Mariano Longo

The paper attempts a comparison between two librettos set to music by Wolfgang Amedeus Mozart. The first, Idomeneo Re di Creta, was written by Giambattista Varesco and performed for the first time in 1780. It is an opera seria, which adopts tropes and common-places of the genre. Once Idomeneo comes back to his island, he is able to kill a monster menacing his people, thus restoring order and peace. The social structure, as emerging from the libretto, is still linked to the Ancient Regime model: society is unequal and order and justice are the output of the legitimate superiority of the sovereign.

El presente trabajo reflexiona respecto a los limites entre sociologia, narracion sociologica y literatura, argumentando con autores clasicos, y conceptualizaciones, asi como haciendo referencia a las diferentes corrientes teoricas y metodologicas, que hacen uso de la descripcion o narracion en sus analisis y del tipo de narracion que aplican.

Il saggio tematizza la questione dell'etnocentrismo nelle scienze sociali, facendo riferimento a Parsons e a Banfield, i quali consideravano le societa meridionali come caratterizzate da una forte resistenza alla modernizzazione. Analizzando autori come de Sousa Santos, Grosfoguel, Cassano e utilizzando in maniera eccentrica un contributo di Luhmann sull'argomento, il saggio propone modalita alternative di intendere il rapporto tra la collocazione culturale e geografica dello scienziato e la teoria sociale.

The paper deals with the transformation of power at the local level, by making reference to Lecce, a middle city in the South of Italy (Salento), as a case study. The authors draw their empirical material from a wider sociological research on the same topic they have edited in 2014 (Cremonesini, Cristante, Longo 2014) and try to sketch how the crisis of traditional political parties has produced a renewed vitality of relational networks, yet by now unable to define a common strategy and to share common values and a common strategic project for city policies. Keywords : power, elites, salons, relational networks, local government, South Italy

Introduction Features and structure of narratives The cognitive value of fictional narratives Narratives and sociology: at the roots of a forgotten tradition Writing sociology: social sciences as texts When sociologists use literary sources On the sociological use of narratives

This article attempts to demonstrate the relevance of both the cultural and structural dimensions of the Sacra Corona Unita, the Apulian Mafia. By assuming Sacra Corona Unita as a case study and by analysing its cultural components such as norms, rituals, self-representations the paper tries to identify a set of characteristics which connote Mafia-like organized crime as such.

En Referring to authors such as Alfred Schutz, Emile Durkheim and Pierre Bourdieu, this short essay tries to identify the redefined characters of everyday life in the pandemic period. It Facendo riferimento ad autori come Alfred Schutz, Emile Durkheim e Pierre Bourdieu, questo breve saggio cerca di individuare i caratteri ristrutturati della quotidianita nel periodo della pandemia.

This paper is about the interconnections between sociology and literature. It focuses on the contributions to the topic of such authors as Florian Znaniecki, Robert Nisbet and Robert Redfield. The brief historical reconstruction is integrated with some thoughts on the role of narratives (including literary narratives) as tools to understand our contemporary reality.

This paper is about the interconnections between sociology and literature. It focuses on the contributions to the topic of such authors as Florian Znaniecki, Robert Nisbet and Robert Redfield. The brief historical reconstruction is integrated with some thoughts on the role of narratives (including literary narratives) as tools to understand our contemporary reality.

The paper analyzes both the theoretical and political dimension of otherness. From a theoretical point of view, it is by now evident that the concepts developed by social sciences are partial representation of reality;  from an ethnocentric  point  of  view,  removing  alternative  modalities, which Raewyn  Connel called Southern  Theories.  Our  recent  awareness  of  the  partiality  of  our  thought  is  strongly  connected  to
globalization  which  is  making  Western  countries  ever  less  central  from  the  economic,  social  and  cultural point of view. In this transitional phase, Western countries make its migration policies ever stricter, as the migrant is seen as one of emblems of our lost centrality.

This article attempts to demonstrate the relevance of both the cultural and structural dimensions of the Sacra Corona Unita, the Apulian Mafia. By assuming Sacra Corona Unita as a case study and by analysing its cultural components such as norms, rituals, self-representations the paper tries to identify a set of characteristics which connote Mafia-like organized crime as such.

The paper analyzes Talcott Parsons' early essay ("Capitalism" in recent German Literature: Sombart and Weber) published in two issues of The Journal of Political Economy in 1928 and 1929. The paper, which introduces both Sombart and Weber to the American public, represents a relevant moment in the development of Parsons as a sociologist. After discussing Parsons' interpretation of both Sombart's and Weber's theories about the origin of Capitalism, the paper gives an interpretation of Parsons role in the establishment of Weber as a founding father of sociology and the relative irrelevance of Sombart as a sociological classic.

La questione metodologica più importante che gli scienziati sociali devono affrontare quando fanno ricorso a fonti letterarie è quella della loro veridicità. Il tema della veridicità è insieme rilevante e complesso, dal momento che impone di ragionare sull'attendibilità e sulla qualità dei dati. Quando utilizza narrazioni letterarie, infatti, lo scienziato sociale fa riferimento a fonti fittizie per loro stessa natura e le utilizza come strumenti per comprendere meglio aspetti della realtà (ad esempio la cultura, i valori e i processi sociali). Il saggio affronta il tema del valore cognitivo delle narrazioni e la loro utilizzabilità per la ricerca sociale

The very possibility of a sociology of emotions lies not in homologies but in differences. If emotions were experienced and managed in the same way across historical times, cultures and the different strata of the same society, any attempt at a sociology of emotions would be frustrating. In order for a specific sociological interest in emotions to emerge, the idea had to be overcome, according to which emotions are the sole irreflexive output of some interior drive, a mechanical response to the environment directed by our genetic make-up. Approaches which consider emotions as universal, transcultural and homogeneous, based as they are on an essentialist conception of human action, are endowed with a cogent persuasiveness. Essentialism (so one could plausibly call this trend) may be detected in biology, in psychology and even in the social sciences. The specific features of the approach were defined by Charles Darwin (1872) in his The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals, in which he contrasted the idea of a divine origin of human expression, justified by the resemblance of humans to God and, in so doing, established a substantial continuity between animal and human emotions. Thus, according to Darwin, emotions and their expression are inborn, part of our inherited qualities: That the chief expressive actions, exhibited by man and by the lower animals, are now innate or inherited, that is, have not been learnt by the individual, is admitted by every one. So little has learning or imitation to do with several of them that they are from the earliest days and throughout life quite beyond our control. (ibid., p. 351) The evidence of the inborn character of emotions is to be traced, according to Darwin, in the spontaneous (hence non-imitative) capacity of young children to express feelings. One more quotation may explain Darwin's position: We may see children, only two or three years old, and even those born blind, blushing from shame; and the naked scalp of a very young infant reddens from passion. Infants scream from pain directly after birth, and all their features then assume the same form as during subsequent years […] We can thus also understand the fact that the young and the old of widely different races, both with man and animals, express the same state of mind by the same movements. (ibid., p. 352) Learning as an aspect of emotional expression is not utterly denied by Darwin, but it is reduced to a complementary character of hereditary and is given the ancillary role of a training in the appropriate use of innate qualities: "it is remarkable that some [emotions], which are certainly innate, require practice in the individual, before they are performed in a full and perfect manner; for instance, the inheritance of most of weeping and laughing" (ibid.). Charles Darwin's approach has been highly influential, chiefly in the field of psychology (Ekman, 1984; 1992), even though traces of essentialism may be detected even in some sociological treatment of emotions (see infra, Chapter II). This should not surprise, for at least two reason: the first, is the power of Darwin's argument, which destabilised the long-held idea of a peculiar position of man in the universe, producing a paradigmatic change by which the human being is a product of natural evolution and cannot be utterly distinguished from the rest of nature. The second is due to the apparently incontrovertible character of Darwin's reasoning: after all, it is part of our experience of the world that we all express (and probably feel) emotions in the same way. Yet, if emotions are conceived as innate, the operating space for the development of a sociology of emotions is by necessity limited: emotions are pre-given, hence emotional behaviour appears as the field of investigation of other disciplinary fields, such as psychology. The sociological perspective on emotion must, by necessity, start from a different set of premises. Some thirty years after Charles Darwin had issued his book on the expression of feeling, Charles Horton

This paper is about the interconnections between sociology and literature.
It focuses on the contributions to the topic of such authors as Florian
Znaniecki, Robert Nisbet and Robert Redfield. The brief historical
reconstruction is integrated with some thoughts on the role of narratives
(including literary narratives) as tools to understand our contemporary
reality.