Matthew Wood’s recent article in the European Journal of Sociology is a useful addition to the secularization debate. There is value in studying ways in which religious organizations now attempt to re-enter the public arena and the secularizing consequences of such activity. However, there is no justification for framing that case as an indictment of either Bryan R. Wilson’s original 1966 presentation of the modern sociological secularization theory or the subsequent work of others in the same paradigm. This rejoinder explains Wilson’s apparent assuming rather than demonstrating the declining influence of religious institutions and concludes that his work can be augmented without asserting that he had missed something which fundamentally alters the secularization approach to religious change.

This article considers the political implications of temporal orientations, building on Reinhart Koselleck’s conceptual histories of “progress” and “utopia”. A computational analysis of survey data from the 2016 US election provides a snapshot of the breakdown of the American Dream for some respondents, and its continued relevance for others. Rather than progress from past to future, data shows negative perceptions of the past or present associated with negative expectations for the future, a link especially pronounced among white respondents and those who subscribe to “America first” beliefs. At the same time, to the extent that racial privilege is inversely related to expectations of future progress, the findings suggest that utopian narratives of progress can help smooth over injustice or inequality with view to a better future. Expectations of progress are thus tightly woven into perceptions of injustice or marginalization.

The notion ‘elementary’ was used from different perspectives as a modality of anthropological explanation by two authors: Durkheim in relation to religion, and Lévi-Strauss in relation to kinship. They developed a methodology for studying the most simple, the most essential, and the most general properties of social phenomena within a regional context. In this context, the movement towards the ‘complex’ is used only to analyse the additions, the evolutions, or the combinations of pure forms or structures. The less systematic approach taken by Mauss in his article on the gift highlights the complexity of the entire social fact.

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.

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.

Depuis des années, qu'anthropologue, nous travaillons sur la société hindoue dans l'État du Karnataka, leurs silhouettes nous étaient devenues peu à peu familières. Combien de fois, au petit matin ou à la nuit tombante, avons-nous rencontré leurs ombres déformées, courbées par l'énorme charge qu'ils transportent à pas lents et mesurés jusqu'aux rues commerçantes de la ville de Dharwar. Là, ils installent quotidiennement leurs étals précaires pour proposer aux Indiens des lainages : pull-overs, châles, bonnets, gants. Ils sont spécialisés dans la vente de vêtements qui sont autant de témoignages de leur terre d'origine, comme s'ils étaient encore porteurs d'une mémoire climatique presque totalement étrangère à leur environnement actuel.

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.

In this paper I am concerned with the lack of consistency in the criteria embodied in the concepts used to identify social relations. There are two main elements: what we can call the indigenous ideology and the observer's characterisation. In the former case we are dealing with role definition, more or less formalised in different cases and with cultural norms which define the scope of a relationship; in the latter, regularities of observed behaviour and their politico-economic significance are the basis for classification. Examples of concepts based on the former are relations of kinship; of the latter, pairs of terms like leader and follower, patron and client. It is to the last of these that this paper is devoted, for it is precisely in those areas where the ideas of the actors are given least weight in our analysis that our ethnocentric perceptions cause analytical confusion.

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.