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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.

Before World War II the intellectual climate of American sociology was congenial to the growth of a sociology of knowledge akin to Mannheim's. Yet in the postwar period American sociologists committed themselves to ahistorical theory, positivist methodology, and team research; their "scientistic" sociology did not permit the historicism, relativism, and holism necessary to Mannheimian analysis. Currently, however, convergent trends in a number of disciplines-not only sociology but also philosophy, anthropology, literary criticism, and the histories of ideas, science, and art-favor a revival of the Mannheimian program. Analysts of culture now seek to integrate the sociological goals of "explanation" and "understanding"-the formulation of quasi-laws of behavior, based on identification of the social structural elements of culture production, and the interpretation of the subjective meaning of culture, based on recovery of actors' intentions. Their research program requires investigation of the peculiar sociohistorical circumstances that condition actors' perceptions, necessitating attention to the cognitive content of culture. This article surveys both the theoretical justifications for such a research program and recent exemplifications of it, focusing on analyses of what Mannheim termed "objective culture"-such symbolic vehicles for conceptions as religion, the arts, science, and political thought that acquire independent existence, becoming subject to diverse interpretations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]