ABSTRACT
This part introduction presents an overview of the key concepts presents in the subsequent chapters. This part focuses on the close connection between processes of data-acquisition and particular social setting. It seeks to reassess the workings of ethnicity by exploring the variation in values held within an ostensibly singular cultural group: the Welsh. British attitudes to the criminally insane are highly ambivalent, Brown asserts. The division between ‘bad’ and ‘mad’ is fuzzy, and how this difference is to translate into legal as distinct from medical institutionalization is fraught with contingency. Key values are implicated in the performance of identity and social practice, affecting individual lives and also those of communities. A method must be devised, however, to measure and not corrupt the intrinsically distributive nature of cultural values in a population.
