Ever since the Enlightenment, most intellectuals on the liberal and radical end of the ideological spectrum have tended to stand for a morality and politics of authenticity, sincerity, and naturalness; while their conservative opponents defended the need for decorum, civility, and restraints. These differences were, of course, largely rooted in differing basic conceptions about the nature of the human animal. Traditionally, the conservatives had a pessimistic view of human nature and hence believed that it had to be curbed; they pitted their views against the progressive belief in the basic goodness of human-kind that emerged in the eighteenth century. When Rousseau proclaimed in Émile: ‘Coming from the hands of the author of all things, everything is good; in the hands of man, everything degenerates’, Bonald, the great critic of Enlightenment thought, answered: ‘We are bad by nature, good through society. The savage is not a man, he is not even a childish man, he is only a degenerate man’.

Histories and critiques of anthropology usually deal mainly with what anthropologists say, including what they say they do. However, like their informants, anthropologists are accustomed to saying one thing and doing another. The emphasis in this paper is on the nature of anthropological data and methods, and thus on what anthropologists really do. The argument is that what anthropologists do is often productive and sensible, but that it has very little relationship to what many anthropologists say they should be doing. Indeed those anthropologists who take such theoretical directives seriously labour under a considerable, self-inflicted handicap.

The ritual giving of blessed bread is a phenomenon that has been reported to take a variety of forms in time and space in western Europe. While recognizing these variations and the problem they ultimately present to social anthropologists, I shall examine only one particular form of the ritual in this paper; for, until we have understood the sociological and ideological basis of the practice in one community, we cannot begin to treat the more challenging problem of how to account for variations and transformations in the ritual that have occurred in several different European societies. The purpose of this paper is to show how one form of the blessed bread ritual was coherently and systematically linked with particular institutions and ritual obligations in the French Basque commune of Sainte-Engrâce.

This paper examines some variables which may explain differences in the position of women, particularly in Middle Eastern tribal societies. By position of women, I mean women's status and roles vis-à-vis men. I am primarily concerned with differences in the dominant or male models concerning women, and the behaviours associated with them, however at a number of points in the paper, for illumination, I refer to women's models of women—that is, muted or counterpart models which are alternative, and sometimes contradictory, to the men's models (E. Ardener 1972; 1975; S. Ardener 1975: xi–xii). But my main argument is in a different direction: I suggest that certain features of social organization and structure determine these dominant models concerning women. Among the more obvious explanations of this kind would be those in terms of economic factors, such as the types of social production (whether a given social group is predominantly pastoral nomad, settled agricultural, or urban commercial-industrial, etc.) or the sexual division of labour within the group. But in my view certain more subtle factors than these are also of explanatory importance. The problem arises from the study of two particular tribal societies, the Shahsevan of north-western Iran and the Durrani of north-central Afghanistan; the women's position in these two societies differs in three significant spheres, yet the economic factors suggested above cannot explain these differences, for the two societies are economically similar, and women are excluded to a similar degree from control of economic and political resources.

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.

The transformative capacity of most religions to initiate modern, capitalistic societies has been extensively investigated (Bellah 1957 and 1965; Eisenstadt 1968; Geertz i960 and 1968; Gellner 1969; Levenson 1968; Rodinson 1974; Sardar 1977; Soedjatmoko 1965; Turner 1974; Weber 1958a, 1958b and 1964). However, most scholars have not been able to come to definite conclusions regarding the capacity of religions to legitimate modern development. This is because it is assumed that every ‘big’ religion contains the potential to legitimate different, even contradictory, patterns of social change. Thus, perhaps it would be useful, when studying a given religion, to analyze the conditions under which a certain pattern of social change is utilized, as well as the interests such a pattern serves.