Search

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]

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]

The recent surge of interest in the history of the social sciences reflects the unsettled conditions which obtain within these disciplines. Historical analysis may prove an aid to the resolution of these conditions, but only if it does not fall into the genre generally called "whig history"—mythologized history which functions to legitimate contemporary practices by assimilating all previous developments to a stylized narrative of continuous, inevitable "progress." Because "whig history" is intrinsic to the "scientific ethos," its rejection entails a reconsideration of the nature of the scientific enterprise in general, and of social science in particular. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses reasons why civil servants are still attracted to ideas which are, from the standpoint of professional sociologists, theoretically anachronistic. The contemporary cities, like Chicago, Illinois have been shaped importantly by federal and municipal bureaucracies. The sociological notions which inform these policies are anything but contemporary, reveals a common patterns of bureaucratic behavior. The implication is that academics who hire themselves out as consultants are committing an intellectual form of prostitution. Following this line of reasoning, it is concluded that when civil servants in Chicago employ social scientists, they do so in order to legitimate preselected policies: social scientists' data will be distorted or ignored unless they support desired conclusions. The idea that the bureaucracy can embody a partisan viewpoint is not new, although it may be more obvious in other cultures. But bureaucrats' pretensions to a "value-neutral" expertise were among the casualties of the past decades, during which virtually all such claims were discredited in political controversy.

Studies the intellectual lineage of the Pacific Islands based on the findings of Alfred Cort Haddon, professor of zoology at the Royal College of Science in Dublin, Ireland. Characteristics of the islands; Darwinian influence; Observations of Torres Straits Expedition; Socioeconomic characteristics of islanders.

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]