This important and essential characteristic aspect of the nature of mankind seems never to have been very carefully investigated by anyone who looked much farther than inside himself. In recent times some of the psychologists have learned a good deal about the mechanisms whereby original nature gets made over into human nature, and the study of this process from the point of view of those concerned with relations between persons in the family and the neighborhood, and with the cultures of the groups within which the process occurs, has been enlightening. Some sociologists have collected material throwing light on the nature of human nature, and some have tried to study those exceptional members of our species, feral men, who grew up without acquiring human nature. But the content of human nature is not well understood.

Of course its existence is assumed by anyone who talks about human beings at all. It is a commonplace that philosophers and writers about social problems makes assumptions about what human nature is like that vary greatly from one another, and the views of literary people on this subject are quite as various. One thinks of the different views of human nature suggested by Hobbes, Rousseau, Bentham, and Dostoevski.

The anthropologist demonstrates the existence of human nature whenever he finds out what an exotic people are thinking and feeling. He can do this only by supposing that they have in common with him certain acquired propensities of attitude; these are human nature. To be able to find out what it is that a Zulli Indian is ashamed of, one must first know what it is to be ashamed. Although anthropologists commonly make assertions to the effect that “human nature is infinitely malleable” or speak of “the refutation of human nature” as an achievement of their science, they in fact recognize its existence every day.

The sources as to the nature of human nature are the records of human living. They exist in ethnography and in history; they exist in biography and in psychiatric case records; and they exist in creative literature. No one is more deeply engaged in the examination and understanding of human nature than are the dramatist and the novelist. In learning about human nature, men of literature and men of social science share a common effort, a common interest. It may be doubted if the results so far achieved by the social scientists are more communicative of the truth about human nature than are the results achieved by the more personal and imaginative methods of the artist.

The common interest of social scientist and of creative artist exists similarly in the study of personality, the organization of human nature and of culture in any particular individual. Here also it is the man of literature and art who has the longest interest in the subject. A personality wholly invented, like Madame Bovary or Huckleberry Finn, provides a record of a human individual that tells us much about the nature of human personality, of its development in relation to other personalities, and to events. A biography may be so written, as that of Hervey Allen on Edgar Allan Poe or that by Marquis James on Andrew Jackson, as to show much of those relationships between original temperament, personal associations, the culture of the community, and the happenings of circumstance, as equally concern the students of personality who are social scientists.

It is perhaps in their common interest in what is called “culture” that the students of the humanities and many of the social scientists find their most obvious and fruitful field for co-operative endeavor. In considering this common interest of humanist and social scientist, one thinks of “culture” as the term has been developed in the comparative study of societies, in the sense which includes all the customs, institutions, and conventions whatsoever, “acquired by man as a member of society,” in Tyler’s familiar words. The conception is a sort of master-term that brings after it many of the more special concepts used by social sciences specializing in the study of families, markets, schools, law, and so forth.

The more spontaneous productions of everyday life, the tools and the institutions that grow up of themselves, as it were, interest the sociologist, the anthropologist, and often the political scientist and the economist, more than they are likely to interest the student of the arts or of philosophy. The interest in a work of art, with reference to its manner of composition and its standard of excellence, is not so characteristically present in the social scientist; and it is the philosopher rather than the social scientist who deals with systems of thought as developed by reflective individuals. Nevertheless, we find no clear line of demarcation here either, and in anthropology one may find a Ruth Bunzel studying the aesthetic norms of individual Pueblo potters and Paul Radin studying the philosophy of Winnebago Indians; and economics may produce a Harold Innis who writes like a philosopher. As to institutions, on the whole social scientists have described their forms and their workings and have accounted for their beginnings in terms of previous social conditions and in terms of the communication of ideas from one group to another. Perhaps they will become more interested than they have been in the way in which inventions and institutions arise in the minds of particular individuals and what conceptions of excellence have guided these productions. If they do so, their work will again become more like that of the humanistic scholars. The juvenile court is, among other things, a work of creative imagination and might be studied as such, as the student of architecture studies the building in which such a court may be housed.

The existence of psychology, in part a social science, and the great current scientific interest in studying human personality prevent one from asserting too strongly that it is the humanist who is concerned with man as an individual while social science regards him as a collectivity. Yet it is true that the humanities, academically recognized, are characteristically concerned with the productions of the few, while the social sciences are for the most part interested in the productions of the many. It is partly a difference between an interest in what is common to members of a society and an interest in what is made by a few of them and perhaps enjoyed by only a few of them. It is partly a difference between an interest in any and every product of man’s collective life, no matter how good or bad it seems to the investigator, and an interest in what is better. A responsibility for the development of appreciation, for the improvement of taste, is more apt to be felt by a student of art and literature, as a part of his work, than it is apt to be felt by an economist or a psychologist or an anthropologist. The social scientist studies markets, cannibalism, ward politics, taxi dance halls, nursery rhymes, and art forms and social life of the juke-box set, but is not likely to be followed in these directions by professors of art, literature, or philosophy. On the other hand, folklore exists as a study of popular productions occasionally under humanistic academic auspices, and psychologists’ studies of symbolic behavior are studies of the creations of individuals. There is more than a little in common between one of Freud’s cases, as he wrote them down for us to read, and Lowes’s study of Coleridge’s creative mind, The Road to Xanadu.

The relationship which the social sciences have with the other sciences is of course undiminished by what has here been written about a relationship in another direction. The former relationship exists in the scientific point of view and in the similarities of method, as to both observation and analysis. The relationship with the humanities, as should appear from these pages, exists chiefly in the sharing of the same subject matter: humanity. This suggests one easy sentence in which one might perhaps summarize the two comparisons: Social science is a discipline with the methods of the natural sciences and the subject matter of the humanities.

Like many other such easy sentences, this one is no better than an approximation. It requires qualification in both its parts. By no means all of the subject matter that the social scientists take up for study is humanity. As has already been recognized here, much that is around or outside of humanity they find to be their business too: population statistics; the market as a function of supply and demand; military power and its influence; congenital reflexes.

And the assertion that social science has the method of the natural sciences requires modification also. Social science method is like physical science method in that it describes; it does not evaluate. Like physics and chemistry it strives for objectivity, system, and comprehensiveness. It uses precise methods where it can, and where it can it experiments, and where it can it measures. But it differs in its method from the methods of all the physical and biological sciences for reasons that follow from the difference in its subject matter. In most of social science, human nature is itself a part of the method. One must use one’s own humanity as a means to understanding. The physicist need not sympathize with his atoms, nor the biologist with his fruit flies, but the student of people and institutions must employ his natural sympathies in order to discover what the people think or feel and what the institution means. This is what C. F. von Weizsacker has in mind when he says, in “The Experiment,” that a philologist trying to understand the meaning an author puts into a text, or a historian seeking the intention of an acting man, enters “as an T into the discourse with a ‘Thou.’ This kind of meeting with its object, physics does not know, because it does not encounter its object as a subject. This personal understanding is a mode of experience which is accessible to us in regard to our fellow man; but not in regard to the stone, the star and the atom.”

The management of this human sympathy, this meeting of the object as subject, is a part of the art or scientific craft of the social scientist. Years ago Cooley gave it the name “sympathetic introspection.” It is a part of the scientist’s art, and, one may add, it is also in cases a personal difficulty or problem, for the social science field worker experiences in that part of his professional life an internal conflict between the yielding to human sympathy, as required by his method, and the standing apart, as science requires so as to look objectively at that which he sympathizes. This is not a problem of the physicist.

What is this “humanity” that both the social scientist and the student of art, literature, or philosophy strive to understand? In what that is susceptible of systematic observation does humanity manifest itself, and what are the most inclusive words that can be used to denote its principal manifestations? No generally accepted answer to these questions can be put on behalf of the social sciences or of the humanities. For the latter an answer would perhaps be a naming of the forms of art and thought which recur in many or all times and places. If the answer to represent social science should be sought of a social anthropologist or sociologist, it might be offered in something like the following words.

Humanity presents itself to our scientific notice as it appears in all men; as it appears in particular individual men; and as it appears in the conventional ways of life of particular continuing groups of men. Three terms are commonly used, nowadays, to point in the direction of these three different but interrelated manifestations of humanity: Human Nature, Personality, and Culture.

The answer is simple. They have humanity in common. Humanity is the common subject matter of those who look at men as they are represented in books or in works of art and of those who look at men as they appear in institutions and in directly visible actions. It is the central and essential matter of interest to social scientist and humanist alike. As physics is concerned with energy and matter, and biology with organisms and life processes, so social science is concerned with the way men and women feel and act and think. Allowing for the fact that there is an aspect of humanity which may be understood when it is seen as a part of all animal life, it is the more important fact that the human qualities of our kind are so notably distinct as to provide a special terrain for systematic inquiry. In his field the humanist and the social scientist work togetherin Montaigne’s day there was no separation. If in grouping the academic disciplines emphasis were given today to subject matter rather than to method, the social sciences and the humanities would be one group, distinct from the other sciences. For the humanity of man is not the concern of physicists or biologists; it is the subject matter of these two other kinds of specialists, now too firmly kept apart.

Humanity is the central subject matter of social scientist and humanist as it is the central interest of mankind. As human beings, we care about the human nature of man; it is more valued than is our animal nature; here theological doctrine restates the view of common sense. What matters to us all, what we live for, is sympathy, understanding, imagination, reason, tradition, aspiration, and personal and human associations. Without these we cannot really undertake to continue to exist, and in our hierarchies of values they are placed above the satisfactions to our physical and biological nature. These last-mentioned come first, in our demands, only because they must come first that better wants be satisfied; but all of us, from the Andaman Islands to New York City, know that companionship, a sense of participation in an effort felt worthwhile, and the confidence of those dear to us are more precious than the absolutely necessary food and shelter. In China, certainly a land where men are hard-pressed to find a livelihood, Confucius is reported to have replied to one who asked him what was necessary in the governing of a people that, although food, force, and faith (or the confidence of the people) were necessary, the first two, as responsibilities of the state, might, at the worst, be dispensed with. But faith in one another we must have to become or to remain a society of human beings.

Of the social sciences, anthropology maintains the greatest sense of the complete human being. In the small communities where he characteristically works alone, the anthropologist seeks to describe all the little society before him, to tell everything about its people. So he keeps a view of the whole man. In his discovery, or rediscovery, of culture, and in the recent excitement in considering the personalities of men and women, the anthropologist finds the work of humanists at hand, congenial, and enlightening. The late president of the American Anthropological Association, Dr. Ruth Benedict, told her follow anthropologists that “the very nature of the problems posed and discussed in the humanities is closer, chapter by chapter, to those in anthropology than are the investigations carried on in most of the social sciences” (Ruth Benedict, “Anthropology and the Humanities,” American Anthropologist, N.S., L, No.4, Part I [October-December, 1948], 585). But as anthropology is a science “phrasing the study of man in terms of scientific generalizations instead of humanistic terms,” she admitted her heresy while seeking to justify it.

There is much in current anthropology-the study of distributions of culture traits, for example-which is as remote from the humanistic study of man as is the marginal analysis of the economist. What we have today in the social sciences is a group of disciplines for the examination of special aspects of mankind, splinters of the whole broken off for their suitability for scientific treatment, and also a disposition, in many leaders of those sciences which treat of these specialties, to return again to humanity, to man as we meet him in daily life. The sociologist develops methods for the study of population, and certain practitioners become engrossed in the perfection of statistical methods to the point where they do not often think of human beings. Yet, in considering population policy, the ways of human beings, as wholes, are again confronted and must again be comprehended. Psychologists, having developed schools and procedures that reduce mankind to little bits of behavior delimited by test or laboratory device, find themselves, through psychoanalysis, again confronting a view of human nature that is at least coherent and demanding of consideration. And economists from time to time become so discontented with the limitations of formal theoretical economics that they push past its limitations. They fall to investigating and describing the actual motives and conduct of men, and before they know it they become sociologists or philosophers. One thinks of Sumner, Veblen, and F. H. Knight.

It seems that in spite of the exactions of scientific method, to which they are properly committed, social scientists cannot escape the fact that they are fundamentally concerned with states of mind. Social scientists are closest to their subject matter when they are concerned with feelings, sentiments, opinions, standards, and ideals. They are in fact usually concerned with these, even when the language does not apparently have that meaning. An “economic policy” means only that somebody intends something, and a “political machine” is only figuratively a machine-it is people, with hopes, ambitions, intentions, understandings. Neither a family nor a religion can be learned about by counting people or by measuring a house or a temple; these two are states of mind, and the influence and relations of the states of mind of some people with respect to those of other people. By talking about “the origin of magic” or “the diffusion of matrilineal clans,” even anthropologists managed to get some distance from a recognition of states of mind as their subject matter, as Dr. Benedict remarks. Under the influence of the scientific method that was adopted by students of humanity in the nineteenth century, humanity was cut into pieces of nature as much like plants and animals as they could be made. But as each fresh effort is made to understand humanity “as it really is,” the thing turns out to be made of states of mind.

And of these states of mind, the schemes of values of people are central and of most importance. The anthropologist who goes to a remote community there to find out about it and report to us would not do what we expect of him if he brought back only a list of everything the people had, did, or even thought. A human life is a sort of structure of sentiments and attitudes in which first things are put first and other things are held in lesser worth. It is this scheme of values which we must come to understand if we are to understand a man or a tribe or a nation. As anthropologists have realized this and have struggled with the problem of representing this structure of values, they have tried to find words for the relative order of values within the structure and for the principal values which seem to give the lead to and to shape other aspects of life to their own nature. So we find anthropologists of today writing of “basic configurations” or of “themes of culture” or of “ethos and eidos” or of “the moral order.” It is the choices that men make, the preferences they have, and the standards that they define explicitly or implicitly, which make up the central subject matter of social science. And these standards are moral, aesthetic, and intellectual.

But is not a concern with standards-moral, aesthetic, or intellectual implied or expressed in every great novel, in the work of every great painter, and in the writings of great philosophers? So it is. However much the academic faculties of departments of humanistic learning may become engrossed with such lesser and formal matters as the choice of vocabulary in one writer as compared with another, or the more technical aspects of musicology, they have before them and must work with records of the search for excellence in some of the traditions of mankind. Both humanist and social scientist have access, through the study of materials both different and similar, to the systems of values that distinguish humanity.

To study states of mind, we need expressive documents. Whether we undertake the study of humanity as a student of the arts and of literature or as a social scientist, we find or we make expressive documents. The materials of social science and of the humanities are essentially the same.

A tool is expressive in that it shows the purpose of the user and perhaps something of the skill of the maker. In so far as it is a work of fine art, it shows something still more significant: something of the standards of technical performance and perhaps of aesthetic satisfaction. A personal letter is in many cases more richly expressive than a tool; and a curse, a chance remark, a word said in passion, a folk tale and a novel-these are very expressive indeed. The answers written in a questionnaire do not express so much. In 1948 there was a revival of discussion as to just what is expressed by a man who replies to a poll asking him how he will vote at the presidential election. What the student of the lives of men, considered separately as individuals or collectively as social groups, must have, is expressive materials. If he seeks to describe these lives in systematic generalizations, it is his business, surely, to report formally and numerically whatever can be so reported. The anthropologist makes a census, or part of one, counts the houses and the people in them, and hopes to get enough cases of marriage so that he can give some figures as to the proportion of cases in which the couple settle with the wife’s parents to those in which the home is made with the husband’s parents or somewhere else. Yet if he does only these things he will miss most of what he came for. When he gets a member of the group he is studying to talk or to write freely and naturally about the things that matter to him most-his family, his ambitions, his faith, and his doubts-then the anthropologist knows he has at hand the materials that are most necessary to his work.

These materials for the study of man in society by the social scientist are similar to and overlap the materials that are used by the humanistic scholar. Art expresses the standards of form, of beauty, and, in certain cases, the interests, political or religious, of the makers. And the materials of literature and philosophy are in part the same as those of sociology and in part are different but related. The materials for the study of Stoic philosophy are the writings of the Stoics, and the materials for the study of Navaho religion and thought are the texts of rituals, of life histories, and of interviews, written down by investigators or by Navaho themselves. The fact that the humanistic scholar generally stays at some university and draws his materials out of the library while the social scientist interviews the Indian or the Chicago precinct committeeman is not an important difference in this connection. Both are reading the words in which other men have expressed their states of mind, their schemes of values.

This distribution of seats does not produce a well-balanced conversational arrangement. On the whole social scientists in America have turned a rather cold shoulder to the scholars of the humanities who sit on their left hand, as the “natural” scientists on the whole have turned a not very warm shoulder on them. In part these attitudes express he hierarchy of status that exists among the disciplines. Like other differences of kind between human societies, those between disciplines tend to be regarded as superiority and inferiority. Certain sciences are “harder” than others, and so better. The “hardness” may have somehow to do with the intellectual difficulty of the discipline or the mathematical character of the work. The prestige of economists as compared with some other social scientists appears to be so derived. But the “hardness” which goes with superior status also has something to do with the subject matter of the discipline: physical or biological subject matter is appropriate to a “harder” science. Anthropologists and psychologists, marginal biologists both, are joined together in one of the sections of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and do well there; but the section or sections in which other social scientists are grouped have little importance and low status. As for the students of art and literature, they are of course unrepresented in the Association. The rough generalization which emerges is that nobody concerned with human beings, as such, is felt to belong to the company of scientists. Only anthropologists, of the social scientists, are admitted to Sigma Xi, presumably because they have something to do with skulls; their interest in the attitudes and sentiments of men may be overlooked. These facts suggest a sort of antipathy felt to exist between the subject matter, humanity, and the method, science.

In Germany the social sciences and the humanities are often thought of as belonging together and the word Geisteswissenschaften then includes them both. In England common origins of the humanistic studies and the social sciences in the study of the classical cultures are not forgotten. But in America the social scientists have for the most part urged only their likeness to the “natural” sciences. Whatever the physicists and chemists think of them, they think of themselves as similar to physicists and chemists. The claim of kinship, or even identity, is made by showing that the methods of the social scientists are the same as the methods of other scientists. It is declared that the social scientists describe-which is true; they have nothing to do with values-which are untrue. The social scientists have developed the use of questionnaires, tables, measurements, and statistics. The building in which are housed the social sciences at the University of Chicago bears over its doorway a text from Lord Kelvin to the effect that knowledge that cannot be measured is meager and unsatisfactory. A social scientist put that text there. It has sometimes appeared that in order to succeed the social sciences would have to become as much like physics as possible and, even, that they were succeeding.

The comparison of the social sciences with the natural sciences exclusively, and with the natural sciences in terms of the similarity of method, goes on so frequently and is made so competently that there is no necessity to repeat it here. Two recent treatments of the theme, one by Lewis White Beck (”The Natural Science Ideal in the Social Sciences,” The Scientific Monthly, LXVIII [June, 1949],386-94), and the other by Donald G. Marquis (”Scientific Methodology in Human Relations,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, LXXXXII, [No.6, December, 1948], 411-16) show us that in their ways of formulating problems and solving them there are only differences in degree between the two kinds of sciences. Both writers are impressed with the similarity of the methods of the social sciences to those of the natural sciences, and both look forward confidently to a development of the social sciences in which the guiding example of the natural sciences will continue to be helpful.

Emulation of the natural sciences and emphasis on formal method brought about the differentiation of the social sciences from other kinds of thinking and investigating out of which they grew. The detachment of psychology from philosophy by way of the laboratory and the development of the social survey into the more precise methods that sociologists now have for studying communities are examples of this development. The striving to make knowledge systematic and comprehensive is a good thing. And that social scientists teach their students how to perform such controlled observation and rigorous analysis as are represented in sampling and other statistical techniques, in the construction of questionnaires and tests, in the marginal analysis used in economics, and in the construction of indexes showing the position of individuals in social classes, is not to be deplored. Every form of knowledge may become as precise and systematic as the application of its methods to its matter makes possible.

On the other hand, as Professor Beck says while himself illustrating the truth of his remark; it is fashionable nowadays to underestimate the differences between the social sciences and the natural sciences. In America at least, the emphasis on formal method and the imitation of the physical and biological sciences has proceeded to a point where the fullest development of social science is hampered. The emphasis on formal method sometimes carries the social scientist into exercises in which something not very important is done very well. There sometimes appears in the use of statistical methods in psychology or anthropology or sociology an exercise of the intellect in which nothing very much is found out about human beings or societies. The knowledge is measured; yet is somehow meager and unsatisfactory.

The identification with the natural sciences alone shelters the contemporary American social scientist from a stimulation from philosophy and the arts and literature which social science needs. Partly because of this, the sense of problem in American social science has diminished. Because small matters can be precisely done, large matters are left unconsidered. American political science has departed so far from philosophy that now, in many departments of the subject, central problems as to justice or as to the relations of the individual and the state gets little attention. Anthropology, a science currently enjoying success in many fields of inquiry, has almost nothing considered to say as to the nature of human nature. And psychology, as Sidney Olivier complained, having named itself the science of the soul, substituted the study of behavior-which is another thing.

The stimulation which the social sciences can gain from the humanities can come from the arts and literatures themselves and through an understanding of some of the problems which interest philosophers and the more imaginative students of the creative productions of mankind. It is not argued here that the humanities have ways of studying mankind which social scientists should adopt. It is not denied that many academic students of Chaucer or of the French language emphasize the mastery of formal method to a degree that they too are shut away from the humanity of man and from consideration of the important questions about man. Pedantry and formalism are weaknesses of humanistic learning as of social science. What is here asserted is that the arts and literatures of the world are sources of understanding of man in society from which social scientists may enrich their insights and their sense of problem. It is also asserted that among the professional humanists are many whose work is as similar to that of many social scientists in spirit and purpose as to suggest that some deliberate cultivation of their common interests, now that the scientific character of the social sciences is well established, would enrich and improve the work of both. Let the social scientists turn and talk for a time to their neighbors on their left.

In investigating this subject we are prepared, as anthropologists of some experience, for the necessity to look at our subject freshly, as if we had not seen it before. We must come to it from the outside, so as to free ourselves from the limiting effects of our own close association with it. We know we cannot accept, as full understanding of what social science is, what the social scientists themselves are in the habit of saying about it. We cannot do this any more than the student of the kinship system of an unfamiliar people can accept as a complete and adequate understanding of the nature of that system what the people who use that system say about it. What they say about it only partly represents the scientific “truth.” Social scientists, until they come to study the actual nature of their social science, as it really is in our society, may merely repeat what they have learned to say about their social science. No, now we must approach social science as if we were anthropologists come to study this society, and we must look at what particular people, social scientists and others, in fact do think and feel about social science. We must look to see how the social science that is taught and studied actually affects the lives of social scientists and people who are not social scientists. It is a kind of anthropological field work.

It is useful to have some preliminary concepts to guide us in arranging our facts and in reaching our conclusions. I propose to adopt a distinction that is common among anthropologists: the distinction between structure and function. When we look at the structure of a cultural object or institution, we need not consider any of the other objects or institutions of the society in which we find it. We consider it as if it were alone, and, having recognized it as something separable from all else, we attend to the way in which its parts are related to each other. We are concerned with its internal order. I can recognize a table, and describe its structure by describing the way in which the legs support the top. I can describe the structure of a clock by showing how its parts go together so as to produce the movements which make a clock something different from a phonograph. But in doing this I need not take account of what use people make of a clock or what they think and feel about clocks as regulators of their lives or perhaps disturbers of their sleep.

When we consider the function of the clock or the table or the institution, we do have to think of what it means in the lives of the people of that society. Then we ask ourselves what contribution this thing that we are studying makes toward fulfilling the needs and desires of people. Also we look to see what contribution it makes toward enabling all the parts and institutions of the society to work together so as to enable the society to persist. The function of anything, in this sense, is its place in making up the going concern in which the activity of that thing is one element.

In speaking of the “structure” of social science, we are then concerned with its internal order. We attend to the way in which men use their minds, the way in which they apprehend and make order of their experiences of man in society when they do what we recognize as “science.” As this way is constituted of rules and habits of observing and thinking, we might speak of the structure of a science as its “logic.” We distinguish the scientific ways of getting understanding of man in society from other ways of getting such understanding by looking at the rules and habits of observing and reasoning-and also of communicating-which characterize science.

Science is one of the ways men have to make sense of experience. It is, perhaps emphatically, a method, a kind of procedure for getting understanding. Also we think of “science” as the product of that method: this is “science” in the sense of “scientific knowledge.” And also we sometime, use the word “science” as in the phrase “A Science of Society,” in the title of a book which records this kind of knowledge; “a science” is one kind of written work.

Let us here think of science as method, as a way of understanding.

From what other ways of understanding, of making order of experience, is it to be distinguished? For one thing, it is to be distinguished from common sense, and for another it is to be distinguished from mysticism. Common sense and mysticism are also ways of getting understanding of society as of anything else; the one is open to everybody with normal wits, common sayings perhaps to the contrary; the other is open, apparently, only to those having the inclinations and the powers of the mystic. The mystic’s ordering of experience is on the whole a matter private to him-its very incommunicability is the test of its mystic nature-while common sense has a considerable currency: what one man learns by that way he can in many cases make known to others.

It is from common sense that we feel the need to distinguish science.

The nature of that distinction is a commonplace in treatises on scientific method. There we read how scientific method is objective. It requires a detachment of the scientist’s personal attitudes from his subject matter and from his conclusions. Science is “impersonal.” The scientist must deliberately doubt his own thoughts on the matter at hand and subject his procedures and his conclusions to testing. He has the word “hypothesis” to dignify these temporary conclusions in process of testing. Moreover, we are told that science aims for perfect communicability-so far as possible the propositions must be formulated so that they will mean the same thing to any two scientists. So propositions in the form of numbers have high value in science: 92 per cent, we are told, is 92 per cent to everybody.

We are talking also of the form or logic of science when we say that it tends to become systematic and comprehensive. Common-sense knowledge is a medley, a collection. But scientific knowledge seems always to be struggling toward an architecture of description. Its effort is to represent the world in the form of propositions that are related to each other by a sort of natural order. Lesser generalizations are marshaled under generalizations of wider scope. A proposition that follows from acceptance of an anterior proposition is declared and shown to be so related. The connections between some particular facts and more inclusive propositions are made plain, and like matters are grouped because they are alike. The likeness is felt to arise within the facts, and without necessary relation to the practical interests of men. The movement is toward compendency, toward linking of propositions with one another; and at the same time toward comprehensiveness: the propositions are widened as observations authorize the widening. For a comprehensive proposition that scientists are at the time not interested in proving or disproving, we have the phrase “natural law.”

This characterization of science in its formal or logical nature, made familiar to us in treatises on the subject, applies to social science. It applies, but not so well as it applies to physics or mathematics. In coming to understand man in society we can use more than common sense and more (or shall we say less!) than the occasional private insight of the seer. Social scientists are in no small part engaged in making order of experience, an order that is objective, systematic, and comprehensive. For society, as for matter and organisms, there grows a structured body of knowledge that belongs to no one thinker, that is accessible to all who will study it, and that is the work of many men. The result is perhaps less objective than is the corresponding result ill physics or biology, for it is harder to be objective about a famine or the threat of war than it is about a star or a starfish. In some of his work the physicist or the chemist may be as anxious about the results of what he does as is the social scientist. The physicists and chemists who saw their studies of nuclear energy go into the making of atomic bombs were certainly anxious. But the situation of the social scientist is different in that many, probably most, of his scientific problems are also problems of immediate practical concern and in the further fact that his very subject matter is made up of human beings, rather than of matter or animal life. As the subject matter of social science is humanity, it would be inhuman not to care. Indeed, in my opinion, a good social scientist does care. He cares about the race relations or the village economy that he studies; he would not do as good a job if he looked at the village or the racial situation with inhuman indifference to it. At the same time he must be self-critical; he must be ready to give up any conclusion for another nearer the truth. Now this is harder to do when the very thing you are looking at, as scientist, is a thing that as a man you feel for and with. Yet it is done, and as it is done social science results.

Nor is social science as systematic or as comprehensive as physics or biology, and in my opinion it is not likely to catch up with the “natural” sciences in these qualities. Perhaps the generalization in social science has there a somewhat different role to play. Perhaps it is not so much a final or nearly final summing up of accepted understanding as it is a provider of a more tentative and yet illuminating point of view. Perhaps the generalization in social science is a sort of searchlight on each particular case. It throws light on it-from one side-but it does throw light. Another generalization, also tentative and not too substantially reported, will perhaps be offered to illuminate the case from another side. I think that in much of social science the generalizations tend to be constructions some considerable way from thoroughly acceptable “truth.” They guide us among real cases that always escape the generalization, and escape by amounts and in ways that are less definable than is the departure of an actual falling stone from the law of falling bodies. But we grasp and deal with the case the better for looking at it with the generalization.

The remarks so far made may be reduced to a sentence: Social science, looked at with regard to its inner or logical nature, as one of the ways men use to understand the world around them, has the chief formal characteristics of other sciences, although in less degree, although as modified because of the peculiar humanity of its subject matter.

In investigating this subject we are prepared, as anthropologists of some experience, for the necessity to look at our subject freshly, as if we had not seen it before. We must come to it from the outside, so as to free ourselves from the limiting effects of our own close association with it. We know we cannot accept, as full understanding of what social science is, what the social scientists themselves are in the habit of saying about it. We cannot do this any more than the student of the kinship system of an unfamiliar people can accept as a complete and adequate understanding of the nature of that system what the people who use that system say about it. What they say about it only partly represents the scientific “truth.” Social scientists, until they come to study the actual nature of their social science, as it really is in our society, may merely repeat what they have learned to say about their social science. No, now we must approach social science as if we were anthropologists come to study this society, and we must look at what particular people, social scientists and others, in fact do think and feel about social science. We must look to see how the social science that is taught and studied actually affects the lives of social scientists and people who are not social scientists. It is a kind of anthropological field work.

It is useful to have some preliminary concepts to guide us in arranging our facts and in reaching our conclusions. I propose to adopt a distinction that is common among anthropologists: the distinction between structure and function. When we look at the structure of a cultural object or institution, we need not consider any of the other objects or institutions of the society in which we find it. We consider it as if it were alone, and, having recognized it as something separable from all else, we attend to the way in which its parts are related to each other. We are concerned with its internal order. I can recognize a table, and describe its structure by describing the way in which the legs support the top. I can describe the structure of a clock by showing how its parts go together so as to produce the movements which make a clock something different from a phonograph. But in doing this I need not take account of what use people make of a clock or what they think and feel about clocks as regulators of their lives or perhaps disturbers of their sleep.

When we consider the function of the clock or the table or the institution, we do have to think of what it means in the lives of the people of that society. Then we ask ourselves what contribution this thing that we are studying makes toward fulfilling the needs and desires of people. Also we look to see what contribution it makes toward enabling all the parts and institutions of the society to work together so as to enable the society to persist. The function of anything, in this sense, is its place in making up the going concern in which the activity of that thing is one element.

In speaking of the “structure” of social science, we are then concerned with its internal order. We attend to the way in which men use their minds, the way in which they apprehend and make order of their experiences of man in society when they do what we recognize as “science.” As this way is constituted of rules and habits of observing and thinking, we might speak of the structure of a science as its “logic.” We distinguish the scientific ways of getting understanding of man in society from other ways of getting such understanding by looking at the rules and habits of observing and reasoning-and also of communicating-which characterize science.

Science is one of the ways men have to make sense of experience. It is, perhaps emphatically, a method, a kind of procedure for getting understanding. Also we think of “science” as the product of that method: this is “science” in the sense of “scientific knowledge.” And also we sometime, use the word “science” as in the phrase “A Science of Society,” in the title of a book which records this kind of knowledge; “a science” is one kind of written work.

Let us here think of science as method, as a way of understanding.

From what other ways of understanding, of making order of experience, is it to be distinguished? For one thing, it is to be distinguished from common sense, and for another it is to be distinguished from mysticism. Common sense and mysticism are also ways of getting understanding of society as of anything else; the one is open to everybody with normal wits, common sayings perhaps to the contrary; the other is open, apparently, only to those having the inclinations and the powers of the mystic. The mystic’s ordering of experience is on the whole a matter private to him-its very incommunicability is the test of its mystic nature-while common sense has a considerable currency: what one man learns by that way he can in many cases make known to others.

It is from common sense that we feel the need to distinguish science.

The nature of that distinction is a commonplace in treatises on scientific method. There we read how scientific method is objective. It requires a detachment of the scientist’s personal attitudes from his subject matter and from his conclusions. Science is “impersonal.” The scientist must deliberately doubt his own thoughts on the matter at hand and subject his procedures and his conclusions to testing. He has the word “hypothesis” to dignify these temporary conclusions in process of testing. Moreover, we are told that science aims for perfect communicability-so far as possible the propositions must be formulated so that they will mean the same thing to any two scientists. So propositions in the form of numbers have high value in science: 92 per cent, we are told, is 92 per cent to everybody.

We are talking also of the form or logic of science when we say that it tends to become systematic and comprehensive. Common-sense knowledge is a medley, a collection. But scientific knowledge seems always to be struggling toward an architecture of description. Its effort is to represent the world in the form of propositions that are related to each other by a sort of natural order. Lesser generalizations are marshaled under generalizations of wider scope. A proposition that follows from acceptance of an anterior proposition is declared and shown to be so related. The connections between some particular facts and more inclusive propositions are made plain, and like matters are grouped because they are alike. The likeness is felt to arise within the facts, and without necessary relation to the practical interests of men. The movement is toward compendency, toward linking of propositions with one another; and at the same time toward comprehensiveness: the propositions are widened as observations authorize the widening. For a comprehensive proposition that scientists are at the time not interested in proving or disproving, we have the phrase “natural law.”

This characterization of science in its formal or logical nature, made familiar to us in treatises on the subject, applies to social science. It applies, but not so well as it applies to physics or mathematics. In coming to understand man in society we can use more than common sense and more (or shall we say less!) than the occasional private insight of the seer. Social scientists are in no small part engaged in making order of experience, an order that is objective, systematic, and comprehensive. For society, as for matter and organisms, there grows a structured body of knowledge that belongs to no one thinker, that is accessible to all who will study it, and that is the work of many men. The result is perhaps less objective than is the corresponding result ill physics or biology, for it is harder to be objective about a famine or the threat of war than it is about a star or a starfish. In some of his work the physicist or the chemist may be as anxious about the results of what he does as is the social scientist. The physicists and chemists who saw their studies of nuclear energy go into the making of atomic bombs were certainly anxious. But the situation of the social scientist is different in that many, probably most, of his scientific problems are also problems of immediate practical concern and in the further fact that his very subject matter is made up of human beings, rather than of matter or animal life. As the subject matter of social science is humanity, it would be inhuman not to care. Indeed, in my opinion, a good social scientist does care. He cares about the race relations or the village economy that he studies; he would not do as good a job if he looked at the village or the racial situation with inhuman indifference to it. At the same time he must be self-critical; he must be ready to give up any conclusion for another nearer the truth. Now this is harder to do when the very thing you are looking at, as scientist, is a thing that as a man you feel for and with. Yet it is done, and as it is done social science results.

Nor is social science as systematic or as comprehensive as physics or biology, and in my opinion it is not likely to catch up with the “natural” sciences in these qualities. Perhaps the generalization in social science has there a somewhat different role to play. Perhaps it is not so much a final or nearly final summing up of accepted understanding as it is a provider of a more tentative and yet illuminating point of view. Perhaps the generalization in social science is a sort of searchlight on each particular case. It throws light on it-from one side-but it does throw light. Another generalization, also tentative and not too substantially reported, will perhaps be offered to illuminate the case from another side. I think that in much of social science the generalizations tend to be constructions some considerable way from thoroughly acceptable “truth.” They guide us among real cases that always escape the generalization, and escape by amounts and in ways that are less definable than is the departure of an actual falling stone from the law of falling bodies. But we grasp and deal with the case the better for looking at it with the generalization.

The remarks so far made may be reduced to a sentence: Social science, looked at with regard to its inner or logical nature, as one of the ways men use to understand the world around them, has the chief formal characteristics of other sciences, although in less degree, although as modified because of the peculiar humanity of its subject matter.

The importance of his contribution has been indicated by the amount of discussion that has gone on about him and his work. Few of the American anthropological brotherhood have been entirely indifferent, and many have found it necessary to emphasize their agreement, or disagreement, with his views. One could assemble a small anthology of papers and chapters written recently each with an eye out to Radcliffe-Brown, the writer feeling called upon to define or declare his position in a field in which Radcliffe-Brown appears as leader, adversary, or challenger.

Developments in the field, however, have not been entirely clear, partly because of the fog rolled up by multitudinous pronouncements of the word “functionalism” in a wide range of half-understood senses. As a matter of fact, Professor Radcliffe-Brown does not think or speak of himself as a “functionalist,” although he makes frequent use of the word “function.” His own use of this word is special and precise: it stands for the activity of an organ as it contributes to the persistence of the organism of which it is a part, and is usually explained by him with reference to an example from physiology. A society is regarded, in some sense, as an organism, and the usages and institutions to be found in the society are described with reference to the role played by them in maintaining the society as a whole. The employment of this conception does not necessarily involve an interest in the development of generalizations as to the nature of society. One might confine oneself to “functional” ethnographic accounts-depictions of unique societies, without comparison, but each presented as an organic whole composed of functionally interrelated and integrating parts. One would then be, in the broad sense,” a historian, not a generalizing scientist. Conversely, there is nothing to require a social scientist-one interested in the development of competent general propositions as to society and human behavior-to adopt the concept of function, and indeed many attempts in the direction of social science get along without it.

Whatever may be left of “function” in American anthropology when the fog lifts, it may now be declared that Radcliffe-Brown’s signal contribution is not derived from his use of the concept of function, but rather, quite simply, from his emphasis on a strictly non-historical, sharply scientific method in anthropology. The objective of social anthropology is the formulation of general propositions as to society. The social anthropologist deals with classes of societal phenomena; early he names the class with which he deals-sanctions, totemism, Omaha type of kinship system, or whatever; the particular society or institution with which he deals is then of significance only as it represents or modifies the class, type, or declared general proposition. History, on the other hand, has a logical nature essentially different; its nature is “not the dealing with time sequences, though that almost inevitably crops out where historical impulses are genuine and strong; but an endeavor at descriptive integration.”3

Kroeber, in the paper already cited, goes on to say that, although the historical and scientific approaches should ultimately, and so far as possible, supplement each other, nevertheless, “precisely if they are to co-operate, it seems that they should recognize and tolerate each other’s individuality. It is hard to see good coming out of a mixture of approaches whose aims are different. They need intellectual differentiation, precisely because we shall presumably penetrate further in the end by two approaches than by one.”

It was the nature and result of Boas’ teaching, as Kroeber ably points out, that the two approaches were, in a sense, mixed. Boas’ great strength lay in two aspects of his intellectual nature that are the reverse and obverse of each other: his rigorous and critical analytic treatment of specific, segregated data, and his unwillingness to pursue any single method or point of view. Boas analyzes particular phenomena, without any elaborate conceptual paraphernalia, to see what elements or events, whether in the present or in the past, bear upon-”explain” -the facts studied. He secures special knowledge of particular fact by critical methods such as a historian would use and analyzes phenomena with the rigorousness of the laboratory scientist. But-and this is said in repetition of Kroeber and with awareness that Boas replied to Kroeber on the point6-he does not write histories, and he does not prepare scientific systems.

At the time when Boas introduced his methods they were precisely what were needed. They freed anthropological interest from speculative theory and cleared the ground and lad the foundations for both a critical history and an empirical science. But ambiguity of methodological approach is no longer essential; it is no longer even advisable. With the further development of procedures, on the one hand historical, on the other scientific, and with the confidence achieved by the mastery of ordered fact, it is desirable that the logical character of the objective, the nature of the approach, be made explicit.

“There is no Boas school, and never has been.” The work of some of his students has gone off in one direction and that of others in other directions. Yet a reluctance to clarify the historical and social anthropological (”scientific”) approaches has remained, and, more important, no one in America has offered a strictly non-historical scientific method equipped with a self-consistent body of concepts and procedures for getting specific jobs done in relation to ultimate scientific objectives. Radcliffe-Brown has done just that.

It is on this scientific side that emphasis has been needed in American anthropology in recent years. Boas does not write histories, but some of his students do. The development of archeology, the full realization of its relationship with ethnology,” the utilization of procedures by which to infer history from data other than document or buried artifact, have made it possible for American anthropologists to write histories, tentative enough of course they are, of American and other cultures. But in the direction of science, such later developments as have occurred have been in the first place exploratory and without system, and second-as in part of the work of Sapir and Mead-with reference to the individual in society rather than with reference to society alone (”psychological” rather than “sociological”).

Radcliffe-Brown has offered an explicit and systematic method for the scientific study of societies. Grant that the method is too systematic to provide in itself a single road to understanding and is too special to represent all interests or to admit all insights. But then let us also grant that it clarifies sharply the distinction between the historical and the scientific approaches in anthropology and that it affords one procedure and one set of concepts for pursuing the scientific approach.

Too much emphasis has been placed on the question of the validity or the importance of the general propositions issuing from this approach to the study of society. It is said that the generalizations of Radcliffe-Brown are vague. Worse, it is declared that they are commonplace, that these formally guided investigations of special fact yield only the familiar general propositions which common knowledge provides. The effect of these allegations is reduced if emphasis is laid not on the general laws which are achieved by the method, or are hoped to be achieved by it, but on the general formulations, whether substantive or relational, which are offered the student as guides to research. No scientific problem can be attacked at all without some tentative guiding formulation; these are either implicit and undeclared, and correspondingly uncertain and personal, or else they are declared and subject to logical criticism. You cannot have science without concepts. It is in the concepts and in the classification of problems (as, for example, with reference to law and social sanctions”) that the more important contribution of Radcliffe-Brown to a scientific social anthropology is to be found. This contribution is called for in American anthropology as a counter-emphasis to the analytic and non-conceptualized procedure of Boas. The effort at scientific synthesis arranges the problems in some order, exposes the implicit postulates, and makes it possible to discover if different workers are talking about the same things. The propositions are not to be treated as final but are to be challenged, revised, or abandoned as the investigation into special fact guided by them proceeds.

The influence which Radcliffe-Brown has exerted on American anthropology is represented in the pages that follow not merely by the extent to which the viewpoints of the seven authors resemble his own but also by the extent to which, stimulated by his teaching, their viewpoints differ from his, being developments out of, or even away from, his own. We are not to assume that the scientific views of the seven contributors are identical with the views of Professor Radcliffe-Brown any more than we are to suppose that Professor Radcliffe-Brown (who had no part in the preparation of the book) would, if we asked him, agree with everything that appears in the following pages. A teacher is successful to the degree, not that he inculcates, but that he stimulates. And Professor Radcliffe Brown has stimulated many American anthropologists besides those who have written this book, and caused them to alter and improve their work and methods. His influence will be read between the lines of many American books already written and to be written even by those who do not realize that they write as they do in no small degree because of the work of Radcliffe-Brown.

Anthropology pursues a diversity of approaches toward the understanding of a diversity of phenomena having to do, in one way or another, with man. There are anthropologists whose principal concern is the pottery made hundreds of years ago by certain Indians of the American Southwest; others who are engaged in determining the precise anatomical changes which have attended the evolution of our species from more apelike ancestors; others who record and analyze the languages of small tribal groups; and still others who study the institutions of modern American towns. The men and women carrying on these special activities share, however, a common traditional and professional body of problems and knowledge and a common point of view. This common body of problems and common viewpoint give unity to the diversity.

The diversity is apparent not only in the great variety of the subject matters studied by anthropological specialists, but in more or less generally recognized subfields. A primary division of anthropology is usually made between physical anthropology and cultural anthropology in obedience to the circumstance that anthropology is concerned both with man as an animal and also with man as a dweller in society and a carrier of culture. Physical anthropology, often regarded as a single subfield comparable with others to be mentioned immediately, is sometimes further divided into somatology and human paleontology. The former is concerned with the study of the biological nature of contemporary groups; the latter with extinct forms.

If physical anthropology be a first subfield, others commonly recognized are archeology, ethnology, and the comparative study of exotic languages (linguistics). Each of these, as is true also of physical anthropology, had a beginning in the work of men of the early nineteenth century, or even of the late eighteenth, before anthropology came to be recognized in the middle of the nineteenth century as a single and inclusive discipline. Each of these subfields developed out of a concern with a special sort of subject matter that requires special techniques in order that it is studied. Physical anthropology arose out of the application of methods of anatomy and related biological sciences to human skulls and other parts and characteristics of the body. Archeology, the study of past peoples by recovery, largely through digging, of their artifacts, began as the collection of antiquities. Ethnology, now understood to mean the study of the cultures of contemporary peoples, had its beginnings in the collection of folklore and in the application of the interests and methods of natural history to primitive human groups. And linguistics is derived from the word lists and grammars made by missionaries and others of the languages of primitive and unfamiliar groups, and in the comparative studies of Indo-European languages made a hundred years ago and more.

These four subdivisions rest, then, on differences in subject matter and on corresponding differences in the procedures a specialist must learn to obtain the materials of that subfield and to analyze them. The physical anthropologist handles bones (to speak approximately) and must know how to describe and measure them. The archeologist must understand the techniques for getting out of the ground the things that ancient men have made and for preserving and interpreting the record they contain. The ethnologist confronts living men in their social groups and must understand how to get from them, and to analyze, information as to their cultures and societies; and the student of languages has to master very special procedures for the recording and study of the subject matter.

There is, moreover, a second kind of diversity within anthropology, diversity in the logical character of the problems set and in the kind of synthesis toward which separate researches tend: anthropological method and objectives are in part those of history and in part those of science.

These terms, history and science, will be recognized to stand for opposing methods: the scholarly pursuit of special knowledge of particular fact, on the one hand, and such pursuit of special knowledge of general fact, on the other hand. The historian, in this sense, is concerned with the uniqueness of his data; each proposition in which he expresses his facts has reference to particular space and time. When it comes to synthesis or integration, he assembles such particular facts into picture-like wholes; these integrations are “histories,” in a wide sense, and include not merely those which are chronologically organized, but also descriptions of the life of a period, accounts of particular institutions, descriptions of persons and places, and ethnographies. The scientist, in this familiar distinction, finds singular propositions referring to definite place and time of service only as they illustrate or contribute to general propositions as to the nature of classes of phenomena. These last are the center of the scientist’s interest. He deals with types, abstracted from particular experience. So he does not relate one particular fact to that next to it in space or time, but rather analyzes the observed or recorded facts, breaking them down so as to abstract so much as may bear upon a class of phenomena also recognizable elsewhere. The organizations of knowledge toward which his work tends are quite different from histories; they are sciences: hierarchies of related general propositions.

With reference to this well-known distinction of approach and objective, anthropology is uncommitted. Or, it is better to say, some anthropologists are clearly historians; a few are plainly interested in science; and the work of many may be regarded as possibly contributing to both history and science. It might be possible to arrange contemporary anthropologists in a linear series with reference to two extremes of scholarly objective: the writing of histories and the making of a social science. Some names may be mentioned to illustrate. Radin is plainly a historian, indeed almost a biographer, he is so interested in particular events and particular human individuals; his disinterest or distrust in social science is marked. Kroeber, always understanding of and sympathetic to scholarly method, however different from his own, is in his own work very largely historical: the products of his work take chiefly the form of reconstructed histories, some local, others continental or world-wide. Moving toward the other end of the series, one encounters, among others, Margaret Mead, Reo Fortune, and Malinowski. None of these is concerned in writing the histories of cultures. They are “historians” only in so far as they depict particular societies. But beyond this they are interested in general scientific problems-the cultural factors in adolescent behavior or the universality of Freudian complexes-and they attack these problems directly in the subject matter immediately before them, without finding any preliminary historical reconstruction necessary. Radcliffe-Brown is near this non-historical end of the series; he is concerned with the general nature of society; particular facts serve for him to illustrate or to yield, by comparison, general propositions as to society and culture; he makes use of considered concepts, somewhat systematically arranged. Other workers are farther from both extremes and nearer to the ambiguous middle ground. Lowie, for instance, has declared that cultural anthropology is a historical science; he makes little use of a priori general propositions to guide his research, which is highly empirical and particular. Yet his own work has contributed to our understanding of, among other things, the general character of kinship and the family, and the general classes of circumstances under which certain forms of these tend to develop.

If emphasis is given to this second diversity which characterizes anthropology-the difference between the tendency to integrate special research into histories of mankind and the tendency to relate them to more or less competent general propositions as to the nature of man and society then the subdivision of anthropology will proceed in accordance therewith and not in accordance with the history of its subject matter and the corresponding techniques of investigation. From this point of view anthropology is a group of investigations and problems concerned with biological fact, on the one hand, and with cultural fact, on the other, and tending either to write the history of man both biological and cultural or to test the validity of general propositions as to his animal or his cultural nature. The subdivisions of the discipline which will then be recognized will be those which come necessarily into being if the difference between historical and scientific objective is made plain. Instead of dividing physical anthropology according to whether extinct men or living man should be the object of study, one will distinguish the study of man’s racial history from the generalizing scientific study of man’s animal nature (human biology). One will distinguish historical linguistics from general linguistics. And one will certainly wish to make plain the distinction between that kind of study of contemporary peoples which moves toward the writing of histories and is closely related to the “history” of departments and professors of that name, on the one hand, and that kind of study of contemporary peoples which is guided by generalizing hypotheses as to society and social and cultural behavior and is related to the other generalizing social sciences, on the other. Recognition of this difference appears in the name “social anthropology” for the generalizing kind of science of culture and society as carried on by anthropologists, and in the restriction of the term “ethnology” for historically directed study of such subject matter. In this limited sense, ethnology is concerned with cultures in their unique situations of time and space: in cultures as systems of events.

The double diversity of anthropology is probably greater, all in all, than the diversity of any other recognized scholarly discipline. No other science presents so many points of contact with other disciplines. Nevertheless there is a unity in the various approaches and interests of anthropology, and this unity lies in a characteristic way of looking at mankind. Archeologist and anthropological linguist, physical anthropologist, social anthropologist and ethnologist, have in common a characteristic viewpoint. The essence of this viewpoint can perhaps be simply put by saying that anthropologists are interested in people in general, rather than in their own people in particular. They are concerned with man’s animal nature and his moral nature, his “body and his sour’ (as Marett says) as such, that is to say, as natural phenomena seen against the entire background of nature and history. Moreover, to realize this concern, he studies all peoples, everywhere and at all times. Characteristically he studies primitive or exotic people. In such groups the anthropologist finds a variety of compact situations in which people, society, institutions, and human behavior may be objectively observed and reported. But whether he study such a group or, as is not rare nowadays, a modern town, he is not much distracted by the importance to Americans or to modern men generally, for practical reasons, of the group studied. For the anthropologist there are many groups and societies, of which his own is only one: the importance of that one as compared with the others depends on its relevance to the scientific or historical problem on which he is engaged.

On the whole the social studies have developed out of concern for the society of those who have developed them, and to them-modern Western society and its antecedents-the social studies and the social sciences, on the whole, tend ever to return. But anthropology has a viewpoint more like that of the well-known man from Mars, who may be supposed to alight anywhere on the planet to begin his illumination studies, and to find the doings of Chinese, Choctaw, or Chicagoan of potentially equal value for his work. Anthropology finds people all over the earth, at different times in its history, exhibiting structure and behavior of great variety. In the impartial investigation of these by direct observation and in the broadest comparative study of these, it makes its claim to science. In the integration of local histories into a history of man’s body and society as broad as the earth and as deep as the beginnings of the human species, it makes its contribution to

…was Robert Redfield’s first published scientific paper. In the six years after receiving his bachelor’s degree from the University of Chicago (1920), he married, completed the work for a law degree, was admitted to the bar, and began the practice of law. He soon gave up law, however, and returned to the University for Graduate Study. By 1926 he had had two years of work in a department of anthropology which Fay Cooper-Cole had recently combined with the somewhat better established department of sociology. In sociology at this time the broad and comprehensive point of view of Robert E. Park was a strong influence, on Redfield as on a number of others. If, as he once wrote, the legal training gave the first discipline to his mind, the intellectual atmosphere of this period encouraged his natural resistance to narrow specialization and created that interest in the nature of social science as a whole which remained with him for the rest of his life.

The distinction made here between historical-depictive and scientific generalizing, suggested by Park, continued to be both valid and useful for Redfield, as may be seen in a number of the papers in this section. Each method had its values. From the beginning he recognized that his primary interest was in general social process; he did not however abandon a sense of history and the importance of historical perspectives. Sahagun, Las Casas, and Landa, for example, gave depth to the understanding of Aztec and Maya Villages.

Science, broadly speaking, is the systematic investigation of observed phenomena. It is recognized that this investigation may be directed toward one of two distinct and opposable ends. It may be the aim of such investigation to discover and set out specific sequences, temporal or spatial, of objects or events. History and geography are scientific disciplines of this sort. They are sometimes called descriptive sciences. In fact all sciences are descriptive, but the events or objects of the historical-geographical sciences are described as they are encountered in time or space, and each datum is unique and not subject to verification.

The term natural science, on the other hand, is often reserved for scientific investigation which seeks to classify data and to reduce a wide range of observed phenomena to a brief statement or formula. This formula is termed a natural law. It is, of course, not a law at all: it compels nothing. It is merely a shorthand description of phenomena observed to recur. It is the processual counterpart of the genetic concept. It is tested pragmatically, not by any standard of absolute truth.” Physics and chemistry are sciences of this sort.

Among recent general sociological books, this distinction is explicitly set forth in Park and Burgess, Introduction to the Science of Sociology, pp. 12-24, and is recognized in C. M. Case, Outlines of Introductory Sociology, pp. xvi-xvii.

But while the facts of history and of natural science are of distinct characters, history and natural science do not remain distinct, but in certain regions of inquiry the one tends to become the other. Geography, in its established phase, is a purely descriptive (i.e., depictive) science, but nevertheless it is forever tending to reduce its data to types and is thus forever passing over into natural science.” Even the historians do not in every case confine themselves to events. In becoming a “comparative historian,” Professor F. J. Teggart has sought to “do for human history what biologists are engaged in doing for the history of the forms of life.” So he calls his book The Processes of History. History, to him, is to become a natural science, i.e., sociology.

From the point of view of this distinction it is interesting to consider the methods of anthropology. Unlike sociology, anthropology has no roots in philosophy. It arose out of a scientific interest in primitive and prehistoric man. Anthropological science thus grew up around a body of materials and not around a defined method. For this reason its relation to history and to natural science did not at once become clear. Its interest in this connection lies in the fact that anthropological method has been both that of history and that of a natural science. Certain of its workers and certain of its schools have inclined to one of the two methods, while others have inclined to the other. In a paper defining the field and principles of anthropology, Boas simultaneously embraced both methods.

In this sense, anthropology is the science that endeavors to reconstruct the early history of mankind, and that tries, wherever possible, to express in the form of laws ever-recurring modes of historical happenings.”

The natural science method was once the anthropological method. In the early days, when anthropologists wrote under the dominance of the evolutionary viewpoint, before Boas had appeared to reduce their hypothetical schemes to unsound conjectures, anthropologists employed the comparative method and were thereby natural historians or natural scientists. Tylor, for example, declared that too many educated minds (but not to Tylor):

there seems something presumptuous and repulsive in the view that the history of mankind is part and parcel of the history of nature, that our thoughts, wills and actions accord with laws as definite as those which govern the motion of waves, the combination of acids and bases, and the growth of plants and animals.

Although Tylor did not entirely overlook the fact that the culture of any group has been largely determined by the experiences of that group, his interest lay in reducing human behavior to types.

In studying both the recurrence of special habits or ideas in several districts and their prevalence within each district, there come before us ever-reiterated proofs of regular causation, producing the phenomena of human life, and of laws of maintenance and diffusion according to which these phenomena settle into permanent standard conditions of society at definite stages of culture.

Tylor, and his contemporaries, sought to reduce cultural data to classes, and to tell the history of the development of such classes. So, for example, as has been pointed out by Park and Burgess, Westermarck’s History of Human Marriage is, more exactly, a natural history of human marriage. Westermarck calls his method “comparative sociology”:

Its ultimate object is, of course, the same as that of every other science, namely, to explain the facts with which it is concerned, to give an answer to the question, why?

This interest in a search for fundamental social laws was halted when the assumptions of the evolutionistic anthropologists were pointed out and their central fallacy made clear. As early as 1896 Franz Boas” showed that this fallacy lay in the false assumption that the same phenomena are always due to the same causes and in the conclusion there from that there is one uniform pattern of cultural evolution applicable to all groups. In a paper in which he made this criticism of the comparative method, as then practiced, Boas announced the program for future anthropological investigation-a program which was to be faithfully followed by American anthropologists for a generation.

The immediate results of the historical method are, therefore, histories of the cultures of diverse tribes which have been the subject of study. I fully agree with those anthropologists who claim that this is not the ultimate aim of our science, because the general laws, although implied in such a description, cannot be clearly formulated nor their relative value appreciated without a thorough comparison of the manner in which they assert themselves in different cultures. But I insist that the application of this method is the indispensable condition of sound progress. The psychological problem is contained in the results of the historical inquiry. When we have cleared up the history of a single culture and understand the effects of environment and the psychological conditions that are reflected in it we have made a step forward, as we can then investigate in how far the same causes or other causes were at work in the development of other cultures. Thus by comparing histories of growth general laws may be found. This method is much safer than the comparative method, as it is usually practiced, because instead of a hypothesis on the mode of development actual history forms the basis of our deductions.

Similar reactions to evolutionistic anthropology took place in England and in Germany, and anthropology became a historical science. During the first quarter of this century anthropologists have been engaged largely in determining the distribution of specific traits of specific peoples and in offering hypotheses as to the histories of specific groups without written records. They have been dealing with events. In Kroeber’s Anthropology he states that “anthropology has been occupied with trying to generalize the findings of history,”l1 but in fact the pages which follow this statement generalize very little upon history; they are history: The historical method employed by recent American anthropologists has been clearly formulated by Kroeber:

It is historical in the sense that it insists on first depicting things as they are and then inferring generalizations secondarily if at all, instead of plunging at once into a search for principles. It may not seem historical in the literal conventional sense because the ethnologist’s data are not presented to him chronologically. He is therefore compelled to establish his time sequences. This he does by comparisons, especially by taking the fullest possible cognizance of all space factors-geography, diffusions, distributions. As soon, however, as he has reconstructed his time sequences as well as he may, he follows the methods of the orthodox historian. He describes, giving his product depth through consideration of environmental and especially of psychological factors; but he describes only. It is each unique event that holds his interest, not the common likeness that may seem to run through events but which he finds, as he remains objective, to dilute thinner in proportion as he scrutinizes more accurately and finally to melt into intangibilities…

In essence, then, modern ethnology says that so and so happened, and may tell why it happened thus in that particular case. It does not tell, and it does not try to tell why things happen in society as such.

At the same time Kroeber kept in mind a more remote end of cultural anthropology in natural science:

As long as we continue offering the world only reconstructions of specific detail and consistently show a negativistic attitude toward broader conclusions, the world will find very little of profit in ethnology. People do want to know why.

In general, recent American anthropologists have been practical field workers who have had little occasion to stop and reflect upon their methods and distinguish the historical interest from that of natural science. Of those who have appreciated that there is here a fundamental difference in the logical character of facts Kroeber has made the clearest statements. He did not, however, make the sharp distinction immediately. His “Eighteen Professions,” published in 1915, is an affirmation by an anthropologist that his method is historical. Kroeber felt the fundamental difference between the method of history and the method of natural science, but in this paper he assumed that cultural phenomena were incapable of treatment by a natural science. He called all natural science “biology.”

“Anthropology today includes two studies which fundamental differences of aim and method render irreconcilable. One of these branches is biological and psychological; the other, social or historical. … In what follows, historical anthropology, history and sociology are referred to as history. Physical anthropology and psychology are included in biology.” He concludes: “In fine, the determinations and methods of biological, psychological or natural science do not exist for history, are disregarded by consistent biological practice. Most biologists have implicitly followed their aspect of this doctrine, but their subsequent success has tempted many historians, especially sociologists, anthropologists and theorists to imitate them instead of pursuing their proper complementary method.”

But in a later paper.” Kroeber made a clear distinction between the historical-geographical and the natural science methods. “Data may be viewed directly as they present themselves; or we can seek to pass through them to the processes involved.” In the realm of the “super organic,” “culture history” is “depiction of phenomena,” while “social psychology” is “formulation of processes.” In this paper Kroeber acknowledges the possibility of a natural science of the super organic, and sociology is no longer included with history: “There is no a priori reason visible, accordingly, why a science of cultural mechanics, or social psychology, or sociology, is impossible” (p. 640). Such sociology must, he says, consistently view “social phenomena and forces as cultural, and not as aggregations and products of psychic phenomena and forces” (p. 650).

Now the interesting fact is that though modem anthropology is primarily history, it does tend in various regions of inquiry to become this “social psychology” or “sociology” of which Kroeber speaks. It does occasionally “pass through data to the processes involved.” Physical anthropology, of course, has long since advanced beyond a mere taxonomic classification of biological types of the human species, and frequently directs its attention to the processes whereby somatological change takes place. Primitive linguistics early sought out types and processes. Archeology remains closest to history.” It is the ethnologist who deals with the phenomena of the super organic.” At first the method of the ethnologist was simply depletive. Ethnology came to be distinguished from ethnography, the latter term meaning descriptive (depictive) ethnology, only when ethnology came to be something besides mere description. Ethnologists do reduce their data to types, and they do arrive at formulations of processes.

An example of how descriptions of process are almost inevitable in considering ethnological problems could be found in almost any modern ethnological writing, but we may take a paper by Edward Sapir entitled “Time Perspective in Aboriginal American Culture: A Study in Method.” Dr. Sapir is there unequivocal in his view that modern anthropology is a purely historical science:

Cultural anthropology is more and more rapidly getting to realize itself a strictly historical science. Its data can not be understood, either in themselves or in their relation to one another, except as the endpoints of specific sequences of events reaching back into the remote past. Some of us may be more interested in the psychological laws of human development that we believe ourselves capable of extracting from the raw materials of ethnology and archaeology, than in the establishment of definite historical facts and relationships that would tend to make this material intelligible, but it is not at all clear that the formulation of such laws is any more the business of the anthropologist than of the historian in the customarily narrow sense of the word… Granting that the labors of the folk-psychologists are justifiable in themselves, the main point remains that so-called primitive culture consists throughout the phenomena that, so far as the ethnologist is concerned, must be worked out historically, that is in terms of actual happenings, however inferred, that are conceived to have a specific sequence, a specific localization, and specific relations among themselves.

Sapir presents an exhaustive outline of means whereby the relative priority of cultural elements in defined cultures may be determined. Such, for example, are “principles of necessary presupposition,” “relative firmness of association,” “cultural elaboration and specialization,” etc. But this leads him to express in general formulas the recurrence of phenomena which may be relied on to establish such a chronology, and the refinement of such formulas leads to the statement of natural “laws.” Thus, in inquiring into the limitations upon the information to be obtained from interpretation of the geographic distribution of culture traits, he is led to make this statement:

A culture element is transmitted with maximum ease when it is conceptually readily detachable from its cultural setting, is not hedged about in practice by religious or other restraints, is without difficulty assimilable to the borrowing culture, and travels from one tribe to another living in friendly, or at least intimate, relations with it, particularly when these tribes are bound to each other by ties of intermarriage and linguistic affinity and are situated on an important trade route.

Here the ethnologist has stated a “natural law,” the description of processes originating as a sort of by-product of the historical account. The descriptive formulation just quoted is made, not as an end, but as a means of finding out what happened in a certain place at a certain time. The processes of diffusion are defined as a guide to the historical investigator. But there is a tendency, with certain ethnologists, for these processes to become a scientific end in themselves, and at this point ethnology has become a natural science. The process of diffusion is the process most extensively treated by ethnologists, but a wider and wider field of explanatory science tends to be developed by them. This tendency is clearly marked in Clark Wissler’s Man and Cuiture.” This is in a very large measure an attempt to formulate culture processes. Particularly in the chapter “The Rationalization of Culture processes” does Wissler anticipate an explanatory science of cultural phenomena, which shall have for its end controls”.

Another ethnologist whose interest was in a large measure that of a natural scientist is W. H. R. Rivers. It is particularly interesting to note this fact, in view of the attempt of the extreme diffusionists to identify his work completely with their own. Elliott Smith and W. J. Perry are simply historians (perhaps some of their American critics would prefer to say, mythologists!); they conceive it their task to tell the story of the migration of culture elements from the supposed Egyptian center. Rivers had a broader interest: In an early paper, Rivers is ostensibly inquiring into the problem of what folkways are more easily borrowed, as a means to the “analysis of cultures,” that is, the determination of historical sequences in certain defined areas. But in reading the paper there is always a feeling that Rivers is interested in these matters of process in themselves. Writing nine years later, in his Social Organization, Rivers discusses this aspect of ethnology without reference to an ultimate historical purpose. He begins by saying:

I am one of those who believe that the ultimate aim of all studies of mankind, whether historical or scientific, is to reach explanations in terms of the ideas, beliefs, sentiments and instinctive tendencies by which the conduct of man, both individual and collective, is determined.

He then proceeds to study social organization “as a process,” and from his data educes general formulas descriptive of recurrent phenomena in the field of social organization. As his Social Organization is a description of the processes whereby forms of social grouping come into being, so his Medicine, Magic and Religion is essentially a natural history of curative practices, describing the process of their change from irrational to rational behavior. Rivers studies, by comparative ethnology, ways of behavior stimulated by the crisis of disease, i.e., ways of curing the disease; this part of the book is a description of the process whereby merely expressive behavior gives way to a rational therapeutic treatment.

Anthropology, therefore, although in large measure a historical science, ever and again tends to become a natural science. To what extent its contribution to a nomothetic science of human behavior will remain independent, or will become merged with other disciplines having this method and interest, remains uncertain. It is probable that for some time its important contribution will remain the collection of a wide variety of invaluable data. Upon these data sociologists and social psychologists are in a large degree dependent.