ABSTRACT
For the historian and sociologist of science, the history of social science provides many fascinating problems for inquiry, not the least of which is the propensity of its practitioners to reject old approaches as false whenever a new approach acquires saliency. Even Marxist and Hegelian social scientists for whom antitheses must necessarily eventuate in some kind of synthesis, nevertheless view the different approaches to sociocultural inquiry as constituting binary opposites, one of which (their own) is believed (with all the fervor of a Manichean) to represent the forces of light, the other the forces of darkness. A relevant case is the rejection of functionalism by the practitioners of the new symbolist approach to religious anthropology, much as the functionalists had rejected the evolutionary approach of the generation before them. The current symbolic approach, it might be added, is part of the contemporary Zeitgeist; everywhere, in politics and kinship, as well as in religion and myth, functionalism is out, symbolism is in, motivation is out, cognition is in, social processes are out, mental processes are in.
