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In recent years, social scientists have turned their critical lens
on the historical roots and contours of their disciplines,
including their politics and practices, epistemologies and methods,
institutionalization and professionalization, national development
and colonial expansion, globalization and local contestations, and
their public presence and role in society. The Social Sciences in
the Looking Glass offers current social scientific perspectives on
this reflexive moment. Examining sociology, anthropology,
philosophy, political science, legal theory, and religious studies,
the volume's contributors outline the present transformations of
the social sciences, explore their connections with critical
humanities, analyze the challenges of alternate paradigms, and
interrogate recent endeavors to move beyond the human. Throughout,
the authors, who belong to half a dozen disciplines, trace how the
social sciences are thoroughly entangled in the social facts they
analyze, and are key to helping us understand the conditions of our
world. Contributors. Chitralekha, Jean-Louis Fabiani, Didier
Fassin, Johan Heilbron, Miriam Kingsberg Kadia, Kristoffer Kropp,
Nicolas Langlitz, John Lardas Modern, Alvaro Morcillo Laiz, Amin
Perez, Carel Smith, George Steinmetz, Peter D. Thomas, Bregje van
Eekelen, Agata Zysiak
In recent years, social scientists have turned their critical lens
on the historical roots and contours of their disciplines,
including their politics and practices, epistemologies and methods,
institutionalization and professionalization, national development
and colonial expansion, globalization and local contestations, and
public presence and role in society. The Social Sciences in the
Looking Glass offers current social scientific perspectives on this
reflexive moment. Examining sociology, anthropology, philosophy,
political science, legal theory, and religious studies, the
volume’s contributors outline the present transformations of the
social sciences, explore their connections with critical
humanities, analyze the challenges of alternate paradigms, and
interrogate recent endeavors to move beyond the human. Throughout,
the authors, who belong to half a dozen disciplines, trace how the
social sciences are thoroughly entangled in the social facts they
analyze and are key to helping us understand the conditions of our
world. Contributors. Chitralekha, Jean-Louis Fabiani, Didier
Fassin, Johan Heilbron, Miriam Kingsberg Kadia, Kristoffer Kropp,
Nicolas Langlitz, John Lardas Modern, Ãlvaro Morcillo Laiz, AmÃn
Pérez, Carel Smith, George Steinmetz, Peter D. Thomas, Bregje van
Eekelen, Agata Zysiak
A new history of French social thought that connects postwar
sociology to colonialism and empire In this provocative and
original retelling of the history of French social thought, George
Steinmetz places the history and development of modern French
sociology in the context of the French empire after World War II.
Connecting the rise of all the social sciences with efforts by
France and other imperial powers to consolidate control over their
crisis-ridden colonies, Steinmetz argues that colonial research
represented a crucial core of the renascent academic discipline of
sociology, especially between the late 1930s and the 1960s.
Sociologists, who became favored partners of colonial governments,
were asked to apply their expertise to such “social problemsâ€
as detribalization, urbanization, poverty, and labor migration.
This colonial orientation permeated all the major subfields of
sociological research, Steinmetz contends, and is at the center of
the work of four influential scholars: Raymond Aron, Jacques
Berque, Georges Balandier, and Pierre Bourdieu. In retelling this
history, Steinmetz develops and deploys a new methodological
approach that combines attention to broadly contextual factors,
dynamics within the intellectual development of the social sciences
and sociology in particular, and close readings of sociological
texts. He moves gradually toward the postwar sociologists of
colonialism and their writings, beginning with the most macroscopic
contexts, which included the postwar “reoccupation†of the
French empire and the turn to developmentalist policies and the
resulting demand for new forms of social scientific expertise.
After exploring the colonial engagement of researchers in sociology
and neighboring fields before and after 1945, he turns to detailed
examinations of the work of Aron, who created a sociology of
empires; Berque, the leading historical sociologist of North
Africa; Balandier, the founder of French Africanist sociology; and
Bourdieu, whose renowned theoretical concepts were forged in
war-torn, late-colonial Algeria.
Social science, history, and philosophy have often been neglect in
thinking through their fundamentally intertwined relationship. The
result is often an inattention to philosophy where social science
and history is concerned, or a neglect of historicity and social
analysis where philosophy is concerned. Meanwhile, the place of
values in research is often uneasily passed over in silence. The
inattention to, and loss of, the intersection between these
different disciplines and their subject matters, leaves our
investigations all the more impoverished as a result. In resolving
these problems, it is not enough to strive for cooperation or
integration, but to rethink of the nature of the disciplines
themselves; their interests, purposes, and presuppositions. In this
volume, contributors explore different facets of these
relationships, and move beyond the problematics erected by
positivism often cast in terms of value-free or value-neutral
science, that is, a science obsessed with empirical data, schematic
classifications, and the pursuit of law-like forms. While
positivism has been subject to critique, the influence and legacy
of positivism remains. It remains in the way in which we often
think about science; the line drawn between the sciences and the
humanities; the norms researchers should follow; what a successful
explanation looks like; and the ethical, normative, and political
implications of scientific research. Aimed at students and
researchers of philosophy, history and the social sciences, this
book is driven by a desire to revindicate questions concerning
ontology and social ontology, to rethink the nature of explanation,
and to resituate normativity and values within scientific, social
scientific, and historical pursuits.
A dynamic aerial exploration of our changing planet, published on
the 50th anniversary of Earth Day  The Human Planet is a
sweeping visual chronicle of the Earth today from a photographer
who has circled the globe to report on such urgent issues as
climate change, sustainable agriculture, and the ever-expanding
human footprint. George Steinmetz is at home on every continent,
documenting both untrammeled nature and the human project that
relentlessly redesigns the planet in its quest to build shelter,
grow food, generate energy, and create beauty through art and
architecture. In his images, accompanied by authoritative text by
renowned science writer Andrew Revkin, we are encountering the
dramatic and perplexing new face of our ancient home.
Germany's overseas colonial empire was relatively short lived,
lasting from 1884 to 1918. During this period, dramatically
different policies were enacted in the colonies: in Southwest
Africa, German troops carried out a brutal slaughter of the Herero
people; in Samoa, authorities pursued a paternalistic defense of
native culture; in Qingdao, China, policy veered between harsh
racism and cultural exchange.
Why did the same colonizing power act in such differing ways? In
"The Devil's Handwriting," George Steinmetz tackles this question
through a brilliant cross-cultural analysis of German colonialism,
leading to a new conceptualization of the colonial state and
postcolonial theory. Steinmetz uncovers the roots of colonial
behavior in precolonial European ethnographies, where the Hereros
were portrayed as cruel and inhuman, the Samoans were idealized as
"noble savages," and depictions of Chinese culture were mixed. The
effects of status competition among colonial officials, colonizers'
identification with their subjects, and the different strategies of
cooperation and resistance offered by the colonized are also
scrutinized in this deeply nuanced and ambitious comparative
history.
From one majestic nature landscape to the next, this is an iconic
collection of National Geographic's photography of the world's most
beautiful locations. With vast deserts in twilights, snow-capped
mountain ranges at the brink of dawn, a forest in the height of
autumn colours, these indelible images will magnify the beauty,
emotion and depth that can be captured in the split second of a
camera conduit to the world around them.
What impact does culture have on state-formation and public policy?
How do states affect national and local cultures? How is the
ongoing cultural turn in theory reshaping our understanding of the
Western and modernizing states, long viewed as the radiant core of
a universal, context-free rationality? This eagerly awaited volume
brings together pioneering scholars who reexamine the sociology of
the state and historical processes of state-formation in light of
developments in cultural analysis.The volume first examines some of
the unsatisfying ways in which cultural processes have been
discussed in social science literature on the state. It
demonstrates new and sophisticated approaches to understanding both
the role culture plays in the formation of states and the state's
influence on broad cultural developments. The book includes
theoretical essays and empirical studies; the latter essays are
concerned with early modern European nations, non-European
countries undergoing political modernization, and twentieth-century
Western nation-states. A wide range of perspectives are presented
in order to delineate this emergent area of research. Together the
essays constitute an agenda-setting work for the social sciences.
The Politics of Method in the Human Sciences provides a remarkable
comparative assessment of the variations of positivism and
alternative epistemologies in the contemporary human sciences.
Often declared obsolete, positivism is alive and well in a number
of the fields; in others, its influence is significantly
diminished. The essays in this collection investigate its mutations
in form and degree across the social science disciplines. Looking
at methodological assumptions field by field, individual essays
address anthropology, area studies, economics, history, the
philosophy of science, political science and political theory, and
sociology. Essayists trace disciplinary developments through the
long twentieth century, focusing on the decades since World War II.
Contributors explore and contrast some of the major alternatives to
positivist epistemologies, including Marxism, psychoanalysis,
poststructuralism, narrative theory, and actor-network theory.
Almost all the essays are written by well-known practitioners of
the fields discussed. Some essayists approach positivism and
anti-positivism via close readings of texts influential in their
respective disciplines. Some engage in ethnographies of the
present-day human sciences; others are more historical in method.
All of them critique contemporary social scientific practice.
Together, they trace a trajectory of thought and method running
from the past through the present and pointing toward possible
futures. Contributors. Andrew Abbott, Daniel Breslau, Michael
Burawoy, Andrew Collier , Michael Dutton, Geoff Eley, Anthony
Elliott, Stephen Engelmann, Sandra Harding, Emily Hauptmann, Webb
Keane, Tony Lawson, Sophia Mihic, Philip Mirowski, Timothy
Mitchell, William H. Sewell Jr., Margaret R. Somers, George
Steinmetz, Elizabeth Wingrove
The revelation that the U.S. Department of Defense had hired
anthropologists for its Human Terrain System project-assisting its
operations in Afghanistan and Iraq-caused an uproar that has
obscured the participation of sociologists in similar
Pentagon-funded projects. As the contributors to Sociology and
Empire show, such affiliations are not new. Sociologists have been
active as advisers, theorists, and analysts of Western imperialism
for more than a century. The collection has a threefold agenda: to
trace an intellectual history of sociology as it pertains to
empire; to offer empirical studies based around colonies and
empires, both past and present; and to provide a theoretical basis
for future sociological analyses that may take empire more fully
into account. In the 1940s, the British Colonial Office began
employing sociologists in its African colonies. In Nazi Germany,
sociologists played a leading role in organizing the occupation of
Eastern Europe. In the United States, sociology contributed to
modernization theory, which served as an informal blueprint for the
postwar American empire. This comprehensive anthology critiques
sociology's disciplinary engagement with colonialism in varied
settings while also highlighting the lasting contributions that
sociologists have made to the theory and history of imperialism.
Contributors. Albert Bergesen, Ou-Byung Chae, Andy Clarno, Raewyn
Connell, Ilya Gerasimov, Julian Go, Daniel Goh, Chandan Gowda,
Krishan Kumar, Fuyuki Kurasawa, Michael Mann, Marina Mogilner,
Besnik Pula, Anne Raffin, Emmanuelle Saada, Marco Santoro, Kim
Scheppele, George Steinmetz, Alexander Semyonov, Andrew Zimmerman
For New York Air, George Steinmetz, the superb aerial photographer
of the Earth’s remote and exotic regions, turns his camera on one
of its most dynamic cities. New York City, with its iconic skyline;
its mix of modern architecture and historic buildings; its rivers
and islands; its infrastructure of roads and bridges; and its
rooftops used for every possible purpose, is his magnificent
subject—the great stage for twenty-first century life. Shooting
from a small helicopter in all seasons and from dawn to dusk,
Steinmetz captures both the brute physical presence and the romance
of the metropolis. Included are the classic sites like Central Park
and Times Square, important new projects like the Highline and the
September 11 Memorial, wide coverage of both Manhattan and the
other boroughs and all kinds of urban spaces, from museums to
sports arenas to beaches. But what particularly distinguishes the
photography is that it portrays the city at all scales and often
reveals people at play, at rest, and at work.
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