A Renewable Source of Fuel

ory construction, George Homans pointed out that the theory is not a theory at all. Laughlin and Brady, like Parsons before them, have written what Homans calls an "orienting statement," which identifies an area of concern without making it possible to quantify variables, apply the framework precisely to particular situations, or infer anything from the theory. As even one of the contributors points out, applying a cyclical theory to contemporary events is difficult, since one never knows what part of the cycle a group is on. The authors and editors of Extinction and Survivai in Human Populations are aware of some of these logical problems of application of the abstract theoretical framework to particular events but are a long way from solving them. In a passage expressing irritation with his critics, Turnbull suggests that anthropologists have a "mystic mountain" called Statistics, for which they play a ritualized "numbers game." The editors and authors of this book are completely innocent of this charge: only Dirks, in his extremely interesting account of the West Indian slave societies, uses numerical data in a systematic way. But suc-