Jack David Eller - Social Science and Historical Perspectives

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Social Science and Historical Perspectives

Ellers book is a logically structured and highly readable overview of the key tenets of various social science disciplines.

Wendy Rouse, San Jos State University, USA

This accessible book introduces the story of social science, with coverage of history, politics, economics, sociology, psychology, anthropology, and geography.

Key questions include:

• How and why did the social sciences originate and differentiate?
• How are they related to older traditions that have defined Western civilization?
• What is the unique perspective or way of knowing of each social science?
• What are the challengesand alternativesto the social sciences as they stand in the twenty-first century?

Eller explains the origin, evolution, methods, and main figures in each discipline, as well as the literature, concepts, and theories. The chapters also feature a range of contemporary examples, with consideration given to how the disciplines address present-day issues.

Jack David Eller is Associate Professor (Emeritus) of Anthropology at the Community College of Denver, USA. An experienced teacher and author, his other books for Routledge include Cultural Anthropology: Global Forces, Local Lives (third edition, 2016), Cultural Anthropology: 101 (2015), Culture and Diversity in the United States (2015), and Introducing Anthropology of Religion (second edition, 2014).

First published 2017
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

2017 Jack David Eller

The right of Jack David Eller to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78
of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised 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.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification
and explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Eller, Jack David, 1959 author.

Title: Social science and historical perspectives: society, science,
and ways of knowing/Jack David Eller.

Description: First Edition. | New York: Routledge, 2016. |
Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016007405| ISBN 9781138675803
(hardback: alk. paper) | ISBN 9781138675797 (pbk.: alk.
paper) | ISBN 9781315560434 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Social sciencesHistory.

Classification: LCC H51 .E45 2016 | DDC 300dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016007405

ISBN: 978-1-138-67580-3 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-138-67579-7 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-56043-4 (ebk)

Typeset in Sabon
by Florence Production Ltd, Stoodleigh, Devon

Contents

Imagine that you were a car salesperson. You could be very successful at selling cars without any knowledge of how cars are manufactured, or how they work internally, or how they were invented in the first place. However, you might be curious to know more about the history and technology of cars, or you might hope someday to own your own car dealership or auto manufacturing plant. You might even have an idea for a better car or an alternative to cars.

Now imagine that you were not a purveyor of cars but of information, that is, a teacher. You could be very successful at teaching information without any real knowledge of how information is made, or how information works, or how the things we know or the particular ways that we organize and transmit information were invented in the first place. However, you might be curious to know more about the history and function of knowledge, or you might hope someday to be a school administrator or to open your own school. You might even have an idea about a better way to teach or run a school or an alternative to existing knowledge- or school-systems.

This book is about the knowledge that we have and teach in what we call the social sciences. Social sciences are either a sub-type of science or a parallel field to the natural sciences. They are also typically distinguished from, but also related to, the humanities. Finally, social studies is a particular condensed and simplified version of (some of) the social sciences.

This book is not a presentation on methods for teaching the social sciences or social studies to any particular set of students. There are many books on social science teaching methods. This book is also not a survey of a specific social science, although it does discuss each of the major conventional social sciences. Texts providing introduction to sociology or general psychology, etc. are readily available, and entire college courses serve to introduce students and future practitioners to the various disciplines.

This book does something more unusual, indeed rare, and there are few college courses that attempt precisely what we will attempt here. The best way to think of the project at hand is sociology of knowledge, that is, the social organization of knowledge-making and knowledge-transmitting. Knowledge, after all, does not grow on trees, and humans do not simply find knowledge lying about in the world around them. Humans have to not only discover but construct knowledge; at the very least, we must put facts together to draw conclusions and arrive at generalizations. But we must also perform certain actions to acquire facts and establish standards for what counts as a fact . One common action in science is the experiment, but as we will see soon, not all sciences perform experiments, and experiments are not the only path to scientific knowledge.

Even more than gathering facts and spinning them into generalizations and conclusions (often and ideally laws), humans must organize themselves in some way to produce and disseminate knowledge. One familiar way to organize the production of knowledge is the research laboratory. One familiar way to transmit knowledge is the classroom and the academic discipline and department; another is scholarly writing. But these are only the beginning of an incredibly complex and controversial knowledge-construction process.

Obviously, different sciences and disciplines know different things. Indeed, each science and discipline was invented for the purpose of knowing different things. So each is a particular body of knowledge. But much more, each is a particular way of knowing . Each has its own language or terminology, its own questions, its own methods, its own literature, and its own disciplinary history. Each is a specific, though not isolated, knowledge community, and, as scholars often complain, members of one knowledge community tend not to read the work or even talk to the members of other communities. Sometimes, the differences in language and questions make it difficult to talk to each other, and the burden of mastering and keeping up with ones own field leaves little time to follow the developments in other fields.

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