Social Theory and Social Structure . Robert K. Merton

Abstract

Anthropology. The reviewer feels enthusiastic about any anthropologist who tries to sharpen methodology or give wisdom to perspective. However, in this article, Spencer discusses the development of a discipline, anthropology, while most of the articles discuss the contributions of their discipline to the clarification of a concept. Spencer, writing as a cultural anthropologist, presents a nine-page history of anthropology. He starts with the early followers of unilinear evolution, psychic unity, and progress. Then, in succession, he mentions or discusses the Boasian school; Graebner and Schmidt; Perry and Smith; the functionalists and British structuralists; and " almost faddist preoccupations " concerning evaluating culture in holistic terms, personality in culture, acculturation, and values. His position, as I understand it, approves the comparative method, the study of cultural wholes, the Boasian approach and the historical method, and cultural relativism. He sees the goal of anthropology as the understanding of particular cultures, but not the predicting of the course of the future or the development of man as a whole or the statement of laws of culture. The reviewer, although more catholic in his tastes than Spencer appears to be, looks favorably upon the things Spencer approves and admires the people Spencer admires. He has no way of knowing what contributions Spencer's article may make to the nonanthropological reader, but he feels the anthropological reader will get little new perspective here. As a contribution to methodology, the article would have been more comparable with others in the book if Spencer, instead of saying what he is for and how this view had emerged in his discipline, had demonstrated what can be learned by the approaches he favors. I cannot see that he did this. A definitive article synthesizing the explicit and implicit uses of the concept of development in cultural anthropology would have been a real contribution not only to the symposium but also to the anthropological reader. This book makes such an article more possible by making a significant contribution to scientific method and theory. Social Theory and Social Structure. ROBERT K. MERTON. Glencoe: The Free Prts., 1957. xv, 645 pp., $7.50.