Scholarship on the History of Sociology, 1945–2012
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 September 2014
Inescapably, birth order casts a long shadow over a child’s later development and interests, as social scientists who study family dynamics have often observed. Among other effects, siblings born late into large families exhibit a strong ambivalence about the history of their family: disdaining, in their resolve to chart their own path forward, dusty stories about the group’s past and yet curious, occasionally at least, about their own place in the saga of their tribe.
As latecomers to the family of the social sciences, entering a household already full of the brothers and sisters discussed in other chapters of this volume – historians, political theorists, economists, psychologists, and even anthropologists – sociologists have long shown a similar ambivalence. Typically, they have been impatient spending hours around the family hearth listening to tales about their forebears, even as their collective ancestry now and then piques their interest – especially when it appears to hold treasures that might help them on their forward journey.
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