ABSTRACT
There has been considerable social and cultural change in our societies, and many people have lost faith in the old ways of explaining those events. Sociologists have not been immune. To begin to shape this towards a debate about sociology, the anxiety is that culture might have broken free from the normal social constraints into some floating hyperreality, making the old ways of understanding redundant. Traditional societies were different, perhaps, and their cultural activity remained constrained by social structures or organisations of various kinds, to such an extent that it could be ‘read off’ from a knowledge of such structures. In modern or postmodern societies, that possibility no longer applies.
