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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 July 2024
In his ‘Reflections on the February Editorial’ (New Blackfriars, April, 1967) Father Cornelius Ernst suggested that in the context of ecclesiological analysis the notion of institution should not be restricted to ‘its narrower, governmental sense’ of legitimated offices and procedures which, however initiated, are formally constituted, but might be more usefully employed in the wider sense of the term ‘familiar to sociologists and social anthropologists’. If I have understood him correctly, his argument is that to confine the term to formally ‘instituted’ institutions, while denying it to ways of thought and action which although equally established as usages have not been established formally, is to lend countenance to dubious oppositions between the formal and explicit on the one hand, and the informal and implicit on the other. As an example of such an opposition he cites that between ‘institutional Church’ and ‘persons’. He suggests that if such distinctions as this are taken as expressing fundamental dichotomies, they may entail ‘damaging oversimplification’.
In the context of this interesting theme, a brief and inevitably cursory note by a social anthropologist on some of the ways in which the notions of institution and institutionalization have been used in his field may be of some small value.
page 252 note 1 MacIver, R. M. and Page, C. H., Society: an Introductory Analysis, London, 1950, p. 15Google Scholar.
page 252 note 2 L. Schneider, article ‘Institution’ in A Dictionary of the Social Sciences (eds. Gould, J. and Kolb, W. L.). London, 1964, p. 339Google Scholar.
page 253 note 1 W. H. Hamilton, article ‘Institution’ in Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences (eds. Seligman, E. R. A. and Johnson, A.), Vol. 7. New York, 1937, pp. 84–89Google Scholar.
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page 254 note 3 Evans‐Pritchard, E. E., The Nuer: a description of the modes of livelihood and political institutions of a Nilotic people. Oxford, 1940Google Scholar.
page 255 note 1 Eisenstadt, S. M., article ‘Social Institutions: I, the Concept’ in International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (ed. Sills, D. L.), Vol. 14. New York, 1968, p. 414Google Scholar.
page 255 note 2 Malinowski, B., The Dynamics of Culture Change (ed. Kaberry, P. M.). New Haven, 1945, p. 50Google Scholar. A later definition (cited in footnote, loc. cit.) differs mainly from the first in defining the end of the activity involved as ‘contributing towards the work of the culture as a whole’.
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