THE TRADUCTION OF THE TRADITIONAL: Sociology and the study of Complex Pre‐Industrial Societies.

It could be argued that sociology is part of the secular dogmata of industrialised systems. Its concerns are now almost entirely confined to theoretical analyses of the institutional and normative structures of modem societies. As a discipline, its interests are purportedly reformative as well as being disinterestedly academic. In the “trade”, there is a praise‐worthy emphasis on relevance and an increasing predisposition towards the practicalities of policy and decision‐making processes. It is absorbed by the problems that derive from industrialisation: the encroachments of the new technology and economic uncertainty; the expansion of the new colonialism and political instability; crime, terrorism and the anonymity of the urban situation ‐ in short, the mounting pressures of living in the contemporary world. All these provide sociology with its current, rather formidable, field of enquiry.