| Abstrakt: |
The article reports on the social life of modern community. This is a study of stratification. It is more painstaking than skillful; it displays more data than imagination of design; its value for social scientists resides more in its "wealth" of "data" than in any theoretical relevance or any "discoveries" made by its authors. Science, to W. Lloyd Warner, is observation, then classification, then generalization. The "general objective" of this study is "to determine the complete set of social relations" of Yankee City. One of the most interesting set of questions which is lost between the confusions of status with class concerns the extent and the precise character of wealth in stratification. For work of the attempted fineness of this study it is questionable if the six-fold occupational classification used is adequate. Given its resources and assuming a set of precise problems, this study would have seemed an opportunity to construct a better set of occupational categories. Social anthropologists are prone to assume that "after all," modern nations are different only in degree from small-scale preliterate cultures and grouplets. This leads to a curious localism which, in turn, severely limits Professor Warner when he writes of the character of American society. The political economy as well as the status system of the nation can neither be deduced nor projected from a series of small town studies. |
