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Many a beginning student in the social sciences learns of Henry Sumner Maine (1822-1888) as an intellectual forebear. He stimulated research among his contemporaries and successors by conceptualizing the modernizing [...]

Is science politics prosecuted by other means? For several decades, many historians and sociologists of science have undertaken research intended to answer this question in the affirmative. They have differed [...]

In the latter part of the nineteenth century, diverse sciences grounded in natural history made a virtue of field research that somehow tested scientists' endurance; disciplinary change derived from the premise that witnesses were made reliable by character-molding trials. The turn to the field was a function of structural transformations in various quarters, including (but hardly limited to) global politics, communications systems, and scientific institutions, and it conduced to biogeographical explanations, taxonomic schemes that admitted of heterogeneity, and affective research styles. Sociocultural anthropology, which took specialized shape at the beginning of the twentieth century, shared many properties with other field sciences, but its method--participant observation--was distinctive. Critical to the method's definition were the efforts of the British experimental psychologist-anthropologist W. H. R. Rivers, who relied on notions then widespread in Europe and the United States. The discipline's future mythic hero, Bronislaw Malinowski, embraced Rivers's model. For both men, proper fieldwork meant using the researcher's body as an instrument and entailed understanding both the anthropologist's body and the research subject's body as energy systems; this symmetry facilitated a relativist perspective. Participant observation remains central to sociocultural anthropology, but the discipline's pedagogic habits contributed to loss of memory of its energetic conceptualization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the religion of Aborigines in Australia. Representations of the quality of the spirituality and morals of Aborigines by missionaries; Theories on the relationships of totemism to the religious beliefs of Australian Aborigines; Place of religion in Aboriginal society; Stereotypes of the behavior and living style of Aborigines.

Explores the use of autobiographies in the study of history and sociology of science. Individual recollections of the authors; Autobiographies of persons in community psychology; Emphasis on the initial conceptualization and academic organization of community psychology indicated by autobiographies; Development of specific spheres of professional practice.

This paper reviews recent interpretive trends among historians of anthropology and sociology, examining both introductory texts and scholarly studies. It focuses on works published over the last ten years, and stresses that there has been no resolution of the long-standing conflict between “presentist” and “historicist” approaches to the history of the human sciences. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explains why the editors of the periodical “Knowledge and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present” decided to publish, in the volume three, 1983 edition, a special issue restricted to new work in the history of the social sciences. This collection exemplifies an emergent point of view. It also has a programmatic purpose: to foster communication among scholars working in professional isolation.

This article discusses prescriptive implications of historical self-consciousness in the school of social sciences. That history should be so used does not represent a novel insight. Historians writing at various times and places, describing societies both Western and non-Western, literate and pre-literate, have noted the role which history may assume; it becomes a weapon in the struggle of rival claimants to power, interpreted to suit the needs of each. It has long been customary for sociologists to legitimize their efforts by demonstrating their affinities to mythologized ancestors. The author is of the views that in order to recognize the tortured nature of the intellectual contortions thus performed, though, we may need to examine examples of this behavior remote from our own concerns and experience: for example, attempts by the late nineteenth-century British sociologists to demonstrate the continuity of their ideas with those of Adam Smith. But for sociology, as for other disciplines and whole peoples, the past is now always an issue; only under certain circumstances will it become controversial. In recent decades, as the degree of professional consensus within the sociological community has waxed and waned, the evidence of the past has seemed increasingly important to the present.

The article presents information on British anthropology and African colonial administration. In Britain and abroad a considerable proportion of the literature of anthropology's current identity crisis concerns its guilt by association with colonialism. Anthropology and imperial expansion are genetically linked: one is presumed the ideology of the other. Influential colonial administrators identified themselves with functionalist anthropology as it emerged during the first decades of the 20th century. Institutional interdependence decreased with advancing civilization. however; as societies evolved there were greater gaps between children and adults and between the increasing numbers of classes in society. The mark of social advance was the triumph of purposive rationality over emotion. Thus only modern societies could change both rapidly and rationally; traditional societies would remain stable only if they changed organically and imperceptibly. Because primitives were ruled by passion.

Between 1930 and 1945 the sociological profession suffered an identity crisis. Its origin and resolution were compounded of both academic realpolitik and theoretical dilemmas: generational conflicts and university power blocs on the one hand, and persisting intellectual obsessions on the other. Contemporary sociologists may find our current situation to be both derivative and parallel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Psychological Testing and American Society, 1890-1930. MICHAEL M. SOKAL, Ed. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, NJ, 1987. xvi, 205 pp. $28. Based on a symposium, New York, May 1984. The [...]

The Rise of Experimentation in American Psychology. The persistent tendency of psychologists to equate genuinely scientific work with experimental research is examined in this collection of essays dealing with episodes [...]