Full Description
John Barnes's collection of essays covers a variety of topics in sociology and anthropology, including lineage systems, social networks, colonialism, underlying assumptions of social science, and the significance of time in social analysis. Together they identify the author's particular view of social science: he is primarily interested in 'what really happens'. Rather than revamp articles written with a distinctive set of assumptions to bring them into line with current intellectual fashion, Professor Barnes has chosen to let them stand as they are, products of identifiable theoretical stance and modes of exposition. But introductory notes to each chapter set out the context in which the piece was originally written and draw attention to later publications and events that bear on it. An introduction discusses in detail the author's view of social science as the construction of models rather than a search for social laws, while the final chapter presents a model of the modelling process itself.
Table of Contents
Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction: social science in practice
Part I. Models Of The Real Social World: 1.
Genetrix: genitor: nature: culture?(1973g)
2. African models in the New Guinea highlands
(1962a)
3. Agnatic taxonomies and stochastic variation
(1971n)
4. Class and committees in a Norwegian island
parish (1954a)
5. The righthand and lefthand kingdoms of God:
a dilemma of Pietist politics (1971k)
6. Indigenous politics and colonial
administration, with special reference to
Australia (1960a)
7. The perception of history in a plural
society: a study of an Ngoni group in Northern
Rhodesia (1951c)
Part II. Models of Social Science: 8. Feedback
and real time in social inquiry (1967b)
9. Time flies like an arrow (1971f)
10. Kinship studies: some impressions of the
current state of play (1980c)
11. Sociology in Cambridge: an inaugural
lecture (1970m)
12. Social science in India: colonial import,
indigenous product or universal truth? (1982c)
Part III. A Model of Modelling: 13. Modelling:
for real or for fun? (1983b)
Postscript: structural amnesia (1947: 52-3)
Bibliography
Index.
