One particular death and the rituals, funeral ceremony, and mourning which followed it are used to explore the relationship of the living to death. The particular death described was one which occurred during a year of fieldwork among urban Punjabis. By examining the category of mourners, it was possible to discern a structure within which grief…

This paper summarizes ethnic and other subcultural differences in drinking behavior and drinking problems, with primary emphasis upon the series of U.S. national surveys conducted by the author's Social Research Group during the last 15 years. The author discusses comparative findings from surveys conducted by others in several European countries,…

Ethnographic semantics is that discipline which seeks to understand human cognition through an analysis of the cognitive content of linguistic expressions: that is, the systematic study of the meanings of words and the role of these meanings in cognitive systems. There are many misconceptions about the nature of ethnosemantics, however, and by…

This paper analyzes the prophetic speech of Ga spirit mediums in terms of its linguistic style and its socio-religious function. As used in the study, "prophetic speech" is understood to have two major characteristics: (1) glossolalic style, and (2) prophetic message content, and it is used by people believed to be possessed by spirits. Prophetic…

A general observation about the vocabularies of most languages is that they tend to increase in size over time. Little is known about the causal mechanisms involved in this lexical expansion, but most anthropologists and linguists are in agreement that it probably mirrors general cultural evolution. The study of lexical growth becomes important if…

Argues that progress in satellite communications depends upon the assurance that satellites are useful to people in all countries, and that a world television network and a worldwide packet data communication system would help achieve that goal, and asserts that direct-satellite television broadcasting does not represent, at present, an active…

Discusses the mass media and education, arguing that the crucial phenomenon is the industrialization of the mind: the mind-making industry is viewed as a product of the last hundred years which has developed at such a pace and assumed such varied forms that it has outgrown understanding and control. (Author/JM)

Reviews some of the current literature on the sociolinguistic aspects of ESL. (RM)

This speech was presented at each of the 1969 division conventions of the Music Educators National Conference.

Based on a paper presented at the Groves Conference, Boston, Massachusetts, April, 1968.

Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Southern Sociological Society, New Orleans, Louisiana, April, 1966.

Political power tends to overlap with economic power, thus favoring those with access to land, livestock, capital, and other productive resources; in virtually all societies women have fewer of those productive resources than men, which reflects and explains women's limited political power. Growing documentation indicates that men…