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People would take anthropology more seriously if it at least aspired to be a science, instead of having explicitly disavowed that aim. From 2010. https://www.c

People would take anthropology more seriously if it at least aspired to be a science, instead of having explicitly disavowed that aim. From 2010. https://www.chronicle.com/blogs/innovations/anthropology-association-rejecting-science/27936 https://www.chronicle.com/blogs/innovations/anthropology-ass... > The weekend before Thanksgiving, at the closing of the annual convention held this year in New Orleans, the Executive Board of the AAA discussed a new long-range plan that alters the AAA’s mission statement. The new mission statement deletes the idea that anthropology is a science. It also blurs the intellectual boundaries of the discipline and, ironically, inserts a stronger warrant for using anthropology to engage in public advocacy. > The proposal has already prompted a strong dissent by, so far, at least one section of the AAA, i.e. the Society for Anthropological Sciences, which is objecting on several grounds. The Society’s listserve, SASci, reflects the widespread distress. One prominent anthropologist observed that the proposal makes the “mission exclusively educational rather than [focusing] on the discovery of knowledge.” Another sees the move as the latest attempt of cultural anthropologists “to rid” the profession of archaeologists, biological anthropologists, and perhaps even linguists. Another complains, “Those of us in applied anthropology are hired because of the scientific nature of our work,” a status that the proposed mission statement would undermine. Another anthropologist wonders what will happen to the flow of federal research funds predicated on anthropology’s contributions to science.

rayiner 7y ago
Like social “science” they want the veneer of science to make it easier to peddle their desired public policies.
- soVeryTired 7y ago
  Meh. Economics is far more guilty of that than any of the other social sciences.
  - barry-cotter 7y ago
    There haven’t been any “scholar-activist” heads of the AEA, have there, because there have been of the ASA.
    - soVeryTired 7y ago
      Umm Milton Friedman in 1967?
  - jackcosgrove 7y ago
    I'm not sure. Economics draws a lot of fire because it is more quantitative. Things that are measured are easier to track when something changes. The more qualitative social sciences advocate for their policies using critiques of mores expressed in natural language, and this triggers behavioral change in a more subtle way. There is less of a "paper trail" to look back on, so it's hard to know how much something changed and how fast, or what caused the change. Academically it would be very interesting to quantify the "memetic rate of change" triggered by introducing an argument into a population.
- barry-cotter 7y ago
  That is the exact opposite of the problem here. (Cultural) Anthropology doesn’t want to be a science and its professional association doesn’t support people who do. Political Scientists and Economists do their best with very messy data and extremely limited ability to do experiments to do science, and sociology researchers mostly do the same though there is a greater continent of “scholar-activists” and faculty outside research universities have lots of plain activists with Ph.D.s. Archaeologists, linguists, physical and biological anthropologists and a tiny minority of cultural anthropologists try to develop true, new knowledge about the world. They’re scientists as much as epidemiologists, geologists, cosmologists or anyone else who has lots of data, makes predictions and has a theory that can be falsified. Social science is science, and anthropology can be too. Not everything is physics or chemistry.
  - opwieurposiu 7y ago
    Social science is science in the same way that bald is a hair color.
    - dang 7y ago
      Maybe so, but please don't post unsubstantive comments here.
- pcwalton 7y ago
  Come on. I have a B.A. in linguistics, which is a social science and, to be honest, is more empirically rigorous than some highly theoretical subfields of computer science. Skim through a syntax or phonology textbook if you ever get the chance. It's about as close to pure Karl Popper "philosophy of science" as you can get. And it's studying something very concrete: the human brain and its unique (as far as we know) capacity for language.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - rayiner 7y ago
    I’m thinking more of most of these: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_social_science https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_social_science
    - pcwalton 7y ago
      Most of those—e.g. psychology, a field which has led to significant improvements in well-being worldwide—have no political bent. If you want to criticize anthropology, say "anthropology", not "social science".
9q9 7y ago
Feynman speaks of "Cargo Cult Science" in 1974: http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm
dtwest 7y ago
Is it possible for anthropology to be a science the way we look at physics or chemistry? I'm not trying to bash anthropology, but I think we should be honest with what the "social sciences" really are. I personally don't think economics is a science, despite that being my field of focus. In fields where it is difficult or impossible to run controlled experiments, claiming to be a science is often misleading. But maybe we just have different definitions of science?
- barry-cotter 7y ago
  If epidemiology, geology or cosmology is a science so is economics.
  - earthboundkid 7y ago
    Geology and cosmology don't change because you talk about how you think they work. Adam Smith wrote a book about how he thought the market worked and then mercantilism disappeared. It's not the same.
    - dragonwriter 7y ago
      > Adam Smith wrote a book about how he thought the market worked and then mercantilism disappeared. Mercantilism didn't disappear, it just became less dominant. It's still around, and still sometimes ends up being the philosophy that drives policy, though we tend to call it by other names. “Protectionism” is a manifestation of mercantilism, as is worry over trade deficits. Mercantilism isn't a predictive theory of how economics works, it's a public (economic) policy framework. Smith talking about how he thought that economy worked didn't make mercantilism less dominant, him proposing alternative policy based on that description did, though.
      - earthboundkid 7y ago
        As far as I know there are no rocks that changed due to the gradualism v. catastrophism debate.
earthboundkid 7y ago
Does that speak poorly of anthropologists or of "science"? Lately I've been thinking that economists tend towards libertarianism because their discipline leads them to understand the beauty of the free market etc. whereas anthropologists tend towards anarchism because any serious study of human organization reveals there's no one right way to do it. The difference between "anthropology" and "sociology" is not easy to defend except as a historical accident, and anthropology was certainly used as a tool for colonial control, but I do think it has developed a certain liberatory power. The only way to find a more just way to organize the world is to look at the different ways it has been done by groups before and see if we can bring any of those into practice today.
hos234 7y ago
Well I know decisions makers and people looking for solutions to hard problems with no simple answers, don't care about consensus/debates coming out of Associations. They care about problems created by Tech that Techies have zero insight about. If we are scratching our head in a tech company, wondering how to deal with Deaf users and an Anthropologist has spent 20 years embedded in Deaf society, that is someone we want in the room when decisions get made. It's that simple. Similarly where I work we push to get Political Scientists, Social Psychologists, Historians and Economists into the room anytime the Techies in the room have no insight beyond some book they read during a vacation. Sometimes we have people whose experience is running a school of Dance or Music when talking about innovation and creativity. Doesn't matter whether its called a Science or not. What is a science and what some group of old men at yearly meetings mentally masturbate about is not relevant to actual problems orgs face.
ebiester 7y ago
In biological anthropology, there is a fair bit more science. However, in cultural anthropology, its methods are purely qualitative. You can't make a hypothesis, breed 100 people and have them interact for a lifetime with your variable (with another 100 for control) to prove a hypothesis. The questions that cultural anthropologists are asking cannot ethically be answered with science because there are too many variables to separate out a dependent and independent variable. It's the difference between running a/b testing and going out and talking with your customers. Going out to talk with your customers is essentially applied anthropology - the methods are the same. (source: my husband is a cultural anthropologist and I've been in countless conversations regarding Anthropology and science.)
- toasterlovin 7y ago
  > However, in cultural anthropology, its methods are purely qualitative. You can't make a hypothesis, breed 100 people and have them interact for a lifetime with your variable (with another 100 for control) to prove a hypothesis. You can't evaluate any hypothesis, but you can evaluate a lot of using natural experiments: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_experiment.
- barry-cotter 7y ago
  Having purely qualitative variables does not render science impossible, it just means you’re dealing with probabilistic inference, so you need more data points or a more powerful theory. Macroeconomics has a relatively tiny data set, only one world and ~200 economies with at most 2,000 years of data and they know plenty, scientifically. Either anthropologists are making theories about the world which are in principle testable, in which case they’re doing science, though it can’t possibly measure up to the standards of proof of physics or they’re just story telling.
  - ebiester 7y ago
    Consider this argument: "political secularism is the modern state's sovereign power to reorganize substantive features of religious life, stipulating what religion is or ought to be, assigning its proper content, and disseminating concomitant subjectivities, ethical frameworks, and quotidian practices." -Saba Mahmood So, that's a lot of jargon, but let's simplify it. As Americans, we all understand secularism as "the separation of church and state." However, Mahmood is saying that doesn't quite cover it. We can look at different countries that all call themselves secular and that there are interesting interrelations with religion. Instead, she argued, that secularism is the government saying where religion can (and cannot) interact with the public sphere. (This is super simplified, mind you.) Well, that's a testable hypothesis, but how? Well, Mahmood had an original question: when she was doing fieldwork with Coptic Christians in Egypt, she was wondering why it was not cast in terms of minority rights. In Egypt; Nasser, Sadat, and Mubarak all were proponents of secularism yet questions of Copts and Muslims were considered attacks to nationalist unity. Well, is that a violation of the purity of secularism, or is it that secularism isn't quite what it seemed? We can look at Turkey and secularism as well - They are secular under the French consideration of Laïcité (Laiklik in Turkish) and yet they had a ministry in the government that certified Imams and provided for the upkeep of the mosques. So they're not Secularist. But then, what of France, which may be considered one of the most strict adherents. but even then, schools follow the Christian liturgical year, including breaks for Christmas and Easter. Yet the government owns most old church buildings in France and pays for its maintenance, and there are clear governmental preferences of Christianity over Islam. And how about the United states, where it opens with a prayer, most often by a Christian? So, then, we have a lot of data, but it is data that is talking about the definition of a word. Who cares about a definition? Well, that definition tells us a lot about the cultures of the US, France, Turkey, and Egypt (among others - see India) but it's not exactly a testable hypothesis. It's closer to what a philosopher does than a Sociologist. ____ But even then, what if it was "just story telling?" Anthropologists have helped to elucidate cultures not our own and referencing what makes them common and different. I argue that that is inherently valuable.

rayiner 7y ago

Like social “science” they want the veneer of science to make it easier to peddle their desired public policies.

soVeryTired 7y ago
Meh. Economics is far more guilty of that than any of the other social sciences.
- barry-cotter 7y ago
  There haven’t been any “scholar-activist” heads of the AEA, have there, because there have been of the ASA.
  - soVeryTired 7y ago
    Umm Milton Friedman in 1967?
- jackcosgrove 7y ago
  I'm not sure. Economics draws a lot of fire because it is more quantitative. Things that are measured are easier to track when something changes. The more qualitative social sciences advocate for their policies using critiques of mores expressed in natural language, and this triggers behavioral change in a more subtle way. There is less of a "paper trail" to look back on, so it's hard to know how much something changed and how fast, or what caused the change. Academically it would be very interesting to quantify the "memetic rate of change" triggered by introducing an argument into a population.
barry-cotter 7y ago
That is the exact opposite of the problem here. (Cultural) Anthropology doesn’t want to be a science and its professional association doesn’t support people who do. Political Scientists and Economists do their best with very messy data and extremely limited ability to do experiments to do science, and sociology researchers mostly do the same though there is a greater continent of “scholar-activists” and faculty outside research universities have lots of plain activists with Ph.D.s. Archaeologists, linguists, physical and biological anthropologists and a tiny minority of cultural anthropologists try to develop true, new knowledge about the world. They’re scientists as much as epidemiologists, geologists, cosmologists or anyone else who has lots of data, makes predictions and has a theory that can be falsified. Social science is science, and anthropology can be too. Not everything is physics or chemistry.
- opwieurposiu 7y ago
  Social science is science in the same way that bald is a hair color.
  - dang 7y ago
    Maybe so, but please don't post unsubstantive comments here.
pcwalton 7y ago
Come on. I have a B.A. in linguistics, which is a social science and, to be honest, is more empirically rigorous than some highly theoretical subfields of computer science. Skim through a syntax or phonology textbook if you ever get the chance. It's about as close to pure Karl Popper "philosophy of science" as you can get. And it's studying something very concrete: the human brain and its unique (as far as we know) capacity for language.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- rayiner 7y ago
  I’m thinking more of most of these: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_social_science https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_social_science
  - pcwalton 7y ago
    Most of those—e.g. psychology, a field which has led to significant improvements in well-being worldwide—have no political bent. If you want to criticize anthropology, say "anthropology", not "social science".

9q9 7y ago

Feynman speaks of "Cargo Cult Science" in 1974: http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm

dtwest 7y ago

Is it possible for anthropology to be a science the way we look at physics or chemistry? I'm not trying to bash anthropology, but I think we should be honest with what the "social sciences" really are. I personally don't think economics is a science, despite that being my field of focus. In fields where it is difficult or impossible to run controlled experiments, claiming to be a science is often misleading. But maybe we just have different definitions of science?

barry-cotter 7y ago
If epidemiology, geology or cosmology is a science so is economics.
- earthboundkid 7y ago
  Geology and cosmology don't change because you talk about how you think they work. Adam Smith wrote a book about how he thought the market worked and then mercantilism disappeared. It's not the same.
  - dragonwriter 7y ago
    > Adam Smith wrote a book about how he thought the market worked and then mercantilism disappeared. Mercantilism didn't disappear, it just became less dominant. It's still around, and still sometimes ends up being the philosophy that drives policy, though we tend to call it by other names. “Protectionism” is a manifestation of mercantilism, as is worry over trade deficits. Mercantilism isn't a predictive theory of how economics works, it's a public (economic) policy framework. Smith talking about how he thought that economy worked didn't make mercantilism less dominant, him proposing alternative policy based on that description did, though.
    - earthboundkid 7y ago
      As far as I know there are no rocks that changed due to the gradualism v. catastrophism debate.

earthboundkid 7y ago

Does that speak poorly of anthropologists or of "science"? Lately I've been thinking that economists tend towards libertarianism because their discipline leads them to understand the beauty of the free market etc. whereas anthropologists tend towards anarchism because any serious study of human organization reveals there's no one right way to do it. The difference between "anthropology" and "sociology" is not easy to defend except as a historical accident, and anthropology was certainly used as a tool for colonial control, but I do think it has developed a certain liberatory power. The only way to find a more just way to organize the world is to look at the different ways it has been done by groups before and see if we can bring any of those into practice today.

hos234 7y ago

Well I know decisions makers and people looking for solutions to hard problems with no simple answers, don't care about consensus/debates coming out of Associations. They care about problems created by Tech that Techies have zero insight about. If we are scratching our head in a tech company, wondering how to deal with Deaf users and an Anthropologist has spent 20 years embedded in Deaf society, that is someone we want in the room when decisions get made. It's that simple. Similarly where I work we push to get Political Scientists, Social Psychologists, Historians and Economists into the room anytime the Techies in the room have no insight beyond some book they read during a vacation. Sometimes we have people whose experience is running a school of Dance or Music when talking about innovation and creativity. Doesn't matter whether its called a Science or not. What is a science and what some group of old men at yearly meetings mentally masturbate about is not relevant to actual problems orgs face.

ebiester 7y ago

In biological anthropology, there is a fair bit more science. However, in cultural anthropology, its methods are purely qualitative. You can't make a hypothesis, breed 100 people and have them interact for a lifetime with your variable (with another 100 for control) to prove a hypothesis. The questions that cultural anthropologists are asking cannot ethically be answered with science because there are too many variables to separate out a dependent and independent variable. It's the difference between running a/b testing and going out and talking with your customers. Going out to talk with your customers is essentially applied anthropology - the methods are the same. (source: my husband is a cultural anthropologist and I've been in countless conversations regarding Anthropology and science.)

toasterlovin 7y ago
> However, in cultural anthropology, its methods are purely qualitative. You can't make a hypothesis, breed 100 people and have them interact for a lifetime with your variable (with another 100 for control) to prove a hypothesis. You can't evaluate any hypothesis, but you can evaluate a lot of using natural experiments: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_experiment.
barry-cotter 7y ago
Having purely qualitative variables does not render science impossible, it just means you’re dealing with probabilistic inference, so you need more data points or a more powerful theory. Macroeconomics has a relatively tiny data set, only one world and ~200 economies with at most 2,000 years of data and they know plenty, scientifically. Either anthropologists are making theories about the world which are in principle testable, in which case they’re doing science, though it can’t possibly measure up to the standards of proof of physics or they’re just story telling.
- ebiester 7y ago
  Consider this argument: "political secularism is the modern state's sovereign power to reorganize substantive features of religious life, stipulating what religion is or ought to be, assigning its proper content, and disseminating concomitant subjectivities, ethical frameworks, and quotidian practices." -Saba Mahmood So, that's a lot of jargon, but let's simplify it. As Americans, we all understand secularism as "the separation of church and state." However, Mahmood is saying that doesn't quite cover it. We can look at different countries that all call themselves secular and that there are interesting interrelations with religion. Instead, she argued, that secularism is the government saying where religion can (and cannot) interact with the public sphere. (This is super simplified, mind you.) Well, that's a testable hypothesis, but how? Well, Mahmood had an original question: when she was doing fieldwork with Coptic Christians in Egypt, she was wondering why it was not cast in terms of minority rights. In Egypt; Nasser, Sadat, and Mubarak all were proponents of secularism yet questions of Copts and Muslims were considered attacks to nationalist unity. Well, is that a violation of the purity of secularism, or is it that secularism isn't quite what it seemed? We can look at Turkey and secularism as well - They are secular under the French consideration of Laïcité (Laiklik in Turkish) and yet they had a ministry in the government that certified Imams and provided for the upkeep of the mosques. So they're not Secularist. But then, what of France, which may be considered one of the most strict adherents. but even then, schools follow the Christian liturgical year, including breaks for Christmas and Easter. Yet the government owns most old church buildings in France and pays for its maintenance, and there are clear governmental preferences of Christianity over Islam. And how about the United states, where it opens with a prayer, most often by a Christian? So, then, we have a lot of data, but it is data that is talking about the definition of a word. Who cares about a definition? Well, that definition tells us a lot about the cultures of the US, France, Turkey, and Egypt (among others - see India) but it's not exactly a testable hypothesis. It's closer to what a philosopher does than a Sociologist. ____ But even then, what if it was "just story telling?" Anthropologists have helped to elucidate cultures not our own and referencing what makes them common and different. I argue that that is inherently valuable.