What Is Science in Anthropology?

The governing documents of the American Anthropological Association repeatedly refer to anthropology as a “science.” What does science mean in this context? And is it true that anthropology is a “science”? These are questions with which anthropologists have wrestled for generations, yet no clear answer has emerged. That these questions are still important was demonstrated following the 2010 AAA annual meeting. The executive board removed the word science from the association’s long-range plan and sparked a brief, though widely publicized, controversy. The important point is that if members of the AAA did not find “science” in anthropology important, the changes to the long-range plan would not have been controversial. Earlier discussions of science in anthropology suggest that anthropologists have always been confused about what science means in the context of anthropology. Leslie White (1949:3–7), for example, defined anthropological science as “sciencing”; that is, what people who call themselves anthropological scientists do. Although this idea seems almost prophetic of contemporary understandings of science, it is not a particularly useful definition. Eric Wolf (1964:13) provided a similarly ineffectual definition: “Anthropology is both a natural science, concerned with the organization and function of matter, and a humanistic discipline, concerned with the organization and function of mind.” Psychologists might argue that the organization and function of mind is a scientific concern, and there are certainly those in fields such as environmental ethics who would see a concern with the organization and function of matter as an obviously humanistic one. Marvin Harris (1979:27) defined science in anthropology as “an epistemology which seeks to restrict fields of inquiry to events, entities, and relationships that are knowable by means of explicit, logicoempirical,