This book is designed to bring the analysis of symbolic phenomena more directly into the discourse of sociology. The human studies are in the midst of an explosion of cultural interest. In diverse disciplinary orientations throughout Europe and in literary studies in the United States, semiotics and structuralism – and the poststructuralist movements which have followed in their wake – have fundamentally affected contemporary understandings of social experience and ideas. In American social science there has emerged over the last twenty years a complementary movement within anthropology. This symbolic anthropology has begun to have powerful ramifications on related disciplines, especially on American and European social history.

In the discipline of sociology, however – particularly but not only in its American guise – researchers and theorists are still fighting the last war. In the 1960s there was a general mobilization against the hegemony of structural–functional theory in the “idealist” form associated with Parsons. This challenge has triumphed, but theorizing of an equally onesided sort has taken its place. The discipline is now dominated by micro and macro orientations which are either anti-systemic, anti-cultural or both. The anti-cultural macro approach, which emphasizes conflict and social “structures,” made positive, innovative contributions in the early phase of the fight against functionalism. It helped stimulate, for example, the reaction against the reigning consensus perspective in history. But the new social history, as it has been called for two decades, is by now old hat; it is in the process of being overtaken by a different kind of social history, one which has a pronounced cultural bent.