Vita e Pensiero

The rise of the network society and the digitalization of communication processes changed modern experience of time and rhythm; notwithstanding a lot of theories account timeless time, real time and network time as a consistent and typical kind of temporality of internet and mobile communication devices, forcing our everyday experience of time and rhythm in a very deterministic way, technical affordances, cultural forms and users’ practices describe a more complex, pluralistic and flexible kind of temporality. Users’ everyday practices of CMC and ICT look like a jazz performance, that includes qualities such as «swinging», improvising, group interaction, developing an «individual voice» on the basis of their social position, habitus and moral economy. Key words: time, rhythm, communication, internet, mobility.

The sociological analysis of the commemorative practices represents nowadays a well defined branch of research into the wide and many sided fragmented area of memory studies. Much of the work conducted in this field has followed the path traced by Emile Durkheim theory. Nevertheless, in the course of the last two decades, scholars have tried to move away from the Durkheimian orthodoxy in order to find more appropriate ways to account for the complex variety of the commemorative universes. The most valuable efforts conducted in this direction are represented by the concept of multivocal commemoration elaborated by R. Wagner-Pacifici and B. Schwartz, and by the concept of fragmented commemoration, developed by V. Vinitzky-Seroussi. Drawing on some empirical stimuli provided by an on-going research on the commemoration of the partisan victims of a massacre perpetrated in the village of Cornalba (northern Italy) by a fascist militia, our paper tries to show that multivocal and fragmented types of commemoration don’t fulfill the typology. In our opinion there is still room for another kind of commemorative rite that we would define conflicting commemoration. That is a specific kind of ritual that witness the emergence, during its own execution, of two or more conflicting representations of the same past that it tries to commemorate. In describing this kind of commemoration, we argue that it is more likely to show up in societies marked by pasts of deep social divisions, where a full reconciliation is still not accomplished. Key-words: memory, difficult pasts, commemoration practices, italian resistance, reconciliation.

A. VITALINI, The use of social networks for the construction of probability samples: opportunities and limitations for the study of populations without sampling frame Populations without sampling frame, usually called hidden populations, are inherently hard to sample by conventional sampling designs. Often the only practical methods of obtanining the sample involve following social links from some initially identified respondents to add more research partecipants to the sample. These kinds of link-tracing designs make the sample liable to various forms of bias and make extremely difficult to generalize the results to the population studied. This article describes some attempts to build a statistical theory of link-tracing designs and illustrates, deeply, the Respondent-Driven Sampling, a link-tracing sampling design that should allow researchers to make, in hidden populations, asymptotically unbiased estimates under certain conditions. Last, the article discusses some features and problems of the Respondent-Driven Sampling which deserve further investigation and study. Key words: snowball sampling, link-tracing sampling, sampling hidden populations, responentdriven sampling, Markov chain.

T. MARCI, Sociology of Being and Ontology of Society. Notes around Andrea Bixio’s Lettera sull’«inesistente» The aim of this paper is to underline the sociological meaning of the book of Andrea Bixio, Lettera sull’«inesistente» (Rubbettino, Soveria Mannelli 2010); a book that revalues the experiences of the sacred and religion as fundamental horizons in order to think the real quality of our age and the complex condiction of the contemporary world. In fact, in order to consider the fundamental dialectic that crosses the relationship between social immanence and religious transcendence, this book opens again the possibility to run throught an able new sociological perspective to pointed out the necessity of a change of paradigm to the reflection of the social scientists. A change that returns to the originality of the sociological reflection, bringing back the thought to its essential historicity, that is, to the historical concreteness of a opened and indeterminated social experience. Key words: sacred, religion, sociology, ontology, transcendence.