“Robert Bellah: Free-floating Intellectual Redux”

Charles Camic*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalReview articlepeer-review

3 Scopus citations
Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)516-523
Number of pages8
JournalAmerican Sociologist
Volume54
Issue number4
DOIs
StatePublished - Dec 2023

Funding

Bellah was “an early career participant in these novel national and international scholarly networks” (xii). As an undergraduate at Harvard in the early 1950s, he took his major in Department of Social Relations, newly created by Talcott Parsons and staffed by scholars in multiple fields, who infused the program with an “interdisciplinary spirit” and “showed students that nothing was fixed” (69, 43). With this background, Bellah went on to earn from Harvard a doctorate in sociology and Far Eastern languages, before accepting a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at McGill University in the Rockefeller-funded Institute of Islamic Studies. Immediately afterward Bellah received a fellowship back at Harvard in its Center for Middle Eastern Studies, followed by a four-year lectureship also supported by the Department of Social Relations, the Center for East Asian Studies, and the Program on World Religions in the Divinity School. This decade-long sequence of institutional affiliations, accompanying interactions with scholars in a wide range of disciplines, and experiences in moving across academic fields amounted, Bortolini’s book suggests, to a concentrated traineeship in intellectual floating.

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Social Sciences (miscellaneous)
  • Sociology and Political Science

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