ABSTRACT
The work of S. N. Eisenstadt, as clearly demonstrated in his The Form of Sociology, represents the conviction that there can exist a single social science whose advance as a coherent system of concepts and theories can be recognized. The transmission of culture has been of special interest to the tradition within anthropology once known as "culture and personality". In the realms of both biology and behavior there exists a striking disjunction between the main mechanisms of transmission and motivations that "energize" those mechanisms. In human biology, of course, the main mechanism is the act of intercourse, which results in the fertilization of the egg by the sperm and in subsequent embryonic development. The existence of distinct mechanisms of cultural transmission is perhaps better documented in another realm—that of language, sometimes seen as the prototype of other cultural structures and processes.
