Neighboring Disciplines Research Articles

Le Paradoxe Des Sciences Sociales: Les Vues D'un économiste `Dissident'

The article underlines the strong contrast between the recognition of social sciences in the academic arena and the numerous epistemological and methodological difficulties that derive from a too highly specialized division into subdisciplines, inherited from a configuration now obsolete. It takes for its starting-point a critical appraisal of contemporary economic research and its desire to found a pure economic theory, totally apart from other social sciences, without the reference to methodological individualism and the intensive use of the assumptions of rationality and equilibrium. Given the current quite unsatisfactory state of the social sciences, there is an alternative research strategy built upon the interaction of various neighbour disciplines addressing the same issue, fully taking into account historical time and the related irreversibility, a new and imaginative use of system theory. Last but not least, a larger diversity of social groups making demands on social scientists would make for the recognition of the neglected variety of social links between countries and regions. This may open a new path for really universal and more relevant social sciences in the 21st century.

Editorial/Introduction

Editorial/Introduction Lawrence Rainey and Robert von Hallberg We begin this journal in the belief that the artistic movement known as modernism produced the most radical and comprehensive changes in western culture since romanticism. Here would be the place to list those changes, if only they were all nameable and known, like characters in a chapter of yesterday’s reading. Instead we sense that the effects of modernism still reverberate through all the arts, and its products surround us in the buildings where we work, the houses and apartments where we live, and even the chairs where we sit now trying to itemize its effects. Modernism was more than a repertory of artistic styles, more too than an intellectual movement or set of ideas; it initiated an ongoing transformation in the entire set of relations governing the production, transmission, and reception of the arts. The modernists themselves seem to have understood this when they urged that changes in the arts be viewed in conjunction with changes in philosophy, historiography, and social theory, to say nothing of the scientific shifts that they claimed as part of their moment’s cultural revolution. The success of modernism was so great that we all feel ourselves to be latecomers: postmodernism is the term now invoked to assert an epochal shift away from our parents’ perspective. We hope that every issue of Modernism/Modernity will convey some sense of the grand ambition and scope of artists and intel-lectuals of the first half of this century. This is to say that this journal will look widely at the art and thought of this period, but also that we want to examine the sense of contestation that was essential to it: between old and new orders, of course, but also among various divi-sions of the intellectual endeavor. We hope for a journal that not only records and explains some of the crossings between architecture and political thought, say, or between music and economics; we want [End Page 1] the essays and reviews we publish to attempt similar crossings. We will be pleased to publish essays and reviews by sociologists on literary history, for example. We won’t always be able to find this sort of work, but we will always be looking for it, and will regularly ask our authors to push toward their neighboring disciplines in the hope that readers will recognize the appropriateness of this ambition in a journal devoted to the study of modernism, even when they may disapprove of poachers on their own particular territory. The particular examples of border crossing that we’ve cited will suggest one of the two major ambitions of the journal. One is simply to maintain a sense of the international dimensions of modernism. An essay about a New Jersey poet, as is evident in this first issue, may sit next to another about German expansion into Poland. Our other, more difficult objective is to bring into dialogue writers in the social sciences engaged by issues of modernity and modernization and scholars of the literary and fine arts committed to the history of modernism in the arts. Scholars of the humanities have borrowed a great deal lately from social, political, and economic historians, and procedures of literary inter-pretation have influenced the writing of history as well; but we have a long way to go before we can claim that these two large divisions of professional intellectual activity are in dialogue with one another. In the pages to follow we intend to experiment with various ways of encouraging collaboration, though we know that it will be much easier to retain the international scope of modernism than it will be to facilitate exchange across the disciplinary boundaries separating literary critics and political theorists, economists and musicologists. For the first few issues of Modernism/Modernity we have chosen themes that will allow us to draw into the journal writers from various scholarly disciplines. Our first theme is modernism and race, a subject crucial both to modernism and to the social transformations of modernity. For while the modernists frequently advocated internationalism in art and politics, they also drew on folk or ethnic traditions that seemed to preserve intact vestiges...

The archaeology of medieval Germany: an introduction

Medieval archaeology is a relatively young discipline. It relies heavily on and contributes to the neighbouring disciplines of history and geography as well as certain of the natural sciences. The kinds of sources investigated in the context of medieval archaeology also cast light on many aspects of life in later centuries. The main sources used are: graveyards, churches and churchyards; castles and fortifications; rural and urban settlements; technical production sites and routes of communication. Closely allied to these are the numerous finds of small objects of everyday life, from cutlery and tools to animal remains and grain. This book is a comprehensive discussion of what can be established from the use of such materials about the culture and daily life of medieval Germany. Each subject is augmented with the use of many illustrations. Besides methodological questions, the author considers what can be learnt about the history of settlement and architecture, of technology, of economic and social matters, of churches and missions, and of population, diet and vegetation.

Culture Builders: A Historical Anthropology of Middleclass Life.

Explains brilliantly the structures and processes of middle-class culture in historical perspective.--Robert Nye, Rutgers University [This] illuminating study of the Swedish middle class around the turn of the century ...is one welcome sign that bourgeois, too, are once again recognized as parts of society worth studying ...to be understood rather than to be savaged. Culture Builders is a welcome sign of yet another development: the ease with which historical studies may be integrated with neighboring disciplines.--Journal of Modern History The authors take an impressively broad intellectual perspective...The everyday routines of bourgeoisie, peasantry, and working class are dramatically portrayed through a skillful weaving together of excerpts from ethnological archives, schoolbooks, memoirs, novels, and etiquette manuals ...provides insight into the sociocultural complexities, conflicts, and contradictions that are ignored in widely held national stereotypes. --American Anthropologist Unites historical and ethnological approaches so as to present a way of life that will be of interest not only to scholars of Scandinavia but to historians, sociologists, and everyone trying to describe and interpret the bourgeois Western culture during the nineteenth century.--Ethnos Jonas Frykman and Orvar Lofgren teach in the Department of European Ethnology at the University of Lund, Sweden.

Two open letters

Your article in Physics Today on “Scientific Choice” touches some of the most important questions which we will face in the immediate future. You presented the situation in the clearest possible way and you pointed out the terrible difficulties which are inherent in any form of scientific planning. I agree with most of what you are saying and I like the way in which you said it. There is one important point, however, in which I cannot follow you. I accept your three “external criteria” for scientific choice: technological merit, scientific merit, and social merit. I would even go along with your sharper definition of scientific merit, when you propose that “…other things being equal, that field has the most scientific merit, which contributes most heavily to and illuminates most brightly its neighboring scientific disciplines”. But I cannot follow your arguments when you apply your criteria to the field of high‐energy physics.