‘Religion is no longer important in Belgium!’, they declared. Wherever I travelled in Belgium over the course of 1976–1977, the year of my sabbatical leave from an American university, and my eighteenth consecutive year of fieldwork in Belgian society, friends, colleagues, and informants announced this.

I was particularly puzzled by this statement because I had always considered Belgium to be a society deeply imprinted by religion: by its diffuse Catholicism, and its complex reactions to it. Belgians from the whole range of philosophical, political, linguistic, regional, and social-class milieux in which I had worked knew that this was my considered judgment. Yet, on this visit, they seemed intent on showing me that religion was less important to them, and in their society, than I had supposed. The picture that many Belgians painted was of a society where religion had not merely waned, but spontaneously, and with great rapidity, had virtually disappeared. However much this image intrigued me, neither sociological theory, nor my own first-hand observations on previous trips to Belgium made it seem credible.

Face aux problèmes d'organisation sociale posés par les sociétés paysannes européennes, passées ou contemporaines, l'ethnologue demeure assez désemparé: les grandes théories ethnologiques, filiation et alliance (élaborées pour des sociétés qui avaient tout un corps de règies d'affiliation à des groupes de parenté ou de sélection du conjoint) sont ici d'un usage incertain. Les sociologues, quant à eux, offrent, depuis les travaux de Redfield (Redfield 1956), une analyse des principes d'organisation communautaire ou, à travers les travaux de Mendras (Mendras 1976), des principes de médiation entre société paysanne et société globale; elles laissent cependant en dehors de leurchamp les questions relatives à l'organisation des groupes domestiques et à leur perpétuation. En Europe, il semble bien que les principes explicites qui organisent la vie sociale en distribuant les individus dans des groupes solidaires aient peu à peu cédé le pas devant d'autres principes, d'ailleurs greffés sur les précédents ou issus d'eux, qui définissent les droits sur les biens et la manière dont ils se transmettent. Ce sont ces derniers principes, dérivant inévitablement d'une certaine conception de la parenté et de l'alliance, qui ont donné lieu à l'élaboration d'une véritable « théorie indigène » de l'organisation sociale, le droit privé. Cette évolution ne conduit évidemment pas à délaisser les grandes théories de l'alliance et de la filiation mais à chercher de quelle manière leurs acquis permettent d'éclaircir les principes d'organisation sociale implicates qui s'expriment à travers ou par delà le droit. Rien que pour la France seule, on découvre la présence d'au moins deux traditions juridiques distinctes et souvent imbriquées: la tradition romaine et la tradition franque.

In recent months a number of lively and stimulating papers have been published dealing with the meaning of history within the discipline of anthropology (Bermann 1978, Boon 1980, Cannon 1978, Cohn 1980, Higonnet 1980). In the literature, however, relatively little emphasis has been given to the variation in anthropological ideas within the tradition of anthropology. One very important aspect of such variation is to be found in the relationship between particular national cultural traditions and the development of anthropological ideas. Writers who have tended to see the history of the discipline in terms of biological paradigms, utilitarian behaviorism, and various conceptions of anthropology as 'objective' science, have failed to grasp adequately either the continuity or the range of variation within the anthropological tradition. Therefore, anthropologists and those thinking about the history of anthropology need to analyze anthropological ideas in historical context. Such an attempt to reconsider the past arouses opposition because it necessarily contradicts rationalist assumptions about anthropology as a science akin to the natural sciences, obedient to the laws of progress and independent of humanpreoccupations, a curious claim anyway for a science of man.

‘Who does not know Turner's picture of the Golden Bough ?’ asks Sir James Frazer at the beginning of his journey into the underworld of primitive magic and superstition called The Golden Bough. And indeed who does not know Frazer's work itself, if not in the full twelve volumes edition, then in the continually reprinted abridged version, or if not by academic reference then as a popular classic entrenched in modern culture?. This paper re-examines this text according to the presence of two discrepant readings of it. The investigation of this discrepancy makes use of the idea of ‘intertextuality’ according to which meanings of a text are located within the discursive traditions to which the text responds and within which it participates actively in the production of meanings. Superficially, The Golden Bough is easily perceived to occupy a place within a web of discourses: folklore, the history of religion, classical studies, social anthropology, as well as literary criticism and even literature itself. We are concerned here with social anthropology and literature/literary criticism, in terms of their uses and treatments of the work; also, significantly with the object discourse of the work.

‘Spencer is dead’, wrote Talcott Parsons at the beginning of The Structureof Social Action, ‘but who killed him and how ? This is the problem’. In this study, which was both the foundation of Parsons’ structural-functionalism and a major reinterpretation of the history of modern social science, Spencer stood for a vanquished schoolof social thought. He represented positivism at the suicidal extreme where its naive individualism fell apart, paradoxically passing over into its antithesis, a biological determinism precluding individual initiative. His thought had died at the intersection of individual and society.Beyond this point, Parsons discovered the rise of a new social theory in Marshall, Pareto, Durkheim and Weber. From these four thinkers, working independently of one another, Parsons tried to put together the pieces of a system, succeeding where Spencer had decisively failed, reconciling personal agency and social order.

The story is therefore restricted to a period, as well as to persons. It is restricted, too, to a short essay which is not a ‘researched’ history but a personal appraisal of past events; not a complete account but an answer to particular questions about those who graduated from L.S.E. in the early 'fifties to be dispersed by professional success during the 'sixties.