  Path integral techniques in collective fields are shown to be a useful
analytical tool to reformulate a field theory defined in terms of microscopic
quark (gluon) degrees of freedom as an effective theory of collective boson
(meson) fields. For illustrations, the path integral bosonization approach is
applied to derive a (non)linear sigma model from a Nambu-Jona-Lasinio (NJL)
quark model. The method can be extended to include higher order derivative
terms in meson fields or heavy-quark symmetries. It is also approximately
applicable to QCD.
