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This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1974

This paper revisits the author's Ph.D. research in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester during the early 1960s. Wes Sharrock also was a PhD student there, and they shared dissatisfactions with the predominant approaches to sociology at the time, and turned for inspiration Winch's critique of social science and Wittgenstein's philosophy of language. At that time they also became acquainted with the empirical alternative to sociology offered by ethnomethodology. This paper describes how insights inspired through frequent and long conversations with Sharrock inspired the approach the author took in his observational study of active members of a local political party. The study was focused on 'The Left Wing' of that party, but rather than treating talk of 'The Left' as a representation of a stable ideological group, the study paid close attention to the discursive use of the distinction between members of the local party leadership, and elucidated the changing membership of 'The Left Wing' and the occasioned relevance of being included in that category. The study suggested that 'talking politics' was not a merely a matter of talking about politics, but was an expression of and constitutive feature of local party politics. ; + Sprache: eng.

Reid reviews Faith in Politics by James A. Reichley.

"Populist Politics in Africa" published on by Oxford University Press.

"Politics is, at its core, a kind of activity, a particular type of doing. It comprises a distinctive and varied repertoire of human practices that we regularly characterize as political and that we think of as somehow defining the essence of public life. One might say that specific forms of political engagement are to politics as batting, throwing, catching and running are to baseball. They constitute, in effect, the sum and substance of the enterprise"--