individual emotions, by using 3 parameters: the initiative of certain elites, the use of exclusive norms, and a good dose of epistemological perversity, admired if not shared. Beyond a certain critical mass, the mixture becomes explosive. Yeats' biography illustrates these arguments: Yeats' own emotions hardly weigh up against forces which cause him to be moved and create his emotion.