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Michael Banton was a militant scientist. He was a committed advocate of the scientific method. He fought, in the numerous intellectual skirmishes in which he engaged, throughout his academic life, for the serious and systematic application of the scientific method to the study of social relations, and especially the study of 'race' relations, for which he is best known. Michael argued for the analytical, objective, empirical and critical examination of social beliefs and interpersonal behaviour. He was not alone in his defence of the sober pursuit of genuinely scientific knowledge, against political ideology and especially Marxist ideology. He consciously aligned himself with some of the pioneers of objective social science, and especially with Max Weber, Edward Shils and Karl Popper.

Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Dedication -- Contents -- Introduction to the AldineTransaction Edition -- Preface -- Exploring Ethnic Identity -- Introduction -- Identity: some preliminary soundings -- 'Tribalism' on the Copperbelt -- Tribal associations -- 'Tribe', 'class', and 'situation' -- Urban-dwellers and tribal chiefs -- Ethnic identity and social change in Melanesia -- The crisis of Tolai identity -- Aspects of Jewish identity in the United States -- The second generation in Yankee City -- From gilded ghetto to the suburbs -- A "non-Jewish" Jew? -- Ethnicity and identity -- 2. Military Ethos and Ethnic Ranking on the Copperbelt -- 3. Identification with the Grandparents and Ethnic Identity -- Notes -- References -- Name Index -- Subject Index

David Martin's sociology of religion embodied an expansive vision of religion, one that encompassed the entirety of human and social experience: its political, national, economic, aesthetic, poetical and spiritual-religious orientations, and the complexities of their institutional arrangements, entanglements and compromises with one another. David's sociology was not formulaic; it was a constant struggle – a struggle for understanding the motives, forms and patterns of human behaviour as these changed and shifted under changing circumstances. David was extraordinarily sensitive to the importance of the historical context, and especially the effects of modernity, in all its different guises, on the great cultural traditions of Western civilisation: Christianity and Western 'high culture' - the 'Western canon' of European art, music, literature and poetry. For David, the former presented the best account of human life; the latter, the pinnacles of human creative and imaginative achievement. As my doctoral supervisor, he also helped me to see and understand the persistence, revival and evolution of that other great European cultural tradition, the Classical tradition, the civilisation of the ancient Greek and Roman worlds, in the modern world. Like its Biblical, Judaeo-Christian, counterpart, the Classical tradition has offered, well into the twentieth century, a powerful repertoire of cultural themes, images and symbols of human existence. This repertoire was often seen to parallel and complement the Biblical repertoire, while in its artistic, musical, and literary manifestations, would form the basis of the 'Western canon'. Modern cultural movements, and especially the expressive and utilitarian revolutions of the 1960s, would set out to break these great images of the axial age. David's mission would be to restore them.

By examining the period from the late eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, this article shows the development in European art of a new genre, that of national art. The new artistic orientation was taken from the doctrine of nationalism, a philosophy which idealised the nation, the historically-evolved, ethno-cultural community. The essay shows, first, that the visual arts have been potent vehicles of the national idea; second, that works of art have been accepted as "national" only to the extent to which they have captured the way of life of the wider, cultural community, rather than that of the elites alone; third, that artists, by engaging with the "spirit" of their cultural community, have contributed to the modernisation of this community-the systematisation or "streamlining" of ethnic identities and solidarities into national identities and solidarities; and fourth, that the creative transformation of the ethno-cultural experience into art has also transformed this experience into a positive and central, national experience. (Original abstract)