Thinking about Society: Theory and Practice

I. C. Jarvie was trained as a social anthropologist in the center of British social anthropology - the London School of Economics, where Bronislaw Malinowski was the object of ancestor worship. Jarvie's doctorate was in philosophy, however, under the guidance of Karl Popper and John Watkins. He changed his department not as a defector but as a rebel, attempting to exorcize the ancestral spirit. He criticized the method of participant obser vation not as useless but as not comprehensive: it is neither necessary nor sufficient for the making of certain contributions to anthropology; rather, it all depends on the problem-situation. And so Jarvie remained an anthro pologist at heart, who, in addition to some studies in rather conventional anthropological or sociological molds, also studied the tribe of social scien tists, but also critically examining their problems - especially their overall, rather philosophical problems, but not always so: a few of the studies in cluded in this volume exemplify his work on specific issues, whether of technology, or architecture, or nationalism in the academy, or moviemaking, or even movies exhibiting excessive sex and violence. These studies attract his attention both on account of their own merit and on account of their need for new and powerful research tools, such as those which he has forged in his own intellectual workshop over the last two decades.

Zusammenfassung
` ... this cohesively organized anthology, written in compact and clear manner, contains an abundance of provocative issues intriguingly stated and cogently argued. ... this is a conceptually opulent work both in depth and scope and one highly recommended for social philosophers, philosophers of the social sciences, sociologists and anthropologists.'
Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology, 29:3, 1995

Inhalt
I: Problems and Theories in the Social Sciences.- I.1. Objectivism Versus Relativism.- 1 / The Notion of a Social Science.- 2 / Social Perception and Social Change.- 3 / Realism and the Supposed Poverty of Sociological Theories.- 4 / Rationality and Relativism.- 5 / Popper on the Difference between the Natural and the Social Sciences.- I.2. Philosophy of Anthropology.- 6 / The Emergence of Social Anthropology from Philosophy.- 7 / On Theories of Fieldwork and the Scientific Character of Social Anthropology.- 8 / Limits to Functionalism and Alternatives to It in Anthropology.- 9 / On the Objectivity of Anthropology.- 10 / The Problem of Ethical Integrity in Participant Observation.- 11 / Anthropology as Science and the Anthropology of Science and of Anthropology.- 12 / Epistle to the Anthropologists.- 13 / On the Limits of Symbolic Interpretation in Anthropology.- 14 / The Problem of the Ethnographic Real.- 15 / Anthropologists and the Irrational.- 16 / Freeman on Mead.- II: Applications and Implications.- II.1 Society and the Arts.- 17 / The Objectivity of Criticism of the Arts.- 18 / The Rationality of Creativity.- II.2. Society and Technology.- 19 / Technology and the Structure of Knowledge.- 20 / The Social Character of Technological Problems.- 21 / Is Technology Unnatural?.- 22 / Utopia and the Architect.- II.3. Society and social control.- 23 / Nationalism and the Social Sciences.- 24 / Explorations in the Social Career of Movies: Business and Religion.- 25 / Methodological and Conceptual Problems in the Study of Pornography and Violence.- Sources.- List of Publications.- Indexes.