Models and Interpretations

John Barnes's collection of essays, published over the last 40 years, covers a variety of topics in sociology and anthropology, including lineage systems, social networks, colonialism, underlying assumptions of social science, and the significance of time in social analysis. Together they identify the author's particular view of social science as being primarily about what really happens. Rather than revamp articles written with a distinctive set of assumptions to bring them into line with current intellectual fashions, Professor Barnes has chosen to let them stand as they are, products of identifiable theoretical stances and modes of exposition. But introductory notes to each chapter explain the context in which the piece was originally written and draw attention to later publications and events that bear on it. A new introduction discusses in detail the author's view of social science as the construction of models rather than a search for social laws, while the final chapter presents a model of the modelling process itself.