ABSTRACT
In a volume of collected essays a reader will be looking for some unifying principle other than that they were all written by the same man—as if that were a unifying principle! He may know of volumes whose essays mark stages in a single line of investigation, pursued by the author year after year with cumulative success. At the least, he will expect some unity to be provided by the author’s official discipline. I am a sociologist, but the reader who has sense enough to scan the table of contents of this book and see what he is letting himself in for may well wonder whether even sociology provides the unity here. Should he know the field, he will, to be sure, find some essays that will strike him as legitimately sociological. Industrial sociology is a recognized department of the field, and so is the study of small groups, though it is a department sociology shares with psychology. But when he comes to a long paper on unilateral cross-cousin marriage, the “cross-cousin” will surely tell him that he has crossed the boundary into primitive kinship, which belongs to anthropology. And as for “The Frisians in East Anglia”—what business has a sociologist with English history?
