Innovation or replication? Crossing and criss-crossing in social science

Abstract

What does it mean to find echoes of an innovatory moment in the past, or a discipline’s cutting edge in another’s worn down tool, or people in different fields quite unknown to one another following a similar intellectual trajectory over the same three or four years? A short case study of what looks uncannily like ‘independent invention’ is prefaced by reflections on replicatory practice in the social sciences. Some US sociological theorizing on the workings of fractal distinctions within disciplines, specifically across many foundational arguments in social science, finds a counterpart in UK anthropological theorizing on scale and replication in social phenomena at large. The conjunction is amusing; it could well be instructive. In any event, there is a challenge here to comparisons across disciplines.