Murray Milner

Hindu Eschatology and the Indian Caste System: An Example of Structural Reversal

Virtually all interpreters of Hinduism agree that the notions of samsara, karma , and moksa are central to nearly all varieties of Hinduism. That is, it is agreed that most Hindus assume continuing reincarnations (samsara) , that a persons current incarnation and experiences are, at least in part, the fruit of past actions (karma) , and that release or liberation (moksa) from this ongoing cycle is possible and desirable. As David Kinsley (1982:8) says, “certain underlying beliefs are accepted by most Hindus: karma, samsara , and moksa , for example.” J. L. Brockington (1981:5) notes, “Doctrines concerning … samsara, karma and moksa … may be regarded as axiomatic by most schools of Hindu philosophy.” Thomas Hopkins (1971:50) observes, “By the early sixth century B.C.E., transmigration and the “law of karma” had been generally accepted as basic facts of existence and were rarely challenged from that time on by any major Indian system of thought.” According to A. L. Basham (1989:42): “These [karma and samsara] are the beliefs of nearly all Indians, other than Muslims, Christians, and Parsis, down to the present day.”

Alternative Forms of Coordination: Combining Theoretical and Policy Analysis

Most transactions become governed by market prices and social values become money values in the market. Like all abstractions this process simplifies and leaves out dimensions of reality included in more concrete particularistic relationships. The extensive body of literature which discusses reification and abstraction are rooted in the realization that market relationships are highly abstract and that these abstractions oversimplify as well as simplify. The abstractions of market prices and values are reified in the sense that they are assumed to include virtually all relevant aspects of social reality, when in fact they are based on only a limited aspect of that reality. Alienation results because the reified abstractions, i.e. market values, become the crucial elements in defining and controlling social reality. This is a special case of goal displacement which results when the most abstract and easily measured dimension of a particular goal replaces the original goal itself. To clarify and illustrate this crucial point let us consider a slightly less abstract and complex example. Universities want faculty members who are scholars. But scholarship is difficult to define and measure. Endless hours of debate and conflict can be spent on defining scholarships and judging whether particular individuals meet these criteria. So to simplify matters there is a tendency for the dimension which is most easy to observe and quantify i.e., number of publications to be selected out i.e., abstracted as the critical element or dimension of scholarship. The concepts of scholarship and number of publications become reified i.e., the limited and abstract dimension of &dquo;number of publications&dquo; comes to be treated as if it were the total concrete reality of scholarship. When the two are treated as synonymous faculty members become selected and rewarded on the basis of the number of publications. Since their destiny and well being is dependent upon this reified concept their efforts become guided and even controlled by this limited dimension of scholarship. What was originally a tool of communication and self expression created by scholars to assist them in communicating with one another i.e. publications, becomes an end-in-itself which controls their behavior and even their definition of reality. That is scholars become alienated from scholarship because a reified element of it something they have themselves created comes to control them. In short the need for simplification led to abstraction which led to reification which led to alienation. In this example we are dealing with a limited and obvious form of simplification by means of abstraction. Most people can intuitively see that scholarship and number of publications are not synonomous. Consequently the tendencies towards reification and alienation are widely recognized and criticised if not always remedied. But the integration of activity through market prices involves much greater degrees of abstraction and consequently the reification is greater while its social visibility is much lower. In everyday modern life most people take it as self evident that the price of a commodity is more or less identical with its social value and that both individually and collectively they should guide their behavior accordingly in choosing alternative courses of action. Just as the concreteness of particularistic interaction is both its strength and weakness the abstractness of

Race, Education, and Jobs; Trends 1960-1970.

Census and Current Population Survey data for employed males in the U.S. Labor Force as tabulated by color, education and occupation are examined for the years 1960-70. Comparisons showed that while the racial differentials on occupation and education were reduced by 1970, the proportion of the remaining occupational gap which was due to educational level had actually increased. This suggests that the attenuation of job discrimination may have had a more significant role than the closing of the racial educational gap. Policy implications are that it is important to maintain efforts to further reduce educational inequality to reduce the remaining occupational differences. At the same time, there are reasons to believe that much of the remaining occupational differential continued to be due to outright discrimination in the job market.

Paradoxical Inequalities: Adolescent Peer Relations in Indian Secondary Schools

Peer relationships in secondary schools in two different cultural areas of India are compared. A general theory of status relations and a specification of the distinctive cultural features of each area are used to explain the observed differences in peer inequality, clique formation, petty deviance, putdowns, fashion consciousness, romantic relationships, and gossip. A surprising finding is that the degree of status inequality among school peers is inversely related to an ideological emphasis on equality and hierarchy: The more egalitarian the cultural ideology, the greater the inequality in peer relationships, and conversely, the more emphasis on hierarchy, the less the actual peer inequality. The apparent paradox is resolved by specifying the structural mechanisms through which cultural and ideological differences operate. Brief comparisons with the United States suggest that these findings are not unique to India.

The Endangered West: Myopic Elites and Fragile Social Orders in a Threatening World:

brought into existence. First, as Hess himself acknowledges, his analysis draws predominantly on case studies and empirical research that take place in the United States and Europe. How might the theoretical foundations of Hess’s interdiscipline shift were one to incorporate what Latin American social analyst Boaventura de Sousa Santos calls ‘‘epistemologies of the South,’’ composed of ‘‘ecologies of knowledge’’ that move beyond the radical binaries of nature/culture, human/nonhuman, facts/values that Sousa Santos sees as being constitutive of Eurocentric technosciences? For example, peasants and activists in Argentina are mobilizing against the spread of genetically engineered (GE) soy by throwing mud balls filled with the seeds of Palmer amaranth—a plant that mutated into a ‘‘super-weed’’ and became resistant to the herbicides accompanying GE soy—into soy plantations. At the same time, these activists leverage amaranth’s cultural symbolism as a sacred plant of pre-Columbian cultures that is returning to avenge the neocolonial takeover of Latin America. In this case, the ‘‘social’’ resistance against agribiotechnologies in Argentina is deeply intertwined with the ‘‘biological’’ resistance of a plant (Beilin and Suryanarayanan 2017). Could Hess’s framework of mobilized publics be broadened to include nonhuman entities with the power to actively mediate industrial transition movements? This brings me to a second issue: many of the STS studies that Hess relies on are part of an actively evolving subfield called the new political sociology of science (NPSS). Hess’s use of insights from NPSS clearly brings benefits, such as a careful attention to the epistemological politics linking developments in science and technology to the dynamics of state, industry, and civil society actors. However, this comes at the cost of overlooking other areas of STS that could strengthen the theoretical foundations of a sociology of science, technology, and social movements. For example, emerging empirical studies at the intersection of environmental humanities, STS, and anthropology attend to human-nonhuman relationships toward analyzing the epistemological and ontological politics of science, technology, and society. Hess’s Undone Science is a work of highquality scholarship that is bold in its goal to develop the foundations of a new interdiscipline and nuanced in its systematic and thorough treatment of the topic. Throughout the book, Hess successfully yokes STS ideas to SMS ideas in the process of developing new concepts and approaches to the study of science, technology, and social movements. Along the way, Hess outlines areas of undone science in this nascent field, such as the relative lack of systematic comparative studies that integrate quantitative and qualitative analyses of the variations in industrial transition movements and their outcomes across countries. This is a visionary book that maps an entirely new research field with major implications for how we understand social movements in an era of high technology.

Limiting Case Models in the Behavioral Sciences: Perfect Competition, Perfect Benevolence, and Perfect Malevolence

By isolating key variables and limiting their value, limiting case models portray processes that are empirically rare or nonexistent. Such models, however, have often been extremely useful in the analysis of events in the real world. The perfect competition model, borrowed from economics, has been useful in analysis of social behavior, but many social phenomena appear rather far removedfrom the limited assumptions of this model. This paper proposes two additional limiting case models-perfect benevolence and perfect malevolence-as alternative ideal descriptions. Insights from the three ideal models are then used to develop a more general model with less restrictive assumptions based on four variables: degree of monopoly, degree of explicitness, identification, and terms of exchange. Several empirical applications are discussed.