Lesacrifice royal de l'aśvamedha (I), tel que les textes védiques nous le font connaître, comporte l'étrange cérémonie que voici: le cheval que l'on s'apprête à immoler est attaché, comme il est de règie pour les sacrifices sanglants, à un poteau sacrificiel (yūpa); mais il n'est pas, en l'occurrence, la seule victime. De part et d'autre du poteau central, d'autres poteaux sont dressés, auxquels sont attachés d'autres animaux, destinés aussi à être immolés. La liste de ces victimes annexes est variable; mais toujours il doit s'agir d'animaux «villageois» (grāmya). Or à ces victimes «villageoises », effectivement mises a mort, s'ajoutent des quasi-victimes, qui se distinguent des victimes réelles par trois traits: ce sont des animaux « forestiers » (āranya); on les maintient dans les intervalles (āroka) entre les poteaux; enfin de compte, on ne les immole pas, mais on les relâche, et un des textes donne cette explication: c'est pour qu'ils ne subissent point de violence (ahimsāyai). La liste des quasi-victimes, variable, elle aussi, comprend nécessairement l'homme (2).

For the believing, shamanist nature is impregnated with mysterious activity. It is a consequence of the belief in a multiplicity of souls that a person, that is a human consciousness, need not always be where his body seems to be; and in everyday life a man does not expect to be conscious of what his soul may be doing. The idea that, without losing their individual personalities, the souls of certain dead people are transformed after death into the spirits of mountains, animal species, and other natural phenomena, means that human beings are surrounded on every side by a nature which is not what it seems to be; in rivers, animals and trees, and hidden by such an existence, are many fully conscious, aware, desirous beings. There is therefore in this world—but greater than it, extending also to other regions of the cosmos, the skies, the air, the earth and the underworld—a further reality, which ordinary people only fully realize when they die and become part of it.

Except perhaps for a few diehards, no sociologist today would think of conducting a large-scale empirical investigation of numerical data without a firm grasp of statistical methods—or at least a graduate assistant who has such a grasp. The old polemics about statistics in social research have died away and are now lost to view under a blizzard of statistical findings in journal articles and books. Asked to date the period when statistical analysis really ‘took over’ in social research, most sociologists would probably put the date around i960, when large computers and efficient programs became widely available. But the date of widespread adoption is perhaps not as significant as the date on which the leaders in the field became convinced of the desirability of using powerful statistical methods in the analysis of standardized data.

Inrecent times sociologists of different intellectual orientation and academic specialization have demonstrated a renewed interest in agrarian matters. If any, because the peasants still constitute a large section of the world population, this interest must be commended. In this paper, I will deal with a subject that is at present rather left aside: the political orientation of agrarian classes: it is a theoretical effort to evaluate the relations existing between landownership and political orientation. I will try to answer this question: ‘Once agrarian classes have been defined according to their access to land, which is their relative political orientation?’

The Petite Bourgeoisie is a stratum that has attrated little academic study. Historians have given it short shrift, the radical scholars dismissing it as the petty bourgeoisie and the aristocratic historians discounting its members as small fry of no significance! And historians are not alone in their neglect, for in economics, political science and sociology there is a similar disdain for those who cannot be cast in the hero's role in any of the major developments of western capitalism. The petite bourgeoisie remains in the wings because to writers of diverse opinions and academic specialisms it has appeared as essentially trivial.

This paper has two purposes: to define the concept of corporatism and to predict that a corporatist economic system is the most likely development for the United Kingdom over the next five to ten years. While the prediction logically presumes a concept of corporatism, the two parts of the paper are separable; the reasonableness of the definition and the accuracy of the prediction are distinct issues.

One of the most widely cited of recent writings on the borderland of philosophy and anthropology is Peter Winch's ‘Understanding a Primitive Society’ (referred to hereafter as UPS)(I). The main reason for the breadth of its appeal would seem to be a blend of general principle and particular application all too seldom found in the writings of philosophers of social science. Thus, on the one hand, Winch develops further some of the general principles of cross-cultural understanding which he first enunciated in his Idea of a Social Science (referred to hereafter as ISS) (2). And, on the other hand, he attempts to show us, in considerable detail, how these principles can be applied to the solution of a particularly vexing anthropological problem: that of interpreting ‘primitive’ mystical thought.