Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
210
result(s) for
"Leaf, Murray J"
Sort by:
Human Organizations and Social Theory
In the 1930s, George Herbert Mead and other leading social scientists established the modern empirical analysis of social interaction and communication, enabling theories of cognitive development, language acquisition, interaction, government, law and legal processes, and the social construction of the self. However, they could not provide a comparably empirical analysis of human organization, one that could show how interactive communication actually came about. They could say how people communicate to establish mutual relationships but not what they communicate. _x000B__x000B_The theory in this book fills in the missing analysis of organizations and specifies the pragmatic analysis of communication with an adaptation of information theory to ordinary unmediated communications. In the process it brings together four major streams of modern empirical social analysis: the developmental-social psychology associated with Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky; the cultural-ecological analyses associated with Esther Boserup; the language and culture tradition identified with Benjamin Whorf, Edward Sapir, and Paul Friedrich; and the more empirical streams of economic theory identified with Frank Knight, Paul Samuelson, and Theodore Schultz._x000B__x000B_Human Organizations and Social Theory also provides the theoretical basis for understanding the success of pragmatically grounded public policies, from the New Deal through the postwar reconstruction of Europe and Japan to the ongoing development of the European Union, in contrast to the persistent failure of positivistic and Marxist policies and programs. Expanding on previous work in social constructivism, this consistent and comprehensive constructionist analysis of human organization powerfully integrates the most successful traditions of modern social, psychological, and legal theory.
eBook
Human thought and social organization
Human beings have two outstanding characteristics compared to all other species: the apparently enormous elaboration of our thought through language and symbolism and the elaboration of our forms of social organization. The view taken in Human Thought and Social Organization: Anthropology on a New Plane is that these are intimately interconnected. To understand this connection, the book compares the structure of the systems of thought that organizations are built upon with the organizational basis of human thinking as such. An experimental method is used, leading to a new science of the structure of human social organizations in two senses. First, it gives rise to a new kind of ethnology that has the combination of empirical solidity and formal analytical rigor associated with the “paradigmatic” sciences. Second, it makes evident that social organizations have distinctive properties and require distinctive explanations of a sort that cannot be reduced to the explanations drawn from, or grounded in, these other sciences. Human social organizations are created by people using systems of ideas with very specific logical properties. This book describes what these idea-systems are with an unbroken chain of analysis that begins with field elicitation, and continues by working out their most fundamental, logico-mathematical generative elements. This enables us to see precisely how these idea systems are used to generate organizations that give pattern to ongoing behavior. The book shows how organizations are objectified by community members through symbolic representations that provide them with shared conceptions of organizations, roles, or relations that they see each other as participating in. The case for this constructive process being pan-Homo sapiens is described, spanning all human communities from the Upper Paleolithic to today, and from the most seemingly primitive Australian tribes to modern-day America and India. While focusing primarily on kinship, Human Thought and Social Organization shows how the analysis applies with equal precision to other social areas ranging from farming to political factionalism.
eBook
The anthropology of Western religions
The world’s “great” religions depend on traditions of serious scholarship, dedicated to preserving their key texts but also to understanding them and, therefore, to debating what understanding itself is and how best to do it. They also have important public missions of many kinds, and their ideas and organizations influence many other important institutions, including government, law, education, and kinship. The Anthropology of Western Religions: Ideas, Organizations, and Constituencies is a comparative survey of the world’s major religious traditions as professional enterprises and, often, as social movements. Documenting the principle ideas behind Western religious traditions from an anthropological perspective, Murray J. Leaf demonstrates how these ideas have been used in building internal organizations that mobilize or fail to mobilize external support.
eBook
The anthropology of eastern religions
The world’s “great” religions depend on traditions of serious scholarship, dedicated to preserving their key texts but also to understanding them and, therefore, to debating what understanding itself is and how best to do it. They also have important public missions of many kinds, and their ideas and organizations influence many other important institutions, including government, law, education, and kinship. Anthropology of Eastern Religions: Ideas, Organizations, and Constituencies is a comparative survey of the world’s major religious traditions as professional enterprises and, often, as social movements. Documenting the principle ideas behind eastern religious traditions from an anthropological perspective, Murray J. Leaf demonstrates how these ideas have been used in building internal organizations that mobilize or fail to mobilize external support.
eBook
Pragmatic and positivistic analyses of kinship terminology
Jones' article suggests that the anthropological analysis of kinship has followed a single line of development based on a single underlying conception of meaning and method. In fact, there have been two opposed lines of development. Jones' conception is positivistic. The other is pragmatic. Pragmatic theory is superior on every recognized criterion. This briefly describes the differences.
Journal Article
Experimental-Formal Analysis of Kinship
The experimental method, in its most important sense, is a prescription for conducting a system of experiments, each answering questions raised by others until the analysis seems complete. I previously published an experimental method for the field elicitation of kinship terminologies, but did not demonstrate the chain of experimental procedures by which the elicitation and final results are connected. These analyses show the logical structure of kinship terminologies and how kinship systems are built on them. This article describes that chain and those developed by colleagues that deepen the analysis. It is the most complete and accurate account of the field data of kinship. It applies equally well to other cultural systems, and in showing the fundamental conceptual structures of kinship, it allows us to see how the power of conceptual systems like kinship rest in the rational basis of culture and, conversely, the cultural basis of rationality.
Journal Article
Skepticism, Pragmatism, and Kant
In recent years, skepticism has been enjoying renewed attention, emphasizing the issues of scientific method that concern us here (McGowan 1974; Burnyeat 1983; Fogelin 1985; Shapin and Schaffer 1985). There is a related but more broadly focused revival of interest in pragmatism (Meltzer, Petras, and Reynolds 1974; Goodman 1995; Hollinger and Depew 1995; Langsdorf and Smith 1995; Rosenthal, Hausman, and Anderson 1999).
Hollinger and Depew’sPragmatism: From Progressivism to Postmodernism(1995) retains a clear sense of what pragmatism was originally and how successive adherents to this original conception have distinguished themselves first from those who attempted to assimilate it to
Book Chapter