Two Approaches to an Archaeology of the Social

Social Theory in Archaeology by Michael Brian Schiffer; Social Transformations in

Archaeology: Global and Local Perspectives by Kristian Kristiansen; Michael Rowlands
Review by: Ian Hodder
American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 104, No. 1 (Mar., 2002), pp. 320-324
Published by: Wiley on behalf of the American Anthropological Association
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320 American Anthropologist * Vol. 104, No. 1 * March 2002

and places providing wide vistas are all commonly seen as first is on p. 112 in the Darvill paper where, in reference to
places linking different levels and states of existence and the entrances to Durrington Walls, the text should read
as forms of power. James E. Brady and Wendy Ashmore "southeast" rather than "southwest"; a little further on,
(AK, pp. 124-145) describe how mountains, caves, and reference is made to flint mines to the northwest of Dur-
water orient and order the Maya world, strongly influenc- rington Walls, but Figure 8.1 shows them as being to the
ing architecture and other aspects of their culture. As in northeast. The second occurs on p. 468 in the paper by
papers discussed earlier, the earth is seen as sacred and McGlade, where one reads, "over the past 2,000 years
animate-as "EarthLord."Caves, pits, and waterholes are spanning the first neolithic colonisations, through the
conceptual counterparts, linking living people with the later Iberian and Romanisation periods," which is not
earth and with the ancestors. Structures are conceived of only obviously an errorbut also makes it difficult to inter-
metaphorically as "hills" and temples atop the pyramidal pret the statement in the following paragraphthat the pri-
mountains interpreted as symbolic caves. Maarten van de mary goal of the project was to gain an understanding of
Guchte (AK, pp. 149-168) reports that in the Inca world the dynamics affecting the region "spanning a period cov-
ideologically important landscape features-the ritual/sa- ering the last 2,500 years."
cred places known as huaca-are marked only by rocks or Together, the two volumes provide a broad overview
textiles and can be identified only through ethnohistorical of the kinds of work being carriedout in landscape archae-
descriptions. Together with a system of lines called ceques, ology in the early to mid-1990s. Both include contribu-
these provided a key to the ritual landscape, incorporating tions that are interesting, thought provoking, and useful.
information about the ritual calendar and social relation- Both range widely around the world and through time. Be-
ships. ing the longer of the two, the Ucko and Layton volume
The final paper to be described, by Lisa Kealhofer(AK, naturally provides a wider range of perspectives, but any-
pp. 58-82), shifts to a very different time and place. It one interested in the interaction between cultures and the
deals with social rather than sacred landscapes, describing landscape will find something of value in each. Both are,
how space-specifically garden space-was used by the in my opinion, valuable contributions to the literature
settlers of colonial Virginia to "establish, negotiate, and and well worth reading.
maintain community and individual social identity" (p.
76) and how this reflects aspects of economics, politics, REFERENCESCITED
and social organization in colonial Virginia. Fox,SirCyril
As can be expected in collections such as these, the 1932 ThePersonalityof Britain.
Cardiff:NationalMuseumof
Wales.
papers vary considerably in quality. A small minority of
Renfrew,Colin
papers in each volume suffer from good ideas poorly con- 1973 Monuments, MobilizationandSocialOrganization in Neo-
veyed by bad writing. In addition, a few papers are marred lithicWessex.InTheExplanation ofCulture Change,ColinRe-
by discussions of postmodernist concerns that seem de- frew,ed.,pp.539-558.London:Duckworth.
Trigger,BruceG.
signed more to show off the authors' intellectual prowess, 1968 TheDeterminants ofSettlementPatterns.InSettlementAr-
knowledge of recent philosophical fads, and political biases chaeology,K.C.Chang,ed.,pp.53-78.PaloAlto,CA:National
than to contribute to our understanding of landscapes. I Press(Mayfield).
encountered remarkablyfew obvious errors;the only ones Willey,Gordon
1953 PrehistoricSettlementPatternsin theVirdValley,Peru.BAE
noted both being in the Ucko and Layton collection. The Bulletin155.Washington, DC:U.S.Government PrintingOffice.

Two Approaches to an Archaeologyof the Social

IAN HODDER Readers maybe nonplussedat the absencein thenewthe-
Stanford University ory of muchvocabulary... suchas meaning,sign,sym-
bol, intention,motivation,purpose,goal,attitude,value,
Social Theory in Archaeology. Michael BrianSchiffer, ed. belief,norm,function,mind,andculture.Despitehercu-
Salt LakeCity: University of Utah Press, 2000. 235 pp. leaneffortsin the socialsciencesto definetheseofteneth-
nocentricormetaphysical notions,theyremainbehavior-
Social Transformations in Archaeology: Global and Lo- ally problematicand so are superfluousin the present
cal Perspectives. Kristian Kristiansen and Michael Row- project.[1999:9]
lands. London: Routledge, 1998. 438 pp. How could someone who rejected everything that
In approaching the edited volume by Schiffer, Social The- many anthropologists, sociologists, and historians regard
ory in Archaeology,I was intrigued. After all, I had recently as central components of the social come to build a social
read the following by Schiffer in another book that pur- theory? Was the title just hubris, or had a new theory
ports to develop a new behavioral theory of material cul- emerged that would sweep away all that we know and sub-
ture. stitute something radically different? Toward the end of

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 Book Review Essays 321

the book, Susan Kus notes that she had been asked to con- production of social micropractices, knowledge, and
tribute a chapter to a working conference whose original power, it is difficult to see how a fuller account can be
title was "Social Theory in Archaeology: Setting the achieved. As another example, Nelson criticizes behavioral
Agenda" (p. 156) (see also Schiffer, p. 2). The book, which approaches to the choices involved in artifact deposition,
derives from the conference, has lost this agenda-setting saying "the social context of the choices could be more
subtitle, but given the views of the editor, what could "so- fully explored" (p. 61). She recognizes the need to intro-
cial theory" possibly mean? duce agency-based approaches to abandonment studies,
My sense of wonder only increased when I saw the list but her account does not benefit from the full range of
of contributions to the volume. These covered an enor- available social theory.
mous breadth from evolutionary biology to the empa- Kelly provides a perspective derived from behavioral
thetic reconstruction of past sensuous experience. Had ecology. His argument that archaeologists should think
Schiffer somehow miraculously welded this diversity of through how stone manufacturing technologies are relat-
authors into one new theory? Certainly, the initial pages ed to return rates (amount of caloriesproduced per minute)
of the volume eloquently express Schiffer's fear of a disin- and distance to raw material is helpful. Some strategic use
tegrating discipline. He fears that archaeology might be- of an optimizing argument may be necessitated in such an
come like sociocultural anthropology with no "common analysis. Such analyses provide a baseline against which to
ground, no core set of concepts and principles... I hoped consider other social, prestige, power, and gender aspects
that we could, at all costs, avoid that unpleasant outcome" of tool production. Kelly provides a useful exploratory ex-
(pp. vii-viii). Although he has elsewhere noted the prolif- ercise that any good archaeologist should think through.
eration of archaeological theories, here his aim is "to Quite rightly, Kelly sees behavioral ecology here as simply
counteract the fissioning of social theory and the faction- a "useful tool" (p. 78). The more information that can be
ing of archaeology" (p. 2). He sees the book as an exercise introduced about the "performancecharacteristics"(p. 69,
in bridge building. In a number of places, Schiffer admits and Schiffer 1999) of artifacts, the better. But the use of
from the start a relative lack of success in this realm. For such tools does not constitute a social theory or paradigm.
example, he admits to failure in building bridges to evolu- Kelly does not want to argue that "humans always opti-
tionary archaeology (p. 6), and elsewhere "the bridges that mize." Thus, grand theoretical claims are avoided, and it
have been built are at best tiny and fragile structures"(p. becomes clear that if a realistic account of human behav-
12), but can any movement toward conformity of perspec- ioral choices is to be provided, there is a need to move be-
tive be detected-especially when some of his authors, yond optimization to consider perception, prestige, power,
such as Thomas and Kus, explicitly reject the need for negotiation, and so on. If we extend Kelly's account to in-
unity? clude a wider range of factors, we could claim to be build-
So in evaluating the book in its own terms, what is the ing social theory in the form that it is usually identified.
social theory implied by the title, and is some unity of per- Kuhn and Sarther, too, in their chapter, which takes an
spective achieved? As far as the first question is concerned, evolutionary ecology view, acknowledge the need to intro-
we are furnished with a definition of social theory on page duce some of the complexity of human relations found by
1. According to Schiffer, social theory consists of bodies of anthropologists in actual social settings.
general knowledge about sociocultural phenomena; it an- A similar indication of the need to embrace a fuller so-
swers how and why questions about human behavior and cial theory is seen in the Darwinian evolutionary archaeol-
societies. I suspect that each of the contributors to the vol- ogy of O'Brien and Lyman in chapter 9. They try to build
ume would provide very different definitions, but in any bridges by discussing the role of history in their theoreti-
case, given the rejection by Schiffer (see above) of most of cal perspective. Their own account of history focuses on
what many of us include as sociocultural phenomena, the selective environment that led to the appearance of
how can social theory be built? cultural traits and then on pursuing the historical lineages
Certainly, many chapters reject Schiffer's strictures of the traits that ensue. A full account of the selective en-
and discuss topics such as power, meaning, and agency, vironments and performance characteristics that lead to
but in much of the book it is difficult to identify any dis- some cultural variants being selected would need to con-
cussion of the full range of the social, society, the social sider social power, agency, meaning, and so on-that is,
role of the material, the relationship between societies and all the rich world (environment) in which cultural traits
individuals, society and power, and so on. Because so are embedded, selected, and transmitted. Once all that has
much of the social is ruled out of court, it becomes diffi- been done, one is back with the full world of social theory,
cult to see how the contributors can satisfactorily answer and with history as social, cultural, constructed, and cre-
the how and why questions that Schiffer sees as central to ated, as well as being materially based. In order to provide
social theory. A good example is provided by the Feinman an adequate account of an evolutionary process, a full so-
chapter. Feinman describes an interesting categorization cial theory would need to be incorporated. At that point
of societies into network and corporate. But he accepts evolutionary archaeology would look very different.
that the important why questions remain (p. 49). Unless As another example, there is little recognition in this
one is allowed to explore the daily manipulation and re- book that social theory should also deal with the social

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322 American Anthropologist * Vol. 104, No. 1 * March 2002

role of archaeology. Through much of the book, social inspired view of social change but made no reference to
theory exists in a social vacuum, as apolitical and decon- the structuralMarxisttradition of Friedman and Rowlands
textualized. A welcome contrast is provided in the chapter and Kristiansen (see below). Nelson discusses the aban-
by Zedefio. He examines the politics of the construction of donment of places and mentions meaning, contextualiza-
the past (see also Kus's and Thomas's chapters), and pro- tion, and negotiation but does not make any use of the
vides a fascinating account of how Native American no- enormous literature on the social theory of memory (e.g.,
tions of place in the landscape conflicted with, and lost Rowlands 1993), the invention of tradition, locales, or the
out to, government definitions of bounded space. He abandonment and revisiting of sites (Barrett1994; Bradley
shows how anthropologists colluded in this process. But 1993). I was depressed to find that Zedefio could discuss
even here, the attempt founders because of the refusal to the ritual deposition of artifacts (p. 107) without any refer-
develop a social theory-that is, to consider the full range ence to the large amount of social theoretical work on this
of social life rejected by Schiffer. Zedeflo argues that places topic (Barrett 1994; Hill 1992; Richards and Thomas
in the landscape are socially and meaningfully constituted 1984).
as "sacred geographies" or "symbolic landscapes." How- All these latter topics are discussed by Kristiansenand
ever, rather than therefore embracing a full analysis of Rowlands in their volume of largely republished papers So-
such complexities, he takes a behavioral twist and sud- cial Transformations in Archaeology.LikeSchiffer, they seem
denly says that we should "first define landscape materi- worried by the hybridity of contemporary archaeological
ally" (p. 105). We should start off by defining a place's for- theorizing, a stance that probably derives from their long-
mal and performance characteristics.On the one hand, he term commitment to structural-Marxism(p. 15). Certainly
accepts that a place becomes a landmark through a social they do provide discussions of many of those aspects of
process but then argues that it can be defined separately the social dismissed by Schiffer-such as symbols, beliefs,
from that process! This confusion stems from a limited and culture. And, unlike the Schiffer compendium, there
view of social theory, which derives from the behaviorism, is some unity of theoretical position. Again, there is a dan-
materialism, and positivism that Schiffer espouses. The ger that a single-minded pursuit of a limited perspective
unfortunate result is that Zedefio argues that the cause of leads to a rejection of what so many people accept today
Native American groups can somehow be furthered by de- as fundamental to any consideration of the social. In addi-
scribing their sacred sites in terms of objective performance tion, the unified perspective offered, while undoubtedly
characteristics-a very Western and contemporary view. important in its time-the 1970s and 1980s-could be
Because so many of the chapters take a very limited considered rather dated at the start of the 21st century.
view of social theory, it seems very remarkable that the Why should the readerbe interested in a set if papers that
term is used to title the book. Few in other disciplines, or go back to the 1970s and that use a structural-Marxistap-
in anthropology, would recognize this book as about so- proach that the authors themselves recognize fell out of
cial theory at all, at least as it is widely understood. And, favor in the social sciences from the mid-1980s (p. 11)?
certainly, it is difficult to identify any unified alternative. How will such papers help us to understand the social to-
The chapters in the volume are highly diverse; there is no day?
adherence to any general propositions. Is there even the The introductory chapter by Rowlands and Kristian-
limited amount of bridge building that Schiffer claims? I sen is an attempt to answer these questions. They restate
found the chaptersby, on the one hand, Kus,Thomas, and their position at the start, to "remain committed to an ar-
Spencer-Wood, so divergent from those of O'Brienand Ly- chaeology which investigates the existence of social reali-
man or Feinman that I came away with a greater sense of ties that to some degree lie beyond, or are repressed by,
the fragmentation of archaeology than ever before. Forex- the scope of conscious experience" (p. 4). Their main in-
ample, far from building bridges, the different approaches fluences are Althusser, Braudel, and Wallerstein. They
to power diverge radically. For Arnold, power is linked to spend much time in the introduction salvaging something
the control over labor. But, for Kus, there are many forms of long-term objective structures in the face of the rise of
of power, and Thomas specifically rejects the limited defi- practice theories, the linguistic turn, and the recent wide-
nition of power as control over labor and resources, and, spread acceptance of the dominance of the discursive and
instead, prefers a perspective derived from Foucault. the phenomenological in European prehistoric archaeol-
I came to deeply regret that more bridges were not ogy. They ask us not to reject social evolutionary views,
built and that the different traditions seem so unaware of and they make a plea for retaining an emphasis on politi-
each other's work. It seemed unproductive that Feinman's cal, historical, and objective structures.
distinction between ostentatious and "faceless" power (p. It is useful to have a reprinting of so many classic texts
34) did not refer to the parallel distinction between natu- from the structural Marxism of European prehistoric ar-
ralizing and masking forms of power (Miller and Tilley chaeology in the 1970s and 1980s. Many of these texts set
1984), or that his distinction between network and corpo- the agenda for many prehistoric archaeologists for decades.
rate societies did not refer to Foucault's break between For example, chapter 3 by Rowlands reflects that exciting
centered and distributed power (Miller and Tilley 1984). It period in the 1980s when the prestige goods model, large-
seemed unhelpful that Arnold claimed to have a Marxist- ly derived from Friedman, was taking hold in archaeology.

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 Book Review Essays 323

Shifts in ranking and social complexity were now seen in Wolf. Kristiansenand Rowlands have again had enormous
relation to the control of exchange and the intensification influence in introducing this approach in European pre-
of production, in contrast to the earlier Chil-dean concep- history. Here they do respond to some extent to the cri-
tion of a European "individualism" emerging in the tique that 2nd-millennium B.C. Bronze Age and Iron Age
Bronze Age. This more systematic and evolutionary ap- systems are different from the capitalist systems for which
proach has had a huge impact. World Systems models were developed. They move toward
Still, why should we be interested in such an ap- an account of large-scale spatial interactions, but if any-
proach today, given all the criticisms that have been lev- thing is to be left of center-periphery models, surely there
eled against it, and given all the attempts in archaeology should be some demonstration of unequal dependence be-
to move toward practice, agency, discourse, and the phe- tween center and periphery, or of devolutionary processes
nomenological? One of the main disappointments I had in the periphery. The World Systems approach has had
in this book is that so little new was written for it. By this I enormous value in exploiting the large scale of archae-
mean that, apart from the introduction, which is general ological data, and in breaking out of parochial accounts.
and limited in scope, there is no real discussion of criti- Kristiansen and Rowlands have shown that long distance
cisms and new developments. For example, the classic exchange with the Mediterranean may have been linked
(1978) paper by Frankenstein and Rowlands, here repro- to social processes within prehistoric Europe. There may
duced as chapter 13, has led to widespread discussion and have been some (perhaps limited) social and economic de-
critique (e.g., by Gosden 1985), and it would have been pendency. I remain unconvinced that this justifies the use
good to see some response. of World Systems models. Unequal dependence and devo-
So the well-rehearsed critiques of evolutionary, objec- lutionary processes have not, in my view, been demon-
tivist perspectives seem as relevant as they ever were. In strated. As a number of authors have pointed out, there is
chapter 4, Kristiansen identifies "chiefly lineages" in a need for a greater contextualization of the models
megalithic burial in southern Scandinavia, and change is within a fuller account of the social and cultural (Gosden
seen as the result of contradictions between the forces and 1985; Treherne 1995).
relations of production. He talks of "theocratic chiefdoms It was not until the end of these two books on "the so-
of the Bronze Age" (p. 91), which can be compared with cial" that I found adequate accounts of what I was looking
Polynesian and Melanesian chiefdoms. Today there would, I for-something that escaped from the narrow stricturesof
think, be less emphasis on off-the-shelf evolutionary cate- Schiffer's behavioralism and Friedman's structural Marx-
gories and more attempts would be made to understand ism, something that engaged in contemporary debates.
specific forms of articulation of ritual, space, time, power, The two chapters by Rowlands at the end of the book, on
and so on. In chapter 5, Kristiansen argues that the prime ritual killing in Benin, and on embodiment in Cameroon,
factors leading to greater social differentiation were pres- mark significant moves toward a more contemporary en-
tige goods and the control of bronze. This was all exciting gagement. Both appear to have been written recently, es-
when first published (in the 1970s and 1980s), but when pecially for the book. Chapter 15 describes how the threat
viewed after the debate that has taken place since, it seems of colonial incursion affected West African kingly power
remarkablethat no attempt is made to discuss the micro- and its mythopraxis. Colonialism is situated within a local
technologies of power-embodiment, landscapes, and ma- world of sacrifice and divine belief, in contrast to the em-
terial practices. No attempt is made to "make sense of" the phasis on exchange and production in the earlierchapters.
evidence either in terms of readingor experiencing.It would Chapter 16 is a fascinating account of the embodi-
have been helpful to have some expansion of the account ment of power in Cameroon. Rowlands is concerned here
to consider these alternative or more recent approaches. to dissolve for West Africaoppositions of person and thing
In these accounts from the 1970s and 1980s, relations and to destabilize ideas about instrumental power. Such
of dominance and hierarchy depend directly on the ma- oppositions and ideas were central to prestige goods mod-
nipulation of relations of circulation and exchange (p. els, and it is useful to see them dismissed here. Beliefs and
176). There is an assumption that wealth can be measured rituals are not seen as utilitarian, as in the prestige goods
in terms of the consumption of ornaments and weapons models, but are seen as constitutive of the social world.
in graves and hoards, whereas deposition came to be dis- Power is not general but is about a particular conception
cussed in terms of discourses of cultural practice (Barrett of bodies, body substances, and flows. The account of
1994; Richards and Thomas 1984; Thomas 1996) in much power is here much more subtle, focusing on the details of
of prehistoric European archaeology. Kristiansen's classic body practices and beliefs.
(1978) study of the wear on ornaments and swords (repro- The two books under review deal in very different
duced here as chapter 7) sees the wear in terms of econo- ways with the social in archaeology, and both make im-
mies of supply and demand rather than in terms of chang- portant contributions. The former reflects some of the di-
ing social practices. versity of contemporary archaeological theorizing about
The second part of the book includes chapters dealing the social. The latter provides a useful historical overview
with center-periphery relations and with a tradition of of the contributions of a very influential pair of writers
scholarship that includes Frank, Wallerstein, Ekholm, and and of structural Marxism in archaeology. But both are

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324 American Anthropologist * Vol. 104, No. 1 * March 2002

stymied by a tendency to restrict the definition of the so- Hill,J. D.

1992 Ritualand Rubbishin the IronAgeof Wessex.Oxford:Tem-
cial. Schiffer's exclusions were listed at the start of this re-
pus Reparatum.
view, and the objectivism and evolutionism of structural- Miller,Danny, and ChrisTilley
Marxism as it has been used in archaeology provide their 1984 Ideology,Powerand Prehistory.Cambridge:CambridgeUni-
own blinkers. But we see, toward the end of the Kristian- versityPress.
sen and Rowlands book and in some of the chapters in the Richards,Colin, and JulianThomas
1984 RitualActivityand StructuredDepositionin LaterNeolithic
Schiffer volume, a fuller account of the social that enters Wessex.InNeolithic Studies:A Reviewof SomeCurrentResearch.
into contemporary debates. We see how debate in archae- R.BradleyandJ.Gardiner,eds. Pp. 189-218. BritishArchaeologi-
ology has moved on to a consideration of the ways in calReportsBritishSeries,133.
which embedded and embodied material practices consti- Rowlands,Michael
1993 TheRoleof Memoryin the Transmissionof Culture.World
tuted and transformed the social.
Archaeology25:141-151.
Schiffer,Michael B.
REFERENCESCITED 1999 TheMaterialLifeof HumanBeings.London:Routledge.
Thomas,Julian
Barrett,John 1996 Time,Cultureand Identity.Cambridge:CambridgeUniver-
1994 FragmentsfromAntiquity.Oxford:Blackwell.
Bradley,Richard sity Press.
1993 Alteringthe Earth.Edinburgh:Societyof Antiquariesof Scot- Treherne,Paul
land Monograph8. 1995 TheWarrior'sBeauty:The MasculineBodyand Self-Identity
Gosden, Chris in BronzeAgeEurope.Journalof EuropeanArchaeology
1985 Giftsand Kinin EarlyIronAgeEurope.Man20:475-493. 3(1):105-144.

Modern Reflex
BILL MAURER the "social problems" of modern life and anthropology
University of California, Irvine would identify the "barriers" preventing nonmoderns
from acquiring the moral and material goods of civiliza-
Facing Modernity: Ambivalence, Reflexivity and Mo- tion. The new world society that the social sciences would
rality. Barry Smart. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publica- document and help to create would represent the inevita-
tions, 1999. 206 pp. ble and one-way motion toward the end of ideology and
the end of analysis, as, eventually, the analytical appara-
Questions of Modernity. Timothy Mitchell, ed. Minnea-
tus would resonate precisely with the clockwork harmony
polis: University of Minnesota Press,2000. 229 pp. of the real world.
If, for 19th- and early-20th-century European intellectu- It did not happen. And it is this predictive failure of
als, modernity was experienced as a disruption of the social science and the unfolding of other possibilities that
moral and epistemological bases of social and political life, animates the books under review. Composed of seven
for contemporary knowledge it is the sedimented but chapters that review theorists from Foucault and Lyotard
unstable ground of social scientific practice. Europeans to C. Wright Mills and Ulrich Beck, Smart's volume is
characterized the "modern" in ways that are familiar to us about the fate of sociology afterthe exhaustion of its modem
today because those characterizations formed the founda- paradigms. Smart centers on a new appreciation of theo-
tions of the social scientific endeavor. Concepts like "al- retical reflexivity and ambivalence. The literature Smart
ienation," "anomie," and "ideology," as well as suppos- draws on and the debates he engages are from sociology,
edly first-order descriptive terms like family, individual, primarily (and refreshingly) outside its neopositivist U.S.
and community,have structuredthat version of human in- formulation. Despite the disciplinary focus, this book will
quiry called "social." Sociology's objects would be the be accessible to a range of anthropologists seeking to be
causes and the products of the disruption of life that con- brought up to speed on recent social theory and a reflec-
jured the social and the individual from the community tion on modernity the ethics of social
that Europeans imagined their own pre-modern to have that. emphasizes
thought. Timothy Mitchell's volume contains a short pref-
been. Its object would be modernity itself. Anthropology's ace and introduction situating it in a conversation be-
objects, constituting its disciplinary apparatusand achiev- tween Middle East and South Asia area scholars who are
ing for it a place at the table of modern inquiry, would be redefining area studies as a theoretical project and devel-
the peoples who Europeans imagined had not undergone oping accounts of modernities outside the West, "redis-
that same disruption. Anthropology's objects, the core of cover[ing] the parochialism of the West" rather than "de-
its self-constitution as modern, would be the nonmodern. parochializ[ing] Western history and social science" (p.
After World War II, the disciplines converged in visions of viii). The volume contains a chapter by Mitchell, five
development and modernization: sociology would tackle chapters on South Asia, and two on the Middle East.

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