nick_jenkins's review
5.0
Despite a healthy degree of repetition and reinforcement, this collection of essays presents so many discrete concepts and arguments about historiography that it is often quite challenging (but always invigorating) simply to begin to assimilate its ideas as guides for the writing of history. Yet more so than most theoretical works, Sewell clearly intends his work as an aid for historians who struggle with the conceptual thinness of many core practices in the field, who would like to reground their own research and writing on solider ground than convention and piecemeal poaching from other disciplines.
Sewell's great advantage in this task is, in fact, his ability to articulate a common conceptual grammar buried deep beneath the jargon of the interpretive social sciences, to demonstrate how anthropology, sociology, and history can--and have--be of mutual aid because they connect at crucial, but frequently obscured, theoretical (maybe even metaphysical) points. Of great, and I would expect lasting, value.
Sewell's great advantage in this task is, in fact, his ability to articulate a common conceptual grammar buried deep beneath the jargon of the interpretive social sciences, to demonstrate how anthropology, sociology, and history can--and have--be of mutual aid because they connect at crucial, but frequently obscured, theoretical (maybe even metaphysical) points. Of great, and I would expect lasting, value.
More...