Lecture Four: An Impromptu Survey of the Literature.

Books like "Plainville," "Street Corner Society," "The Gang," "The Irish Countrymen," and a series of others, were part of a kind of sociology done in the U.S. mainly twenty five to thirty years ago. It's associated with the University of Chicago and also with Harvard. At that time those fellows were trying to build ethnographic studies in a tradition that had been developed largely in England in social anthropology largely by studying tribal societies. But in recent years, anthropologists are again returning to detailed ethnographic work, and the term "ethnographer" which had fallen into considerable disrepute. This recent work is of a new sort, in a way. Where much of the early work was criticized as being impressionistic, casual, not hard, that is, not reproduceable, not stating hypotheses, etcetera, the new ethnographic work-which is calling itself things like "ethno-cognitive studies," "ethnocultural studies," "ethno-science" and the like-is attempting to proceed without being subject to those criticisms. There are several bases for this renaissance. But the most important one is the development of very strong tools by linguists.