Nomothetic science and idiographic history in twentieth‐century Americanist anthropology

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