The new edition reflects the impact of the rise of critical theory in its postmodernist forms on the social sciences, especially in the arenas of cultural anthropology, qualitative sociology, and methodology. Simultaneously, it includes the most sophisticated theoretical reaction to those developments—the reaction that has sublated those developments by challenging the nihilistic thrust of postmodernism—in the form of realist theory; the latter is not to be confused with “realism” or “realpolitik.” The new edition incorporates transformative developments in the social sciences: the routinization of the use of applied statistics and mathematical modeling in economics, psychology, and sociology; the rise of cultural studies, including the study of popular culture; the exploration of race, ethnicity, phenotype, and identity across the social sciences; the emergence of gender studies and women’s studies; the “coming out” of queer studies; the study of memory as something far more than a biomechanical act; and the recent construction and development of concepts like “the other,” Orientalism, causality, postcolonialism, the clash of civilizations, the gaze, marginalization, occupational crowding, generation X, and gentrification.

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