Book excerpt: An attempt at a final summary of much of my work in anthropology has been divided into two separate volumes, Status Inequality: The Self in Culture, 1990, published by Sage Publications and this present volume, Social Cohesion and Alienation: Minorities in the United States and Japan. Many of the themes touched upon in both volumes have appeared in a series of writings that stretch through a period starting in the early sixties through the late eighties. Some of these efforts resulted in books; others appeared separately as invited contributions to symposia, as special issues of journals, or as parts of edited volumes.