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STATE OF THE ART/SCIENCE IN ANTHROPOLOGY a
Author(s) -
FOX ROBIN
Publication year - 1995
Publication title -
annals of the new york academy of sciences
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.712
H-Index - 248
eISSN - 1749-6632
pISSN - 0077-8923
DOI - 10.1111/j.1749-6632.1996.tb23152.x
Subject(s) - humanism , annals , anthropology , sociology , art history , history , classics , theology , philosophy
3 The symbolism of the quest for scientific status was marked: the archetypical image was not clad in aca- demic robes but in a white lab coat, preferably with a slide rule (remember the slide rule?) sticking out of the pocket. Everyone wanted "laboratory" status. I worked at Harvard in both the Laboratory of Social Relations and the Laboratory of Human Development, and (begin page 328) even in France the burgeon- ing structuralists at the College de France instituted the Laboratoire de l'anthropologie sociale — still there and still flourishing under the same title. Both Britain and the United States then had a Social Sci- ence Research Council, and would have settled for nothing less. The vindictive Tory government in the United Kingdom has recently stripped the Science from its research council title — surely to avenge them- selves on the pesky Fabians from the London School of Economics. Signs of the times indeed. We anthro- pologists understand these symbolic gestures, no? But back then it was science or bust. The terror of being excluded from scientific grace was palpable. The last thing a Ph.D. candidate wanted to hear was that he was being "unscientific." Words of doom. 4 Just what constituted being scientific was in turn much debated. At Harvard it raged between the statisti- cal crowd (analysis of variance qualified you for scientific heaven) and the Freudians. But even many of