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Nomothetic science and idiographic history in twentieth-century Americanist anthropology

✍ Scribed by R. Lee Lyman; Michael J. O'Brien

Publisher
John Wiley and Sons
Year
2004
Tongue
English
Weight
112 KB
Volume
40
Category
Article
ISSN
0022-5061

No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.

✦ Synopsis

Abstract

For over a century, Americanist anthropologists have argued about whether their discipline is a historical
one or a scientific one. Proponents of anthropology as history have claimed that the lineages of human cultures
are made up of unique events that cannot be generalized into laws. If no laws can be drawn, then anthropology
cannot be a science. Proponents of anthropology as science have claimed that there indeed are laws that govern
humans and their behaviors and cultures, and these laws can be discovered. Interestingly, both sides have the
same narrow view of what science is. The same sorts of debates over science and history were played out in
evolutionary biology over a half‐century ago, and what emerged was the view that that discipline and its
sister discipline, paleontology, were both history and science—hence the term “historical
sciences.” Anthropology and its sister discipline, archaeology, have only recently begun to realize that
they too are historical sciences. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

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