Applied Anthropology and Development Policies
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 5632777 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Lucy Mair (corresponding author), L P Mair |
| Year | 1956 |
| Volume | 7 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 120 |
| Publication date | 1956-06-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | British Journal of Sociology (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0007-1315 • E-ISSN: 1468-4446 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/587853 |
| OpenAlex | W2335738463 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 4 |
> 'N the last ts ent)J or thirty years, gallons of ink have been spilt in diseussion of the appropriate, or the inevitable, relation between seientifie researeh i .and social needs, or, in more old-fashioned terms, between pure and applied science. At one extreme, pure scienee is conceived as the disinterested pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. At the other, Marxist theory asserts that advances in scientifie theory occur only in response to the demand for solutions to practical problerns, though tlliS does not exclude the value of fundamental researeh, the bearing of which on practical problems is not immediately obvious to the layman. In the field whieh this discussion generally eovers there is no doubt as to what is meant by applied seience. It is the applieation of principles experimentally established to the production of speeifie results. In many cases the techniques based on these principles are so well developed that they can be practised by people with no more than an elementary understanding of the principles themselves, and indeed some of them are practised by us all in everyday life. In others a seientist may be asked to solve a problem which falls in his field, but yet cannot be dealt with by the applieation of any principle already established; in these eases the functions of the pure and the applied scientist are eombined. Though I have implied by my choice of a title that one ean speak in an analogolls way of the application of the principles of social anthropology, it nuust be admitted that the analogy is not a very close one. Indeed, in many quarters it is questioned whether anthrspology is a science at all, and among anthropologlsts themselves there are some who hold that it is not and should llot be. It is not, of course, an experimental science; it shares this disability with the other social sciences, apart from psychology, which can be studied experimentally to a limited extent. It can, however, claim to be something more than that study of the unique product of a particular series of events which Evans-Pritchard appears to have had ill mind when he deseribed anthropology as essentially alsin to history. It does look for regularities in social behaviour extending beyond the limits of a single society} even if these
Political science · Sociology · African cultural and philosophical studies · African history and culture analysis · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Anthropology
| Citations per year | 0.06 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 1958 - 2015 (58) |
| Highly cited | No |