The Four Subfields: Anthropologists as Mythmakers

A survey of articles published in the American Anthropologist over a 100‐year period indicates that substantive collaboration across anthropological subfields is largely a myth—amounting toonly 311 of 3,264 articles surveyed (or 9.5 percent of the total). Working with the anthropological insights of Bronislaw Malinowski, Edward Tylor, and Claude Levi‐Strauss, this article considers why a myth of subf ield collaboration nonetheless exists within anthropology. This article concludes by calling for new forms of holism. [Keywords: American Anthropologist, subf ield collaboration, holism, public anthropology]