ABSTRACT
In sciences of all kinds, most awkwardly in the human sciences, the analytic process of parsing stimuli into various mental files is more or less skilfully lifted from the realm of sheer reflex into the exalted status of fully articulated analysis. This is the function of scientific categories that are, in their technical state, often called variables, available for numeric or verbal manipulation. Like all mental procedures analytic methods are good in some ways, bad in others. But they are acutely interesting and probably confounding when it comes to an endeavour, like the one tasked to this chapter, to sort out the differences, if any, between social and cultural theories. Here the social and the cultural, if different in analytic ways, are approached as connected in the real world as all things are. This idea allows cultural theory to enter the world of all other social things, and thus to end an institutionally fixed but intellectually useless distinction.
