What makes anthropology a science

The four main subfields of anthropology are cultural anthropology, physical biological anthropology, archaeology, and linguistics. Anthropologists balance objective and subjective epistemologies. I think the best way to get a sense of how anthropology differs from other branches of science is to understand the anthropological imagination. I borrowed the concept of the anthropological imagination from one of my professors, Dr. Wade Pendleton, who in turn borrowed it from an introductory anthropology book Dimen-Schein , who based it on an important sociology book, The Sociological Imagination by C.

Wright Mills There isn't much published about the anthropological imagination, but it is basically the same thing as what most anthropologists call the "anthropological perspective" Jurmain ; Field I like the connotations of "imagination" in the way it has been used by John Lennon and recent social movements to recognize the agency that people have to go beyond their cultural constraints. It is especially related to cultural anthropology, where "the world is as you see it", the idea that if people believe in ghosts, then you as a scientist need to start with the hypothesis that those ghosts really exist.

That might seem weird to many scientists, but anthropologists need to balance a detached, objective, way of seeing, with the subjective reality of the people they join to study. Anthropologists balance several seemingly contradictory philosophies. I like to see the anthropological imagination as tendencies between two extreme poles, and though they may lean towards one side or the other, they can never really go to the extreme in any direction.

The principle method of fieldwork in cultural anthropology is called participant-observation, and participant observation exemplifies the balance of anthropology. Anthropologists must objectively study people as an outsider, but they also become part of that culture.

Because our science is so tied to humans we can't avoid asking ethical questions, or as Sir Raymond Firth put it "Cui bonum? Schepher-Huhges What is the purpose of doing anthropology? This is true to a lesser extent in our class, regarding physical anthropology.

We are objectively discussing some aspects of a biological species that has been around hundreds of thousands of years, and has a few distinct characteristics from other animals, but at the same time, we are talking about ourselves, my relatives, the people who gave me the genes I have now, that enable me to think, and type, and wish that this font was easier to read on this crappy screen. I think the two most distinctive characteristics of anthropology are that it is holistic and it emphasizes genealogy.

Holism means that it tries to understand all facets of the human condition. American anthropology is generally divided into four subfields. Each of the subfields teaches distinctive skills.

However, the subfields also have a number of similarities. For example, each subfield applies theories, employs systematic research methodologies, formulates and tests hypotheses, and develops extensive sets of data. Archaeologists study human culture by analyzing the objects people have made. They carefully remove from the ground such things as pottery and tools, and they map the locations of houses, trash pits, and burials in order to learn about the daily lives of a people.

Archaeologists collect the remains of plants, animals, and soils from the places where people have lived in order to understand how people used and changed their natural environments. The time range for archaeological research begins with the earliest human ancestors millions of years ago and extends all the way up to the present day. Like other areas of anthropology, archaeologists are concerned with explaining differences and similarities in human societies across space and time.

Biological anthropologists seek to understand how humans adapt to different environments, what causes disease and early death, and how humans evolved from other animals. To do this, they study humans living and dead , other primates such as monkeys and apes, and human ancestors fossils.

They are also interested in how biology and culture work together to shape our lives. They are interested in explaining the similarities and differences that are found among humans across the world.

Through this work, biological anthropologists have shown that, while humans do vary in their biology and behavior, they are more similar to one another than different. Sociocultural anthropologists explore how people in different places live and understand the world around them.

They want to know what people think is important and the rules they make about how they should interact with one another. Even within one country or society, people may disagree about how they should speak, dress, eat, or treat others. Anthropologists want to listen to all voices and viewpoints in order to understand how societies vary and what they have in common. Sociocultural anthropologists often find that the best way to learn about diverse peoples and cultures is to spend time living among them.

They try to understand the perspectives, practices, and social organization of other groups whose values and lifeways may be very different from their own. The knowledge they gain can enrich human understanding on a broader level. Linguistic anthropologists study the many ways people communicate across the globe. They are interested in how language is linked to how we see the world and how we relate to each other.

In , the statement read in part:. In the sentence was changed in part to:. Partly because of the media attention, the membership responded to the changes, and, by the end of , the AAA had put back the word "science" and added the following verbiage which still stands in their current long-range plans statement:.

In , the debate in anthropology was just the most visible of a cultural divide among scholars in pedagogy, a seemingly sharp and impassible split that existed between the humanities and science. Traditionally, the main difference is that humanities, or so says the Oxford English Dictionary, are based on the interpretation of texts and artifacts, rather than experimental or quantitative methods.

By contrast, sciences deal with demonstrated truths which are systematically classified and follow general laws, found by the scientific method and incorporating falsifiable hypotheses. Modern methods of research today often do both, bringing analytical methods into what was once purely humanities; and human behavioral aspects into what was once purely science. French philosopher and science historian Auguste Comte — started down this path by suggesting that the different scientific disciplines could be sorted out systematically in a Hierarchy of Science HoS in terms of their complexity and generality of their subject of study.

Comte ranked sciences in descending order of complexity as measured on different levels of empiricism. Twenty-first-century researchers seem to agree that there is at least an understood "hierarchy of science," that scientific research falls into three broad categories:. These categories are based on the perceived "hardness" of the research—the extent to which research questions are based on data and theories as opposed to non-cognitive factors.

Several scholars have tried to find out how those categories are separated and whether there is any definition of "science" that excludes, say, the study of history, from being a science. That's funny—in both the peculiar and humorous sense—because no matter how empirical a study into such categories is, the results can only be based on human opinions.

In other words, there's no hard-wired hierarchy of science, no underlying mathematical rule that sorts scholarly fields into buckets that aren't culturally derived.

Statistician Daniele Fanelli gave it a shot in , when he studied a large sample of published research in the three HoS categories, looking for papers that declared they had tested a hypothesis and reported a positive result. His theory was that the probability of a paper to report a positive result—that is to say, to prove a hypothesis was true—depends on. What he found was that fields that fall into the perceived "social science" bucket indeed were statistically more likely to find a positive result: BUT it a matter of degree, rather than a clearly defined cut-off point.

In today's world, research fields—certainly anthropology and likely other fields as well—are so cross-disciplinary, so nuanced and so interwoven as to be resistant to breaking down into neat categories.

Each form of anthropology can be defined as a science or a humanity: linguistics that of language and its structure; cultural anthropology as that of human society and culture and its development; physical anthropology as that of humans as a biological species; and archaeology as the remains and monuments of the past. All of these fields cross over and discuss cultural aspects that may be unprovable hypotheses: the questions addressed include how do humans use language and artifacts, how do humans adapt to climate and evolutionary changes.

The inescapable conclusion is that anthropology as a research field, perhaps just as acutely as any other field, stands at the intersection of the humanities and science. Sometimes it's one, sometimes the other, sometimes, and maybe at the best of times, it's both. If a label stops you from doing research, don't use it. Actively scan device characteristics for identification.