George Caspar Homans - Sentiments and Activities

The International Library of Sociology

SENTIMENTS AND ACTIVITIES

Founded by KARL MANNHEIM

The International Library of Sociology

SOCIAL THEORY AND METHODOLOGY
In 22 Volumes

SENTIMENTS AND ACTIVITIES

Essays in Social Science

by

GEORGE CASPAR HOMANS

First published in England 1962

by Routledge

Reprinted in 1998, 2002

by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN

or

270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016

First issued in paperback 2010

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group

1962 The Free Press of Glencoe

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A CIP catalogue record for this book

is available from the British Library

Sentiments and Activities

ISBN 978015175159 (hbk)

ISBN 978015605052 (pbk)

Social Theory and Methodology: 22 Volumes

ISBN 978015178181

The International Library of Sociology: 274 Volumes

ISBN 9780415178389

Publishers Note

The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original may be apparent

To the memory of Elton Mayo

Contents

13 Anxiety and Ritual
THE THEORIES OF MALINOWSKI AND RADCLIFFE-BROWN

14 Marriage, Authority, and Final Causes
A STUDY OF UNILATERAL CROSS-COUSIN MARRIAGE

SENTIMENTS & ACTIVITIES

Autobiographical Introduction

I N a volume of collected essays a reader will be looking for some unifying principle other than that they were all written by the same manas if that were a unifying principle! He may know of volumes whose essays mark stages in a single line of investigation, pursued by the author year after year with cumulative success. At the least, he will expect some unity to be provided by the authors official discipline. I am a sociologist, but the reader who has sense enough to scan the table of contents of this book and see what he is letting himself in for may well wonder whether even sociology provides the unity here. Should he know the field, he will, to be sure, find some essays that will strike him as legitimately sociological. Industrial sociology is a recognized department of the field, and so is the study of small groups, though it is a department sociology shares with psychology. But when he comes to a long paper on unilateral cross-cousin marriage, the cross-cousin will surely tell him that he has crossed the boundary into primitive kinship, which belongs to anthropology. And as for The Frisians in East Angliawhat business has a sociologist with English history?

I have indeed scattered my shots, and the best thing I can do by way of introduction to these essays is to take advantage of this very deficiency by explaining it. Few of us social scientists have tried to write our intellectual autobiographies and to tell as best we could why we got interested in the subjects we have worked on and what influences have played upon us as we worked. Without trying to analyze the deeper and less conscious influences, I shall explain the scattering of my subjects by giving, as well as I can at this late date, the more obvious reasons why I took them up and why I pursued them as I did. The reasons were seldom what the picture of an ideal scientist says they should have been. Often they were opportunistic, designed to advance a career rather than a discipline; often intensely personal rather than dictated by a reasoned appraisal of what was best worth doing in the field; and often matters of chance, in the sense that the choice could not easily have been predicted ahead of time. I should be more ashamed of myself if I thought that many others had let themselves be dominated by the mere flux of circumstance less often than I have.

Whatever my nonintellectual reasons for embarking on my various subjects, I found, once fairly embarked, that they were running into intellectual problems of wider scope than the subjects themselves. This collection includes most of the papers, other than reviews, that I have published during my professional life. Some of them are occasional pieces or the by-products of other work, and I shall explain at the beginning of each essay what the occasion for it was. The others are different. Although they certainly deal with their subjects, they should also be looked on as points where a dialogue that has been going on in my mind for a long time thrust itself for a moment above the surface of consciousness, a dialogue between the data of social science and certain kinds of general ideas. These ideas are the final justification of this collection, and the second purpose of this introduction is to explain what they are.