ABSTRACT
The field besides psychology that Mayo chiefly asked us to study in his seminar was social anthropology, especially the work of two members of the British school, Radcliffe-Brown and Malinowski. Mayo's choice was not determined by their being friends of his. They were also the two most distinguished social anthropologists of their generation, though Clyde Kluckhohn would have added the American, Franz Boas. Domus refers not just to the physical house but to the social one, the family. It becomes a norm, and the elder generation teaches it to the younger, thus reinforcing what the tendencies inherent in the social organization originally brought about. Warner might not have chosen Newburyport had he known it was the hometown of the greatest satirical novelist of the time, John R Marquand. In his novel Point of No Return there is an entertaining but not savage caricature of a social anthropologist doing field research in a New England community.
