ABSTRACT
Marginalities come in many forms. The marginality status of a migrant scholar is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for discovering national particularities of practices and their institutional conditions. Yet as sociologists the author, not typically satisfied with descriptive accounts of single cases. Instead the author seeks insights on macro-sociological patterns, which migrant scholars are especially likely to do, in a Weberian tradition, by comparing specific cases with ideal types. In the fall of 1973 the author enrolled in a combined sociology-economics-public policy program at the University of Cologne. In addition, Ryan and the author collaborated to examine collective memories and the framing of hate crime law comparatively for Germany and the United States. To compare collective memories they examined national holidays and important memorial sites in and around the nations' capitals. Lewis Coser reports an experience in his introduction to Maurice Halbwachs' work on collective memory.
