Mountain symbolism and geographical imaginations

Generational research: between historical and sociological imaginations

In an overview of the history of post war British sociological research Mike Savage traces a transition from what he describes as a ‘gentlemanly sociology’ – normative in intention drawing on narrative and secondary sources – to a technical and empirical project employing the new methods of the interview and the survey. The latter, he suggests, abandoned an evolutionary project of relating past...

Rethinking Symbolism

[The pages numbers are the same as in the original edition]

Sound Symbolism

Sound symbolism is the term for a hypothesized systematic relationship between sound and meaning (Hinton, Nichols, & Ohala 1994). The idea that there might be a non-arbitrary relationship between the physical aspect of a speech signal and its meaning is quite an old idea, dating back at least to the time of Plato who, in his work Cratylus, had Socrates debating with two pupils the issue of whet...

Freud, Psychoanalysis, and Symbolism

Freud, Psychoanalysis, and Symbolism offers an innovative general theory of symbolism, derived from Freud’s psychoanalytic theory and relocated within mainstream scientific psychology. It is the first systematic investigation of the development of Freud’s treatment of symbolism throughout his published works, and discovers in those writings a broad theory which is far superior to the widely acc...

Myths and Symbolism