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PERSONALITY are among the most common and widespread cultural devices for "making sense" of interpersonal behavior. Of the many vaned uses of personality trait-terms in ordinary language, one of their most important is in the interpretation of social behavior. Everyday descriptions and explanations of social interaction often draw upon folk assumptions about behavioral consistencies in the action of individuals over time and across situations. These assumptions are often evident in words which describe individual behavioral traits. Such words can be found in diverse languages spoken by inhabitants of very different social worlds. Are there significant commonalities in the linguistic and cultural organization of concepts of personality in different societies? Or [82, 1980 are both individual behavior and the language used to describe it so variable that little can be said about consistencies in concepts of personality across cultural boundaries? AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGISTThis paper suggests the possibility of universal conceptual themes in the language of personality description. Speculations about universals made here are necessarily tentative given that relevant evidence is drawn from only a few languages. The case for universality is made primarily on the basis of a comparison of lexical data from a Melanesian language with the findings of similar studies in India (Shweder 1972) and the United States (Rosenberg, Nelson and Vivekenanthan 1968). For the sake of brevity, these comparisons are made using English translations of the Melanesian and Indian word-sets. While there are real dangers in matching English glosses which mask the range of culture-specific meanings, models of conceptual organization derived independently from these distinct languages show remarkable similarities in overall structure. This structure is interpreted here as composed of the intersecting dimensions of solidarity/conflict and dominance/submission. Although these dimensions resemble closely the evaluation (good/bad) and potency (strong/weak) dimensions described by Osgood (Osgood, May, and Miron 1975) as universal modes of affective response (or connotative meaning) in linguistic modifiers of all sorts, they have a more specific and "meaningful" significance in the realm of language used to describe interpersonal behavior.Cross-cultural uniformity in the organization of personality concepts is surprising in light of the social diversity of societies which have been examined, as well as the variability of individual behavior itself which has proven so elusive to formal measurement. Positing conceptual universals in personality description departs from the relativistic posture of cultural anthropology in past decades. Personality descriptors, however, may symbolize complex actions and mental states. They most often cannot be linked easily with observable referents. Indeed, evidence which shows no direct parallel between the structure of trait attributions and actual consistencies in the behavior of individuals (DAndrade 1974;Shwed...

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This paper examines spaces in between the "out there" of collective representation and the "in here" of personal cognition and emotion by focusing on acts of public remembrance that are at once individual and collective, personal and national. Reporting on research carried out at the U.S. national memorial to the bombing attack at Pearl Harbor that drew America into World War II, the paper analyzes the discourse of "survivors" who present personal stories in the memorial context. The analysis argues that a repertoire of discursive strategies functions to emotionalize national narrative, while at the same time works to nationalize personal pasts.

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A study was carried out on the bacteriological faecal flora of horses before and after oral doses of oxytetracycline or trimethoprim plus sulphadiazine. Administration of oxytetracycline was rapidly followed by large increases in counts of coliforms. Bacteroides and Streptococcus species, the disappearance of Veillonella species, the appearance of Clostridium perfringens type A in large numbers and the accumulation of watery fluid in the rectal contents. These changes were not seen following administration of trimethoprim-sulphadiazine and it was concluded that oral treatment of horses with this combination was unlikely to be accompanied by the hazard of inducing colitis.

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