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Ernest Gellner's understanding of the social role of absurdity is discussed & illustrated with examples of how different kinds of irrationality have social consequences. Gellner notes that anthropologists often attempt to explain away apparent incongruities with two principles of charitable interpretation: elastic contextualization & underlying structuralism. It is argued that moral & cognitive uncertainty is universal & expressed through incoherence. Absurdity may also be the consequence of a mistake or stupidity. Carlo M. Cipolla's (1989) useful analysis of stupidity is shown to be widely applicable. There is considerable reluctance to call stupid incoherence perceived by ethnographers, but not their hosts. It is argued that the recognition of absurdity is often superior to the principle of charity when interpreting societies. 28 References. H. von Rautenfeld

▪ Abstract  Two features have marked the sociological analysis of violence: (a) disparate clusters of research on various forms of violence that have been the object of urgent social concern, and relatedly, (b) an overwhelming focus on forms of violence that are socially deviant and motivated by willful malice. The resulting literature is balkanized and disjointed, and yet narrowly focused. The systematic understanding of violence as a broad genus of social behavior has suffered accordingly. I examine the issues that have clouded the analysis of violence: the importance of physical injuries vs. psychological, social, and material injuries; the weight placed on physical vs. verbal and written actions; the role of force vs. victim complicity in the infliction of injuries; and the emphasis on interpersonal vs. corporate agents and victims. That discussion highlights the widely varying forms of violence in social life, including many instances that are neither driven by malicious intent nor socially repudiated. I consider the diverse motives that drive violent actions and the variant social acceptance or repudiation that they meet. I propose a generic definition of violence, freed of ad hoc restrictions, that encompasses the full population of violent social actions. This directs us to more systematic questions about violence in social life.

The case of the Danish "cartoon war" was a premonition of things to come: accelerated social construction of inequalities and their accelerated symbolic communication, translation and negotiation. New uses of values in organizing and managing inequalities emerge. Values lead active social life as bourgeois virtues (McCloskey, 2006), their subversive alternatives or translated "memes" of cultural history. Since social life of values went global and online, tracing their hybrid manifestations requires cross-culturally competent domestication (Magala, 2005) as if they were "memes" manipulated for further reengineering. Hopes are linked to emergent concepts of "microstorias" (Boje,2002), bottom-up, participative, open citizenship (Balibar,2004), disruption of stereotypical branding in mass-media (Sennett, 2006). However, Kuhn's opportunistic deviation from Popperian evolutionary epistemology should fade away with other hidden injuries of Cold War, to free our agenda for the future of social sciences in general and organizational sciences in particular (Fuller, 2000, 2003).