ABSTRACT
Any reasoned inquiry seeks to understand its subject-matter, and the kind of understanding appropriate in any particular case will depend both upon the interests of the inquirer and upon the kind of material he is investigating. Social anthropologists have not always been agreed as to exactly what their sub-matter is or as to the nature of their interest in it. It may therefore be useful to see, first of all, what it is that present day social anthropologists really study and, secondly, to consider how they attempt to make sense of what they study, that is, to understand it. One way of understanding things is to explain them, so I shall undertake a brief review of some of the types of explanation used in, and appropriate to, social anthropology. 1 What follows does not purport to be an original contribution to the methodology of the social sciences; its aim is the very limited one of making more explicit certain methods of analysis already commonly used.
From British Journal of Sociology, 10 (1959: 45–59. Copyright © 1959 by Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd. Reprinted by permission of the publisher and the author. John H. M. Beattie is Lecturer in Anthropology, Oxford University.
