This essay reflects on the ethical and reflexive considerations surrounding the use of student fieldwork reports on a course on the sociology of religion. Using reflexivity as a teaching strategy coincides with changes in sociological approaches to religion where experiential and substantive issues are stressed in its study. Reflexive and ethical issues that emerge on courses on sexuality and gender politics are compared to those which seem peculiar to the teaching of religion from a sociological perspective. Study of these fieldwork reports disclosed the way students faced their own ethical worries in a task generated to enhance their own reflexivity but also an understanding of religiosity.

A significant minority of Westerners believe in reincarnation, even though they do not belong to religions that teach it. What is the relationship of their belief to personal identity? In areas of the world where reincarnation is accepted, one can identify three forms of pre-natal and/or post-mortem identity: the continuing self/soul, the dissolution of the self, and family identity. Comparable concepts within the contemporary West might be labelled modern, postmodern and kin-based. The article considers three forms of evidence from Britain: everyday conversation, the personal stories to be found in Reincarnation International magazine, and an interview study of thirty adults and twenty children. It is concluded that (1) the understanding of A as the reincarnation of close family member B, found in several American and African tribes and in popular Hinduism, may be unusual in Britain; (2) in so far as people play with past identities, this cannot easily be squared with postmodern theories of the self; (3) the past identities constructed bear strong resemblance to current identities, and may be considered part of the modernist project of the self.

Based on a content analysis of a hundred heterosexual dating advertisements, the paper, in part, seeks to build upon the findings of previous research emerging mainly from the disciplines of sociobiology and psychology, which shows that when selling the self, men market their financial and occupational resources, whereas women offer physical attractiveness and appealing body shape, consistent with traditional ‘sex-role’ stereotypes and mating selection strategies. The main focus of this paper, however, is on the repetitive and changing meanings of masculinity and femininity. Locating analyses in the context of a postmodern, consumer society, it shows that whilst consumer culture appears to provide men with a wide range of resources for the creation of identities, reflexive self-fashioning is more problematic for women. It argues that although what constitutes a ‘feminine’ identity has now diversified as men and women deal with a novel set of social conditions, women's subjectivities remain more fixed and stable than those of men. It concludes, therefore, that access to cultural resources for identity construction are not equally available to men and women.

How do things come to embody meaning? In much anthropological and sociological writings, things have mainly been considered in two ways: either as commodities or as gifts. Correspondingly, people's relationships to things and to other people seem to fall in two broad categories, often regarded as mutually exclusive: either as impersonal, economic or market relationships with strangers, or as personal gift relationships with intimates, friends or relatives. The ‘social life of things’, however, is more varied. Drawing on Alan Page Fiske's theory of the four fundamental models of human relationship, four ways in which people may relate to each other and to things are distinguished; these models are applied to empirical data from a study on the giving of gifts in the Netherlands. Complications may occur when the parties to the transaction do not share the same frame of mind with respect to each other and to the things that are being transferred. Things may have conflicting social lives.

There has been a well-documented ‘cultural turn’ in social theory. This takes two forms: the ‘epistemological’ case in which culture is seen as universally constitutive of social relations and identities; and the ‘historical’ case in which culture is seen as playing an unprecedented role in constituting social relations and identities in contemporary society. In this paper I take it that both cases overlap in studies of contemporary society and that the stronger case is justified. I argue that a model of cultural politics is necessary to fully develop the impetus of the ‘cultural turn’ away from structural determinism, and that relations between the state and society should no longer be taken as the central focus of political sociology. I propose that the understanding of politics developed by Foucault in his later work on power and domination can provide the basis of a ‘cultural turn’ in political sociology. Finally, I offer some suggestions about how those working in the field of political sociology are already beginning to develop the theme of cultural politics – albeit without naming it as such – and how this might be extended.

Social science has long fought shy of the natural sciences. Meanwhile, concerns with the environment, health and the new genetics are creating a need for systematic links to be made between these disciplines. This paper suggests a new way in which social theory can be linked to biology. Recent developments in biology point to the importance of considering organisms in relation to their environment. And work in epidemiology stresses the links between the infant-development, health in later life and the well-being of future generations. Complex combinations of genetically-determined predispositions and capitalist social relations are responsible for important features of contemporary social stratification and well-being. The paper is informed by critical realist epistemology and Marx's theory of the subsumption. Such a fusion leads to a key assertion. Capital tends to modify the powers of human biology in its own image.

While various attempts have been made to link nature and society more closely together within environmental sociology, it now appears as though there is a general acceptance of rather traditional divisions between these two domains. Yet ecology specifies that natural and social entities are bound together in complex interrelations. Why then does sociology insist on sifting out the social from the natural? The paper takes this question as its starting point and seeks to identify what environmental sociology might gain and lose from a shift towards ecological thinking. It does so by examining the case of actor-network theory, an approach that, in significant respects, closely approximates a kind of ‘ecological sociology’. Actor-network theory is ‘co-constructionist’: it seeks to identify how relations and entities come into being together. Critics have focused on the problems of co-constructionism: they have argued that human actors generally possess powers of reflection (through language) and that these powers of reflection provide motive forces for action. Thus some form of social analysis is still necessary. Any ecological sociology will thus need to bring these two perspectives together so that humans and non-humans can be considered within the same frame of reference but so the distinctions that generally hold between the two can also be assessed.

The article looks at some strengths and weaknesses of attempts at socialising the concepts of knowledge and epistemology. Roughly speaking, such socialising is the result of considering these concepts from the sociological point of view. Four consequences of doing so are pointed out. This is followed by a discussion of a number of flaws identified in much of the constructivist literature on the issue. Constructivists have doubtless played an important role in demystifying the notions of knowledge and epistemology. Yet at times they have gone too far by drawing conclusions from their analyses which these analyses are incapable of supporting. At the end of the article, an alternative avoiding the difficulties posed by such conclusions is briefly sketched.

This paper evaluates Kieran Healy's recent contribution to the structure–agency debate. Supervenience, I argue, has multiple uses, it entails different ontological perspectives depending on which entities it is applied to and which conditions are placed upon subvening and supervening entities. Healy's use of supervenience is unclear. On the one hand, applied to individual–society relations it does nothing more than restate the trivial truth: no people – no society. On the other hand, if supervenience is to be applied to structure–agent relations the consequence is extreme voluntarism. In either case it simply fails to address Healy's key concern: conceptualising social constraint. I then argue that an alternative way of grasping structural constraint in the present might be to view past-tense ‘activity dependence’ as ‘Cambridge events’.

In recent times, under the influence of postmodernist thought sociology has largely rejected the idea of social evolution. An exception to this trend is to be found in the work of Jürgen Habermas. Habermas's account of social evolution has received some critical attention, but in sociology wider detail of the picture is not well known. Habermas wishes to hold to the possibility that evolutionary progress can be discerned not only in the sphere of technical control, but also in the sphere of social and moral development. The paper presents Habermas's views on social evoluton within the wider context of his development of critical theory as a ‘reconstructive science’. It suggests that his account has been able to resist many of the standard criticisms of evolutionary theory and that a renewal of interest in this area could provide a rich vein of new sociological knowledge.

As Bechhofer, McCrone, Kiely and Stewart point out, there has been a tendency in the study of nationalism in particular, and in the social sciences in general, to assume that national identity is simply conferred upon individuals by the nation-state. Their article ‘Constructing National Identity: Arts and Landed Elites in Scotland’ seeks to rectify this emphasis (Bechhofer et al. 1999). Through theoretical argument and discussion of survey work in Scotland, they arrive at the conclusion that, ‘National identity should not in our view be seen as a fairly passive means by which citizens are bound culturally and socially to the state, but a far more interactive process whereby individuals have available the means for constructing who they are and who they want to be’ (1999:530). National identity is not, they earlier claim, ‘essential, given, unproblematic and unchanging’, but is ‘constructed in the processes of everyday life’ (1999:521). Certain qualifications are placed upon these claims. The writers acknowledge that, on the one hand, the views (in themselves anticipated) of ‘significant others’ check the ability of the individual to successfully make a claim upon a particular identity, and, on the other, that most of the time for most people national identity is unproblematic and unquestioned. However, these concessions seem to make little impact upon their actual discussion and do not detract from the central claim advanced that the formulation and presentation of national identity is a matter of individual choice.

We are grateful to the Editors of Sociology for the opportunity to respond to Dr Sam Pryke's comments on our paper ‘Constructing National Identity’.

We are, of course, pleased that Dr Pryke has taken an interest in our work and by his acknowledgement that empirical enquiry is welcome in a field marked by, in our judgement, excessive theoretical abstraction. He acknowledges in his first paragraph that ‘there has been a tendency ... to assume that national identity is simply conferred to individuals by the nation-state’, and correctly observes that our article ‘seeks to rectify this emphasis’. However, this appreciation that we are simply trying to advocate a more balanced approach vanishes as the Comment goes on. Dr Pryke's comment is inconsistent and internally contradictory.

We should first take the blame for a misunderstanding. On p. 520 of our article we use the phrase ‘We take as our starting points. . .’. Dr Pryke has interpreted ‘starting points’ as meaning ‘prior to the research’, as being theoretical assumptions. The reality is more complex. Our general reading of the literature and such evidence as exists did lead us to the a priori view that national identity could not simply be ‘read off’ from ‘objective’ factors, or taken as imposed from above. For a comment on the author's argument that it can, see below. However, the detailed set of ‘starting points’ (pp. 520–1) are the starting points for our exposition of the argument in the paper, which is derived from close reading and analysis of our empirical evidence. It would have been better to describe them as ‘summary’ points.

Anthony Elliott, The Mourning of John Lennon, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999, $45.00 hardback ($17.95 paperback), xi+219 pp. (ISBN 0-520-21549-4)

Adrian Kear and Deborah Lynn Steinberg (eds.), Mourning Diana: Nation, Culture and the Performance of Grief, London: Routledge, 1999, £13.99 paperback, xi+218 pp. (ISBN 0-415-19393-1)

Tony Walter (ed.), The Mourning for Diana, Oxford: Berg, 1999, £14.99 paperback, xiii+286 pp. (ISBN 1-85973-238-0)

Within the last decade or so there has been a growing recognition among sociologists of the role played by emotions in various aspects of human behaviour (witness, for example, the range of articles appearing in Sociology alone, e.g. Jackson 1993; Craib 1995; Burkitt 1997, and the formation of a BSA study group devoted to the sociology of emotion). This burgeoning focus on emotions has challenged sociology to rethink its dominant conception of the human subject as governed by rational and conscious thought alone. In so doing it has raised a question mark both against the adequacy of the (theoretical) tools used for analysing emotions which have developed from these premises and the ability of sociology in general to provide answers to such questions.

B. Turner (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Social Theory, Oxford: Blackwell, 2000, 2nd edn, xx+566 pp. (ISBN 0-631-21366-X)

B. Turner, Classical Sociology, London: Sage, 1999, xi+291 pp. (ISBN 0-7619-6458-4)

A. Swingewood, A Short History of Sociological Thought, Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 2000, 3rd edn, xi+269 pp. (ISBN 0-333-80199-7)

L. Ray, Theorizing Classical Sociology, Buckingham: Open University Press, 1999, ix+218 pp. (ISBN 0-335-19865-1)

The editor of the newly revised Companion to Social Theory describes his volume as an ‘attempt to offer the student a prescriptive and critical, rather than bland and neutral, pathway through the literature’ (Turner 2000:xiv). The rest of the introduction certainly lives up to this promise. In a bold, incisive and sharply worded defence of sociology as a distinct mode of conceptualisation, with a unique object of enquiry – the social – Bryan Turner makes a passionate plea for social theory to engage with the central political issues of our times. Yet as I turned the pages of this skilfully edited, beautifully presented and lavishly referenced collection I grew increasingly uneasy. Then, in the opening of Terry Lovell's chapter on ‘Feminisms of the Second Wave’, I found my disquiet pointedly expressed. She recognises a further aspect of the role of a sociology text for students, the full appreciation of which is missing from several of the volumes under review.