Nomothetic science and idiographic history in twentieth‐century Americanist anthropology

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.

Theoretical and Epistemological Thoughts on Archaeology and Experimental Lithic Technology

“…Among others, the most basic and primary procedures in many research activities are the classification of evidence and data. One of the oldest approaches for dealing with lithic implements was typology, one of the main tools to be used from a cultural historical perspective that understood the human past from an ideographical standpoint (Lyman & O'Brien, 2004 communities, it is still in use but with an updated makeup. It is also known that the epistemological background underlying typological thought relies on an idealistic philosophical perspective.…”

Definitional Argument in Evolutionary Psychology and Cultural Anthropology

“…Boas's project for an autonomous cultural anthropology was predicated on freeing anthropology from Herbert Spencer's notion of lockstep cultural stages and passive adaptation to competitive environments, which in the context of late l9th century America carried classist, racist, and sexist implications. Epistemologically and methodologically, Boas achieved this by bringing to America the neo-Kantian German academic discourse that divided generalizing from particularizing, or lawgoverned from interpretive, sciences (Bunzl 1996;Lyman and O'Brien 2004). George Stocking (2001) has discussed how Boas's own conception of anthropological science was influenced by the "traditional distinction in German thought between the Naturwissenschaften and the Geisteswissenschaften, between the sciences dealing with physical nature and those dealing with human spiritual activity" (37).…”

“…Boas's project for an autonomous cultural anthropology was predicated on freeing anthropology from Herbert Spencer's stadial theory of culture, which, in the context of late nineteenth-century America carried classist, racist, and sexist implications. George Stocking discussed how Boas's own conception of anthropological science was influenced by the “traditional distinction in German thought between the Naturwissenschaften and the Geisteswissenschaften , between the sciences dealing with physical nature and those dealing with human spiritual activity” (Stocking 2001, 37; see also Bunzl 1996; Lyman and O'Brien 2004). This enabled him to insist on cultural anthropology as an interpretive inquiry, and to assert its autonomy by distancing it from the notion of evolutionary progress, which was, at the same time, being undermined by Weismannism.…”

A Paleontological Look at History

“…Paleontology, astronomy, geology and archaeology and aspects of evolutionary biology are historical sciences. They differ fundamentally in their approach and methods from largely ahistorical disciplines as physics, chemistry, physiology and much of molecular biology [5,21,25]. Physicists often assert that because they are not predictive, historical sciences are no more sciences than history.…”