The advent of food-producing economies – agricultural and pastoral – is indeed an important step in the evolution of human societies. A number of explanatory models have been devised to explain and make sense of the processes involved in these transformations. The explanatory model offered by J. Cauvin in his last book is anchored on the “cultural reason”, a revolution of symbols that presided over the formations of the earliest villages communities and the onset of agricultural economies in the Levant. Alain Testart disagrees, launching an interesting debate and providing a rebuttal of the very logic – or lack thereof – underlying J. Cauvin's suggestions. In this paper, we outline the evolutionary models involved in this debate. Through two complementary case studies featuring prehistoric artworks, we offer a parsimonious non-deterministic co-evolutionary model that integrates all the major factors involved in the neolithisation processes.

Maoist insurgent or Naxalite activity has expanded markedly in India over the past three decades, especially in the central tribal belt. This paper first uses a unique, district-level dataset to demonstrate that insurgency does not, as is widely argued, occur where tribals or Adivasis have been dispossessed of their land and forced to work as landless labourers. Rather, insurgent activity is most likely to take place in areas where Adivasis retain control of their land. The second part is an in-depth analysis of the Dantewara district. It shows that the Adivasis’ grievances are intimately related to the colonial encounter and neo-colonial state’s desire to control forests and forest resources. While the insurgent leaders are non-Adivasis, they strive to frame the insurgency in terms that are meaningful to Adivasis, and to provide a combination of collective and selective incentives. Nevertheless, some Adivasis oppose the insurgency because it undermines their status, while others do so because of short-term processes operating during the course of the insurgency. A syncretic theoretical approach, which concentrates on the complex and dynamic relationship between insurgents and their support base, and includes insights from Marxian, Weberian and Durkheimian theory, is best suited to explaining Adivasis’ involvement in the insurgency.

This study reviews international comparative studies investigating people’s views on inequality. These studies are classified using a framework consisting of three types of conceptions of inequality and two dimensions of inequality. Four perspectives are discussed explaining cross-national differences in views on inequality: the modernist, the culturalist, the micro and the macro perspective. The findings of studies comparing views on inequalities in post-communist and Western states provide more support for the modernist than for the culturalist perspective. Few comparative studies appear to investigate views on inequalities as independent variables impacting on other social attitudes and behaviours. It is argued that the social relevance of the field will be enhanced if more studies can show that views on inequality have an effect on social outcomes complementary to that of objective inequalities.

The capability approach has been developed by Amartya Sen, Martha Nussbaum and others as a human-centred normative framework for the evaluation of individual and group well-being, quality of life and social justice. Sen and Nussbaum’s ideas have influenced global, national and local policy and have been further developed in a number of academic disciplines, but so far have remained largely unnoticed in sociology. This article examines recent capability-informed theories and empirical applications in the sociology of human rights and other academic fields adjacent to sociology, focussing on examples of social policy studies in the fields of welfare, the labour market, health and disability, and education. The article outlines several potential areas in which capability-informed frameworks are relevant for critical social theory, public sociology and global sociology.

The debate about knowledge-production in sociology has pitted “internalist” accounts, which pay close attention to the places, practices, and tools of knowledge, against “externalist” accounts of institutions and fields. Using psychoanalysis as a case, this paper develops an approach that integrates these traditions by comparing the differentiation of places, tools and practices of knowledge production. The paper shows that, in a context in which other areas of practice increasingly differentiate research, diagnosis and treatment in spaces, tools, and professional roles, psychoanalysis invokes that differentiation rhetorically but refuses to differentiate its practice. Psychoanalysts insist on a specific setting – the couch and the psychoanalytic relationship – as central to all aspects of their knowledge-production but they do not adapt this space to pursue any of these purposes in their own right. This analysis explains some of the problems psychoanalysis has with its environment and the specific form divisions take within psychoanalysis. As an unusual case of non-differentiation, psychoanalysis highlights the role differentiation plays in other areas of knowledge-production.

Health care systems reflect historical relationships between states and citizens, as well as predominant values and institutions marking a particular social milieu. Theories that place national health care in historical social context tend to exaggerate the forces of globalization and to underestimate the role of local specificities. A health care system and its social context, however, are shaped at the intersection of global, regional, and local factors, rather than by globalization alone. In this article I demonstrate this combined influence by tracking the transition in Soviet to post-Soviet health care Azerbaijan. I show that the dissolution of Azerbaijan’s socialized health care was due not to neoliberal globalization, but rather to the historical constellation of global, regional, and national processes, including the political choice of a petroleum-based development strategy.

Conventional wisdom about civil litigation, both among scholars and political actors, holds that abuse of the legal process is common, that there is too much litigation, that it is “all about the money”, and that “a bad settlement is better than a good trial”. This constellation of attitudes that emphasize the economic function of law suggests that courts are an expensive conflict resolution mechanism of last resort and that their use would be minimized in a healthy market-based democracy. In this paper we apply a new sociological framework to understand the meaning and function of civil litigation in a democratic society. We focus in particular on the democratic function of the informational characteristics of litigation that require substantial disclosure and engagement between plaintiff, defendant and third parties. Instead we examine the role courts play in the maintenance and attainment of a social information order – norms and legal rules governing the sharing and withholding of information that depend on and constitute particular status relationships between actors (Ryan 2006). Using interviews and surveys of family members of victims of 9/11 we develop a theory of the lived experience of entitlement to information in Anglo-American legal settings with suggestions of how these ideas might translate to civil law systems.

The recent publication of the entirety of Max Weber’s methodological writings in an English translation by Bruun and Whimster offers an opportunity to reassess the question how far he himself consistently adhered to his own precepts about Wertfreiheit and the construction and deployment of ideal types. It is argued that Weber himself saw the problem not as a logical but as a purely psychological one, and that he could therefore justify the apparent contradictions between his precepts and his practice as either deliberate exercises in something other than Wissenschaft or, in his wissenschaftlich writings, as lapses capable in principle of correction. In conclusion, it is briefly suggested that Weber would regard the major advances made in the human behavioural sciences since his lifetime as generally consistent with his own methodology.

The paper argues that Claude Lévi-Strauss’ thought was influenced by Marcel Mauss’ works in a much deeper way than has been remarked in the literature. Far from being restricted to Lévi-Strauss’ seminal 1949 work on The Elementary Structures of Kinship Mauss’ constitutive impact can already be found in Lévi-Strauss’ early ethnographic studies (starting in the mid-1930s). Moreover, it can be shown that decisive theses and arguments of Lévi-Strauss’ later thought – ranging from the anthropology of kinship to classification theory and the specifics of the “savage mind” – are clearly prefigured in these early texts. In the end, the arguments presented here do not only call into question the well-known and widespread portrayal of Lévi-Strauss as a solitary scientist and “born structuralist” but also show how the specific interpretation of Mauss by Lévi-Strauss directed and restricted the further reception of Mauss’ works.

Comparing the treatment of Islamic veils and Christian crucifixes by the European Court of Human Rights, this paper re-examines the charge of “double standards” on the part of this guardian of the European legal order, which is seen as disadvantaging Islam and favoring Christianity. While this is proved partially correct, the paper calls for a more differentiated treatment of the issue. For one, there is a modicum of consistency in the European Court’s decisions, because they are all meant to further “pluralism”. Only, Islam and Christianity fare differently in this respect, as “threat” to and “affirmation” of pluralism, respectively. This distinction hinges on Islam’s compatibility with the liberal-secular order, on which the jury is out. A possible way out of the “pluralism v. pluralism” dilemma, I argue, is signaled in the European Court’s recent decision in Lautsi v. Italy (2011), which pairs a preference for “culturalized” Christianity with robust minority pluralism.

Between 1940 and 1944, sociologist Talcott Parsons and political scientist Eric Voegelin engaged in a vigorous correspondence, discussing the origins of totalitarianism and modern anti-Semitism, the legacy of Max Weber, patterns of secularization set in motion by the Protestant Reformation, the methodology and goals of social science, and more. This article introduces and explicates the surprisingly amicable and intellectually rich exchange between these two seemingly different thinkers. Although the letters hold obvious historical interest, their variegated topics are also closely thematically related, revealing an inner logic that we interpret as a theoretical search for “critical naïveté”. This logic, we argue, is relevant to contemporary discussions about the social, political, and scientific legacies of world-transcendent spiritual traditions.