The topic of reciprocity has long played an important role in anthropology, ethnology, and sociological thinking, for instance, in the classic writings of Georg Simmel (1950), Bronislaw Malinowski (1926), Marcel Mauss (1950/1990), or Alvin Gouldner (1960). More than four decades ago, Gouldner clarified the concept and its dimensions and assumed the existence of a universal norm of reciprocity i...

This article calls for a re-conceptualization of the social sciences by asking for a cosmopolitan turn. The intellectual undertaking of redefining cosmopolitanism is a trans-disciplinary one, which includes geography, anthropology, ethnology, international relations, international law, political philosophy and political theory, and now sociology and social theory. Methodological nationalism, wh...

Colonial nurses were ideal agents of colonial medicine's supposed beneficence: while practising and teaching "hygiene", they also reinforced racial and cultural separation. In some cases, however, the nurses took their role as healers and teachers of local populations much more seriously than was authorized implicitly by their employer. This article analyses the circulation of original life wri...

The first AustKin project (AustKin I) collected a large database of kinship terms from Aboriginal languages all over Australia, endeavouring to maintain standards of spelling, kin formulae and group identities, without losing the details of original sources used. An online geospatial interface has been used to map distributions of forms of terms and their polysemies or equations. The patterns o...

André-Georges Haudricourt was born in 1911. He grew up on his parents’ farm, in a remote area of Picardie. He was curious of techniques, plants and languages from his early childhood. After he passed the Baccalauréat in 1928, his father advised him to enter the National Institute of Agriculture (Institut national agronomique), in the hope that he would obtain a prestigious position in the admin...

Holling, Diversity and Stability in Ecological Systems (report and symposium held 26-28 May 1969 at Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, N.Y.)]. 21. A. Alland, Evolution and Human Behavior (Doubleday, Garden City N.J., 1973). 22. G. Hardin, Science 162, 1243 (1968). 23. H. G. Barnett, Innovation: The Basis of Culture Change (McGraw-Hill, New York, 1953). 24. R. Firth, J. R. Anthropol. Inst. 8...

In general, the figurines belonging to the Neolithic (the New Stone Age) have rarely been under functional analysis. Nevertheless, three studies undertaken on the figurines unearthed from some places in the Middle East have presented some classifications for them, and attempted to study different results in terms of their application (Voight, M., 1983, pp.186-192). The first one is the publishe...

The Meertens Institute in Amsterdam was founded in 1930 under the name ‘Dialect Bureau’ (Dialectenbureau), and became an official institute of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) in 1952. In 1979, it was named after its first director, P.J. Meertens (1899-1985), a student of 17th century Dutch literature. Currently it comprises two departments, one of Dutch Ethnology and o...