Robert A. Manners – författare

In the United States today we are confronted by a number of serious social problems, not the least of which concern the character of our basic human services. In each of the broad public domains of welfare, education, law, and health there are crises of public confidence. Each in its own way is failing to accomplish its essential mission of alleviating material deprivation, instructing the young, controlling and righting criminal and civil wrongs, and healing the sick. The poor, the student, the offender and the victim, the sick-all have in some way protested the failure of the institutions responsible for them. And these protests occur at a time when the human services are absorbing an increasingly massive amount of money and manpower. Awareness of that crisis intensified in the second half of the twentieth century. Increasing energy has been invested in research designed to determine what can be done. Each of the human services has long had its own research tradition, but during the sixties each has also made a concerted effort to mobilize and use the skills of such comparatively new disciplines as sociology. Owing to these new demands, sociology itself has grown. The hitherto obscure specialties of the sociology of law and medicine and the established specialties of criminology and educational sociology have taken on new vigor. In applying themselves the task of studying the human services, however, these segments of sociology have had to choose between two different strategies. Rather than dealing with the details of the human services for their own sake-and this lack of detail in a characteristic limitation of the second approach-this book shall instead attempt to stand outside the system in order to delineate one of its critical assumptions and a strategic feature of its basic structure. This book deals with the concept of profession, for the concept rests on assumptions about how services to laymen should be controlled and is realized by a special kind of social structure that organizes the presentation of those services.

Anthropological theory has been much discussed in recent years, yet the crucial questions still remain--how can it be defined, how is it developed, how is it to be applied, and how can one confirm it? The editors of Anthropological Theory answer these questions by presenting essays relating to various aspects of anthropological theory. Their selections from widely scattered and often difficult-to-obtain sources present a comprehensive set of writings that describe the current position and issues involved in theory.The development of field work in anthropology generated a tremendous emphasis on empirical data and research. The plethora of information awaiting collection and the enthusiasm with which the field embraced it so immersed anthropologists that they were unable to relate this new information to the field as a whole. Manners and Kaplan believe that this lack of generalization had a profoundly negative effect upon the discipline. Therefore, they look closely into the relationship between field work and theory in an opening essay and go on to present material that demonstrates the value and the necessity of theory in anthropology. Essays by anthropologists and other social scientists deal with "explanation," evolution, ecology, ideology, structuralism, and a number of other issues reflecting throughout the editors' conviction that anthropology is a science, the goal of which is to produce generalizations about sociocultural phenomena.The book provides necessary perspective for examining and evaluating the crucial intellectual concerns of modern anthropology and will therefore be important for the work of every anthropologist.

This festschrift commemorates Julian H. Steward. The essays were contributed by former students, colleagues, and other anthropologists whose research or thinking has been influenced by him. There was no preconceived attempt to give the volume any greater sense of unity or to impose upon the contributors any restrictions as to subject matter. On the contrary, each author was urged to write on an anthropological topic of greatest current interest to himself. Many of the essays could be placed just as handily within a division other than the one to which they have arbitrarily been assigned in the book. This kind of interchangeability may reflect, in some measure, the interrelatedness of Steward's contributions to anthropological theory.The broad relevance of all the selections to Steward's work could reflect also the extent to which his interests continue to be reflected in the work of anthropologists influenced by him. It could also reflect a parallelism of theoretical concerns within the profession that stem from the cultural ambience that produced Steward himself. Parallelisms and convergence are aspects of the kind of cultural determinism which has claimed Steward's attention during the many years that he fought a fairly lonely battle to establish the respectability of evolutionism in anthropology. Now that respectability has been achieved--with an almost bandwagon fervor--it is clear that Steward, as much as anyone else in anthropology, was "responsible" for the change.The essays in this collection are at once a vindication of his patience, an evidence of the high status he enjoys among anthropologists, and a testimony to the impact of his unusual creativity on his colleagues.

This is VII in a series of ten volumes on the Theory in Anthropology. Originally published in 1968, this is a sourcebook that was created by the authors’ need for making accessible in a single volume a sample of those important pieces which are presently scattered in numerous publications, some of which are difficult for the student to obtain. Our second reason had to do with certain convictions they hold about the aims and methods of anthropology.

This is VII in a series of ten volumes on the Theory in Anthropology. Originally published in 1968, this is a sourcebook that was created by the authors’ need for making accessible in a single volume a sample of those important pieces which are presently scattered in numerous publications, some of which are difficult for the student to obtain. Our second reason had to do with certain convictions they hold about the aims and methods of anthropology.

This festschrift commemorates Julian H. Steward. The essays were contributed by former students, colleagues, and other anthropologists whose research or thinking has been influenced by him. There was no preconceived attempt to give the volume any greater sense of unity or to impose upon the contributors any restrictions as to subject matter. On the contrary, each author was urged to write on an anthropological topic of greatest current interest to himself. Many of the essays could be placed just as handily within a division other than the one to which they have arbitrarily been assigned in the book. This kind of interchangeability may reflect, in some measure, the interrelatedness of Steward's contributions to anthropological theory.The broad relevance of all the selections to Steward's work could reflect also the extent to which his interests continue to be reflected in the work of anthropologists influenced by him. It could also reflect a parallelism of theoretical concerns within the profession that stem from the cultural ambience that produced Steward himself. Parallelisms and convergence are aspects of the kind of cultural determinism which has claimed Steward's attention during the many years that he fought a fairly lonely battle to establish the respectability of evolutionism in anthropology. Now that respectability has been achieved--with an almost bandwagon fervor--it is clear that Steward, as much as anyone else in anthropology, was "responsible" for the change.The essays in this collection are at once a vindication of his patience, an evidence of the high status he enjoys among anthropologists, and a testimony to the impact of his unusual creativity on his colleagues.