Department Of Social Relations Research Articles

Harvard's quixotic pursuit of a new science: The rise and fall of the Department of Social Relations By Patrick L.Schmidt: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers. 2022. pp. xiv + 249. $40.00 (paper). ISBN: 978‐1‐5381‐6829‐5

Harvard's quixotic pursuit of a new science: The rise and fall of the Department of Social Relations By Patrick L.Schmidt: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers. 2022. pp. xiv + 249. $40.00 (paper). ISBN: 978‐1‐5381‐6829‐5

Talcott Parsons on building personality system theory via psychoanalysis.

This article examines Talcott Parsons's efforts at building the theory of personality system as a special case of his general theory of action and places those efforts in historical context. I demonstrate how, during the middle decades of the twentieth century, Parsons employed elements of classic Freudian thought to advance a new appreciation of the personality system and its relations to other action systems. I begin with an overview of the reception of psychoanalysis at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, the Massachusetts General Hospital, and the Harvard Department of Social Relations, showing how Parsons's thinking on the personality system cannot be understood apart from his association with these three institutions. I then turn to how Parsons endeavored to integrate his particular brand of sociology with his own interpretation of Freud's writings to explain how the personality system functions and develops. I conclude by showing that while Parsons's involvements with psychoanalysis became more intermittent after the mid-1950s, to the end of his life he remained steadfast in his enthusiasm for Freud's theory of personality. In short, Parsons always believed that for sociological theory to progress, it needed to engage with psychoanalysis.

A hubristic windmill off Harvard Yard: Historically situating the Department of Social Relations

This essay reviews Patrick L. Schmidt’s book chronicling the rise and fall of Harvard’s Department of Social Relations (Harvard’s Quixotic Pursuit of a New Science) and contrasts Schmidt’s history with work of other scholars focusing on the impacts of the Cold War on Harvard’s social sciences during this period. While Schmidt provides important new historical details about the Department of Social Relations, with significant new information on some of Harvard’s internal politics, this review considers some of the department’s failures in relation to the chilling effects of McCarthyism and some department members covert arrangements with intelligence agencies, and limits to free inquiry during the early Cold War.

Notes on the history of SocialScienceResearch: In celebration of its 50th anniversary

This paper reports a first look at the founding of Social Science Research, providing a few key signposts but keenly aware that a full history must await recovery of many additional documentary materials. The journal was founded by James S. Coleman and Peter H. Rossi, who had trained at Columbia, taught at Chicago, and founded the interdisciplinary Department of Social Relations at Johns Hopkins. The Coleman-Rossi vision statement embeds three key ideas: (1) quantitative theoretical work and quantitative empirical work are close and constant partners; (2) quantitative theoretical work and quantitative empirical work each require special methods; and (3) crossing disciplinary lines spurs the growth of knowledge. The first issue of Social Science Research appeared in 1972. Then as now, SSR welcomed papers that may be too innovative or too technical (or too long or too short) for other journals, inclusive of papers that cross traditional disciplinary lines. Examination of the first four volumes (1972–1975) reveals a beautiful realization of the founders’ vision — a collection of rigorous quantitative papers from across the social sciences, pushing frontiers in both theory and empirics and in both substance and methods. There is innovation and creativity – and a touch of the playfulness that accelerates the growth of knowledge.

LAW AND TRADITION

The four of us came to Yale and the Law and Modernization Program by different routes. I’m going to describe my background because it explains how Dave and I complemented each other. Influenced by Russia’s launch of Sputnik in fall of my senior year in high school and the fact that I was good at math and science, I majored in physics at Harvard. By the end of my second year, however, I realized I didn’t want to be a scientist: I wasn’t good enough, and it would be years before I could do original work. In spring 1960 I took David Riesman’s SocSci 136 course: “American Character and Social Structure.” It was transformative. The course addressed some of my most pressing personal concerns; for instance, we read Riesman’s “The Lonely Crowd” and Paul Goodman’s “Growing Up Absurd” (1960)— critiques of 1950s culture and pressures for conformity. Allowed to write on almost any topic for our term paper (the only requirement), I chose “Attitudes towards science and extra-scientific phenomena: an empirical study among Harvard students.” (Looking back, I think I was seeking justifications for abandoning physics.) Riesman was a fellow of Quincy House, where I lived, and often had lunch with students, encouraging us to voice dissatisfactions with our Harvard education. My section man sent me a long, laudatory letter about the paper. (He was William Gamson, then writing about social movements in opposition to fluoridation, prefiguring today’s anti-vaxers.) Even more important, Riesman wrote every student (perhaps a hundred of us) about our papers. His 3.5-page letter to me concluded: “One of the things which is most desirable about your paper is the topic itself, chosen and pursued with great originality.” I was hooked.[1] I have always tried to emulate his eclectic, qualitative approach. (A lawyer with no formal training in sociology, he was Henry Ford II Professor of Social Sciences in the Social Relations Department.) The next year I took Paul Freund’s undergraduate course on legal reasoning and felt immediately drawn to law’s pilpul (despite having no background in Talmudic exegesis). I wrote a term paper for him on group libel—only to discover that Riesman had written a long article on the subject (1942)—which, Freund said disparagingly, was the last good thing he ever wrote. In my fourth year I took Talcott Parsons’s first-year graduate course (presumptuously, since I had disdained undergraduate soc rel courses) and was not enamored his formalistic theorizing, which seemed devoid of content. At the same time, I was becoming politically engaged, inspired by the sit-ins and freedom rides (which began in 1960 and 1961, respectively). Although 1950s apathy still pervaded Harvard (the only “demonstration” was a May 1961 protest against changing diplomas from Latin to English), I became active in Tocsin, which opposed above-ground nuclear testing and advocated for nuclear disarmament (doing research and participating in demonstrations in Boston and Washington). What may have clinched my choice of law over sociology graduate school, however, was Columbia’s offer of a full-tuition scholarship (although it was little more than a thousand dollars at the time) and my failure to get a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship. Riesman had urged me to go to Yale Law School for its alleged social science orientation; but I chose Columbia to be close to my girlfriend. (Yes, reader, I married her[2]—and we’re still happily together 58 years later.)

Richard Alpert (Ram Dass): Harvard psychologist who experimented with psychedelic drugs and became one of America’s most prominent and respected spiritual leaders

Credit: Dassima Kathleen Murphy Nothing in Richard Alpert’s early life could have predicted that he would come to embody the spirit of the psychedelic 1960s. He was born in Boston,...

Clifford Geertz, intellectual autonomy, and interpretive social science

Clifford Geertz was a key protagonist in the development of “interpretive social science,” but much of our understanding of his position as an intellectual neglects the crucial years before the publication of The Interpretation of Cultures. In this article, I argue that there is a common thread in Geertz’s early work and that it addressed, quite sophisticatedly, the reworking of the concept of cultural system, which he wrote on from the mid-1950s through the early 1970s. This research program was first developed in the context of the “basic social science” that characterized Harvard’s Department of Social Relations, and it had the support of key figures in that network. Geertz’s position in that intellectual debate was as a contributor to the development of a theory of culture that could address issues left unsolved by structural-functionalism and action theory. In that process, Geertz gradually developed a more interpretivist reading of the cultural system, while maintaining the support of his original network. The article offers some conclusions about the role of support within attention spaces in cases in which emergent intellectual positions can lead to the definition of new research programs.

Toward an Integral, Professional-Public Sociology: The Example of Gordon W. Allport

There has been much recent debate within sociology regarding academic versus applied approaches, as well as how to integrate these during a career. Sociologists interested in such issues might find both inspiration and an exemplar in social psychologist Gordon W. Allport. Well known for his leadership role in both personality and psychological social psychology, Allport has still not gained widespread recognition for his sociological contributions, especially his “public sociology.” As an undergraduate, Allport embraced the tradition of “social ethics” as taught at Harvard, which focused on social problems and social policy, and on individual engagement. Over the first two decades of a half-century career, Allport adapted to his “hard science” organizational and professional contexts and earned a tenured position primarily by building up a naturalistic psychology. But beginning in the early 1940s, he increasingly re-engaged with social ethics and overt reform efforts, with a focus on the social psychology and sociology of rumor, prejudice and racial and religious discrimination. Though a key architect of the interdisciplinary Department of Social Relations, he came to see that project as excessively value-neutral and he lobbied to revive a clear ethical commitment. Fittingly, Allport ended his career as the first incumbent of the Richard Clarke Cabot Professorship of Social Ethics. In this way, he bridged naturalistic psychology, sociology and social ethics in order to create an integral science oriented toward social justice.

American Sociology and Holocaust Studies: The Alleged Silence and the Creation of the Sociological Delay by Adele Valeria Messina

Reviewed by: American Sociology and Holocaust Studies: The Alleged Silence and the Creation of the Sociological Delay by Adele Valeria Messina Lori Gemeiner Bihler (bio) American Sociology and Holocaust Studies: The Alleged Silence and the Creation of the Sociological Delay. By Adele Valeria Messina. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2017. xxxviii + 459 pp. In 2007, Judith Gerson and Diane Wolf wrote that studying the Holocaust from the perspective of sociology was akin to wandering in the desert. Adele Valeria Messina’s new book, American Sociology and Holocaust Studies: The Alleged Silence and the Creation of the Sociological Delay, provides a close topography of that desert, uncovering forms of early life and the harsh conditions that inhibited growth. Metaphors aside, this comprehensive volume tracks the precise historical and political factors that shaped seven decades of American sociological thought on Nazism and the Holocaust, offering new insight into the notion of a “sociological delay.” The book’s four dense chapters are arranged chronologically, presenting a rich compendium of Holocaust-related sociological scholarship. In each chapter, Messina effectively uses a historiographical narrative to explore the field’s inconsistent level of attention to Nazism, racism, and the extermination of the Jews. Chapter One points to the postwar political environment and long-standing prejudices within the academy that led to the marginalization of Holocaust-related research by the establishment, now called the “sociological delay.” Chapter Two starts in the early 1970s and connects American sociology’s newfound interest in Nazi extermination camps to growing national discourse on the Holocaust, as well as to political events including the Vietnam War and the Yom Kippur War. The third chapter reviews 1980s sociological theory on the “genocidal state,” suggesting that it was prompted in part by atrocities occurring against the Maya Indians, Sikh, and Burundians that decade. The last chapter begins with the fall of the Berlin Wall in [End Page 587] 1989 and ends at the present moment, situating American sociology at the fulcrum of interdisciplinary Holocaust studies. In this history of the sociology of the Holocaust, Messina reveals that there were, in fact, sociologists writing about Nazi atrocities all along. Most intriguing is the author’s discussion of the eminent sociologists Talcott Parsons and Everett C. Hughes, who in 1948 both shied away from publishing research on Nazism. Messina shows that Parsons’ abrupt disinterest coincided with his trip to Allied-occupied Germany and the establishment of the Harvard Russian Research Center (HRRC). She revisits the controversy around Parsons’s supposed role in the resettlement of Nazi sympathizers and considers whether the unexplained murder of Parsons’ colleague, Edward Hartshorne, Jr., a fellow sociologist and staunch anti-Nazi, influenced the direction of Parsons’s research. Parsons’ place in sociology cannot be overemphasized: as president of the American Sociological Association (ASA) in 1949, he secured funding for its re-establishment and then served as its secretary from 1962 to 1965. He was the founder and director of Harvard’s Department of Social Relations, where he advised dozens of future sociology professors and developed his ideas around structural functionalism. It is no wonder that Parsons’s “values free” sociology avoided a close examination of racial prejudice when ideas of American exceptionalism and fears of communism prevailed. In the first chapter, Messina also questions Everett C. Hughes’s 1948 decision to halt publication of his essay on Nazi violence called “Good People and Dirty Work.” Hughes, serving as editor of the American Journal of Sociology from 1952 to 1961 and as president of the ASA in 1963, knew that if he published this work in 1948, his funding would likely be jeopardized. In analyzing Parsons’s and Hughes’s actions that year, the author pinpoints the roots of the sociology establishment’s delay in engaging with the Holocaust. Messina writes that studying this era is “useful for understanding the status of sociologists from a ‘wider perspective,’ that is, when academic research is not free and unfettered, but rather conditioned by political intentions. Briefly, the main American universities, as with the HRRC, could not deal with the Holocaust theme, which concerned a matter of accountability and a very recent event calling for political accountabilities or for a kind of public admission of guilt...

A Sympathetic Appraisal of Cold War Modernization Theory

ABSTRACTThe apparent failure of recent US nation-building efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan has re-awakened interest in earlier American efforts at nation-building and the scholarly literature that provided the intellectual framework and justification for those efforts. In the aftermath of the Second World War, a generation of scholars, shaped by their wartime experience, contributed to that literature under the general label of modernization theory. Modernization theory was promulgated under the auspices of three major institutions: Harvard's Department of Social Relations, the Social Science Research Council's Committee on Comparative Politics and MIT's Center for International Studies. All three institutions provided homes for scholars conducting multidisciplinary research on conditions in the ‘new states’ – that is the former colonial countries. Drawing on the work of key scholars that contributed to modernization theory, this article offers a more sympathetic analysis than is typical of many contemporary assessments of the theory. In order to provide that sympathetic appraisal, the widest perspective on the various approaches to modernization theory is required so that the scholars whose work are highlighted include: Gabriel Almond, Lucian Pye, Karl W. Deutsch, Daniel Lerner, Alex Inkeles and Walt Rostow.

Bernard Tursky (1918-2012).

Psychophysiology, 51 (2014), 1059–1060. Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Printed in the USA. Copyright © 2014 Society for Psychophysiological Research DOI: 10.1111/psyp.12338 In Memoriam Bernard Tursky (1918–2012) LARRY D. JAMNER, Ph.D. Department of Psychology and Social Behavior University of California Irvine bs_bs_banner Psychophysiology and our Society lost one of its original greats when Bernard Tursky passed away on September 13, 2012 at the age of 93. Bernard Tursky was an academic trail blazer and pioneer extraordinaire. Raised in New York City, Bernard immigrated to the U.S. with his grandparents and brothers at the age of three. Circumstances demanded that he cease his formal education after the eighth grade in order to support his family. Bernie or “Profes- sor” as I affectionately referred to him represented as close an embodiment of the self-taught “Renaissance Man” I have ever met or will likely ever come across again. To enter Bernie’s office was to enter a veritable library of classic and contemporary texts, and reference manuals on topics such as electrical engineering, classic psychology, political science, medical sciences, physiology, psy- chiatry, systems theory, and mathematics. His academic career began as a technical engineer at MIT, and as his reputation grew as an ingenious developer of laboratory equipment and programming, he was recruited by the Massachusetts Mental Health Center. Remarkably, Bernie was to become the only faculty member in the State University of New York system to hold the title of Full Professor in three separate departments; Political Science, Psychol- ogy, and Psychiatry and Behavioral Science at Stony Brook Uni- versity. Bernie’s academic career was characterized by the use of elegant procedures, meticulous methods, and clever experimental designs to address fundamental scientific questions in areas ranging from human pain perception and clinical psychophysi- ology to political psychology. His work showed a fastidiousness not often seen today, and Bernie was, at the same time, a visionary. In 1965 David Shapiro convinced David McClelland to offer Bernie an appointment in the Department of Social Relations at Harvard where Bernie and David Shapiro built a state-of-the-art psychophysiology laboratory and together with Andrew Crider, and Gary Schwartz developed and taught what perhaps was the first seminar/lab courses devoted entirely to psychophysiological concepts, methods, and applications. Among the notable students who took the course or were involved in the course’s laboratory were Nancy Adler, Iris Bell, Richard Davidson, John Kabat-Zinn, and Alan Sirota. This training effort eventually spawned a NIH- sponsored summer training institute in Psychophysiology at Harvard Medical School that offered formal training to young scientists. It was at this 1972 summer institute that Bernie became acquainted with Milton Lodge a political scientist from SUNY Stony Brook who soon after convinced him to head a comprehen- sive behavioral research laboratory as a Professor of Political Science. Eventually, Bernie was to become Chair of the SUNY Stony Brook’s Department of Political Science, a position he held until his retirement in 1985. Bernie, like several of our Society’s founding members, designed his own experimental apparatus and created the equip- ment necessary to study human pain perception in a standardized fashion. This pioneering program of research conducted in collabo- ration with Peter Watson and Donald O’Connell focused on the development of a reliable laboratory pain stimulus delivery system in the form of a constant-current stimulator and the Tursky con- centric electrode capable of quantifying and precisely specifying the parameters of painful stimuli used in experimental pain studies. With his meticulous and elegant techniques Bernie systematically studied the electrical parameters necessary for stable repeated delivery of painful stimuli as well as the local and more general physiological responses associated with these stimuli. The devel- opment of the constant-current stimulator along with the Tursky concentric electrode represented, at the time, major methodological advances in the area of human pain perception. Parenthetically, one of the original constant-current stimulator units and concentric electrodes Bernie built remain in active use in my laboratory today and is affectionately known by my students as the “Dragon Lady.” With these tools in his armamentarium, Bernie went on to study psychophysiological aspects of pain including the role of attention and control, as well as culture, in pain perception. In what were to become seminal papers, Bernie and Richard Sternbach demon- strated substantial ethnic differences in pain thresholds/tolerance levels and psychophysiological pain responses. Another signifi- cant contribution of Bernie’s to the field of human pain research

Henry W. Riecken Jr. (1917–2012).

Presents an obituary for Henry (Hank) W. Riecken Jr. In 1950, Riecken received his doctorate from Harvard University, having studied in the Department of Social Relations, which enjoyed a well-known relationship with the Department of Psychology. A thought leader, and a follower and booster of interesting thoughts (more prescience), Riecken was the first director of the National Science Foundation's (NSF's) Office of Social Sciences (later called a division) in 1959. As vice president and then president of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) from 1966 to 1971, Hank led the development of the first state-of-the-art monograph on randomized controlled trials in the United States. Riecken was a member of the first Director's Advisory Committee at the National Institutes of Health. He became a member of the National Academy of Sciences' Board on Medicine in 1969 (one of two social scientists) and, as a founding member, assisted in the challenging effort to create the Institute of Medicine (IOM) in 1971. Hank is survived by his children Gilson, Susan, and Anne. He talked about them often, gently, and proudly and clearly loved them. The current Riecken Foundation, whose mission aims at substantial enhancements to libraries in Guatemala, is a testimony to Riecken's beneficence and to the intellectually generous spirit of him and his family.

David Maybury-Lewis and Pia: Social/Symbolic and Public Anthropology

David Maybury-Lewis and Pia have influenced my research, teaching, and activism in ways that evolved and hopefully will continue to evolve. The trajectory from teacher/scholar to public intellectual, expressed in David's and Pia's life and work, also influenced the life and work of others, as illustrated here. I was still a new graduate student at Harvard (second year) when David arrived as a new faculty member in Fall 1960. Initial impact was intellectual and personal; Cultural Survival and the public intellectual phase had not yet surfaced. David brought, via Rodney Needham and Levi-Strauss, a certain kind of structuralism and, from Evans-Pritchard, social anthropology. He also brought youth, energy, charm, a sense of adventure fresh from the field in Brazil, and a British and cosmopolitan persona into what was then a very US milieu, in anthropology and in the department of social relations at Harvard. Pia came too, and she and David together were the first faculty to invite me and other graduate students to their house, where we met to discuss social anthropology, eat her Danish pastries, and relish their warmth and verve. Sometimes guests joined us, such as Edmund Leach, who sat in a chair which collapsed, after which he brandished a chair leg from his spot on the floor. While I did not join the Ge project in Brazil, I took the structuralist influences, which resonated with Dutch anthropology, to Indonesian fieldwork and to thinking through an anthropological perspective. Even though my work was not related to his Ge project, David was kind enough to serve on my examining committee, write to me in the field, and express interest in what I did after I returned, as I excitedly and naively recounted what seemed new and original to me but failed to carry forward his own interests. Their civility and kindness I deeply appreciated, and, no doubt nostalgically, I mention it to others- most recently my mother's brother's granddaughter, who majored in anthropology at Harvard, thinking that someday she might need a welcoming human being. But it is especially graduate students who need decency in a world offering sparse rewards for what they do. David's public intellectual work, through Cultural Survival, the Millennium Series, and other work on advocacy and outreach stands as one of the great achievements by an anthropologist in what some of us term public interest anthropology. If one compares, say, Boas, one would ask whether he managed to create any organization such as Cultural Survival that outlived his own acts as a public intellectual. I have not participated directly in Cultural Survival other than to be a member, but I have been inspired by it in carrying out some related work, even though this initiative began after I had finished graduate work. I shall briefly illustrate, then, two kinds of work that owe a debt to David and to Pia. The first kind is academic, a social anthropological approach to the study of symbols and meaning. David arrived at a kind of lacunae within socio-cultural anthropology at Harvard and perhaps generally. The summer before he arrived, Clyde Kluckhohn, the anthropological founder of the Department of Social Relations, had died. Not long afterwards, Alfred Kroeber, co-author with Kluckhohn of an exploration of the concept of culture, died also. The death of these two leaders symbolized a dangerous period in US anthropology-the threat of an end to a humanistic and holistic conception of cultural anthropology that had been initiated by Boas with inspiration from German scholarship. However, a second major founder of Social Relations, Talcott Parsons, was still alive and active, together with his protege, Robert Bellah. Parsonsian theory provided a comprehensive (if not always comprehensible) framework for some of us in the social anthropology program within the Social Relations Department. Terry Turner, Thomas Kirsch, and I had been studying with Parsons in 1960, the Spring before Kluckhohn died and David arrived. …

David Maybury-Lewis and Cultural Survival: Providing a Model for Public Anthropology, Advocacy, and Collaboration

David Maybury-Lewis and Cultural Survival: Providing a Model for Public Anthropology, Advocacy, and Collaboration Louise Lamphere In 1972, David Maybury-Lewis and his wife Pia founded Cultural Survival, a non-governmental organization dedicated to promoting and protecting the rights of indigenous peoples.1 At a time when most academic anthropologists were committed to objective social science research, publication, and teaching, David and Pia’s efforts were very much outside the mainstream. Their actions were a response to the deteriorating situation of the Brazilian Indians they had studied in the 1960s. Yet the early years of Cultural Survival are a model for what has become public or engaged anthropology—an approach currently recognized as more central and legitimate within our discipline. Documentation, advocacy, and collaboration—three characteristics of Cultural Survival’s work—have become regular activities both for a broad range of anthropologists and for the American Anthropological Association, the largest professional association of anthropologists. [End Page 1049] The Context In an early newsletter, David explained how he and Pia came to found Cultural Survival: “Over twenty years [1958] ago my wife and I took our baby son and went to live with the Shavante Indians of Central Brazil. They had a reputation at that time for being fiercely hostile to outsiders, so that local backwoodsmen gave them a wide berth as they roamed beyond the frontier of Brazilian society. The Shavante accepted our little family, however, and let us live with them, to learn about them and to learn from them. . .Today [1980] they are still struggling to defend their way of life. The frontier has now caught up with the Shavante and threatens to destroy them. Their lands have been invaded and reduced. . . . . They need help as do hundreds of other small societies throughout the world” (Cultural Survival Newsletter 4:3:12). The condition of the Xavante and David and Pia’s decision to found Cultural Survival seems light years away from the anthropology of the late l950s, when they first visited the Xavante, and 1962, when I arrived at Harvard as a graduate student. Social anthropology (which at the time was part of the Social Relations Department) was a discipline that saw itself as a social science dedicated to the objective and careful study of small-scale societies using field research and participant observation. David had arrived at Harvard, in 1961, fresh from Oxford—one of the British universities where the “real” social anthropology, as developed by Radcliffe-Brown, Evans- Pritchard, and Needham, was practiced. I remember taking copious notes in David’s class on “Kinship and Marriage” as he lectured on Lévi-Strauss, Needham, and Leach and their models of cross-cousin marriage. His lectures were clear and elegant. They led me to understand the many ways in which kinship ordered almost all social relationships in indigenous societies. David was one of my dissertation advisors (Evon Vogt served as the other). While most other students were involved in Harvard faculty research projects that took them to Central Brazil, Chiapas, and India, a handful of us conducted research with Native North Americans, groups that had long been studied by US anthropologists and were somewhat “passé” compared to populations in more exotic parts of the world. I conducted my research on residence patterns and cooperation on the [End Page 1050] Navajo Reservation in 1965–66, and, characteristically, David suggested that I write the chapter on kinship and social organization first, since that would presumably be the heart of the dissertation. Between 1965 and 1972, the US and the world changed dramatically. The US was increasingly involved in the Vietnam War, spawning a vigorous anti-war movement. We began to see US policy as no longer benevolent and US support for the World Bank and other international institutions as having very negative consequences for the indigenous peoples we studied. On the Navajo reservation, new coal strip mines, power plants, and light manufacturing plants raised environmental and labor issues, while in Brazil, the plans for building a highway in the Northwest frontier area threatened many small indigenous groups who had no land rights and who died from infectious diseases brought by invading settlers. Anthropology, of course, had long been...

Unsupported allegations about a link between Milgram and the CIA: Tortured reasoning in A Question of Torture

Journal of the History of the Behavioral SciencesVolume 43, Issue 2 p. 199-203 Research Article Unsupported allegations about a link between Milgram and the CIA: Tortured reasoning in A Question of Torture Thomas Blass, Thomas Blass University of Maryland Baltimore CountySearch for more papers by this author Thomas Blass, Thomas Blass University of Maryland Baltimore CountySearch for more papers by this author First published: 09 April 2007 https://doi.org/10.1002/jhbs.20224Citations: 5AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Citing Literature Volume43, Issue2Spring 2007Pages 199-203 RelatedInformation

Participant observer: memoir of a transatlantic life

In tradition of Levi-Strauss's Tristes Tropiques (crossed with Angela's Ashes) Robin Fox, one of preeminent anthropologists of our time, takes us on an exuberant personal, intellectual and cultural journey through 1930s to 1970s. This is a personal, historical, intellectual journey, one that is at once intriguing, hilarious, and moving. Like Browning's Sordello (who recurs throughout book), Fox is telling story of the development of a soul. Fox's method is to depend entirely on memory to select people, events, and ideas that have driven him towards what was called at time a in social sciences. This revolution was founding of biosocial, or what came to be called sociobiological, movement in study of human behavior. It was a long road peppered with strange events, brain-bending ideas, odd adventures, dangers and sorrows, and a cast of lively, often eccentric characters. Fox describes himself as an observer of a series of endings: last gasps of now extinct ways of life. He witnessed last of old steam and horse-powered northern wool towns of industrial revolution and pre-industrial Hardy countryside of southern England. He saw ancient grammar schools before their destruction by doctrinaire socialism; old LSE when it was still an international family, not just a big college; brave but failed experiment that was Talcott Parsons' Social Relations Department. In United States, he experienced innocent but troubled America of 1950s and last gasp of traditional Indian life in New Mexico. He lived in genteel Jane Austen England in Devon and experienced peasant-crofter life in Irish islands. Participant Observer is a report from cultural and social battlefront, seen through personal lens of a combatant. Fox has given us a kind of Cook's Tour through ideas and intellectual movements of mid-century, when world changed and foundations of twenty-first century were set. It is history of an education by a narrator in love with learning.

Ecological Influences on an Ecologically-Oriented Community Psychologist

My development as an ecologically-oriented community psychologist was shaped by many ecologies, including my family's religious faith, the civil rights, anti-war, and feminist movements, and the diverse cultures I have been privileged to experience. Harvard's Social Relations department and Michigan's programs in Social and Community Psychology provided intellectual underpinnings for an ecological viewpoint. New York University's program in Community Psychology and New York itself have allowed a variety of exciting research opportunities. Sexism has also shaped my career, and combining work and family has been sometimes a challenge, but always a joy.

Conversation with Conan Kornetsky.

Conversation with Conan Kornetsky.

Creating, Testing, and Applying Social Psychological Theories

I am highly honored to receive the 2002 Cooley-Mead Award, and I want to thank my collaborators, both colleagues and students, who made this possible. I don't have enough time to acknowledge all the people from whom I learned so much and who stimulated the social psychological work that I have done. I would be remiss, however, if I did not mention the people most significant to my work and my development. I owe my colleagues at Stanford-Joe Berger, Sandy Dornbusch, Henry Walker, Buzz Zelditch, and especially Liz Cohen-an immeasurable debt not only for the research in which we were involved but for the hundreds of hours spent discussing issues of theory construction, methodology, and social psychology in general. Creating, testing, and applying social psychology theory takes team efforts, and I was part of a very exciting team. There is a small irony involved in receiving the Cooley-Mead Award since the one question on my PhD written exams that I answered inadequately was the question about Cooley and Mead. That, too, was predictive in a sense because it started me on the path of questioning the prevailing conceptions of theory in sociology. When I came into the field, there was not much of what I would call theory. Today there are many examples. I disagree with my friend Henry Walker (Walker 2000) about the state of theory development, but I understand the basis of our difference. I am looking at theory development relative to where we were when I started in social psychology; he is critiquing theory development relative to where we want to be. I agree with him that we have a long way to go, but the four branches of the expectation states program (Berger, Cohen, and Zelditch 1966; Berger and Conner 1974; Berger et al. 1972; Webster and Sobieszick 1974)-power-dependency theory (Emerson 1972a, 1972b), network exchange theory (Markovsky, Willer, and Patton 1988; Willer and Anderson 1981; Yamagishi, Gilmore, and Cook 1988), identity theory (Stryker and Burke 2000), and affect-control theory (Heise 1999) to cite a few examplestestify to the growth over the last 45 years. I would like to believe immodestly that I, along with my Stanford colleagues, contributed to this growth. I was interested in the theory enterprise even before my first year in graduate school. In fact, I took an MA in psychology from the University of Minnesota because I was attracted by Leon Festinger's (1950) theory of informal social communication. At Minnesota I discovered that I did not look at things the way most psychologists do, so I returned to Harvard for my PhD in sociology, but I was very much a product of the Social Relations Department. Jerome Bruner told me after I had switched to sociology that the boundary areas between fields like psychology and sociology generated the most creative work. I took this seriously, and much of my research was close to this boundary. What no one told me was that working in these boundary areas creates problems of legitimacy. Because I constructed a probability model for the Asch (1951) conformity experiment (B. Cohen 1958,1963; Cohen and Lee 1975), sociologists tended to treat me as a psychologist even though my model was based on the very unpsychological assumption that there were no individual differences among the experimental subjects. I had a hard time convincing people that it is not the phenomenon one studies but the theoretical approach one takes that determines whether one is a sociological social psychologist. The theory enterprise has grown and matured over the last 50 years. Almost everyone now speaks favorably about theory. I am reminded of George Homans' complaint 5 * Direct correspondence to author at cohenb@stanford.edu

The Department of Social Relations and “Systems Theory” at Harvard: 1948-50

The Department of Social Relations and “Systems Theory” at Harvard: 1948-50