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Anthropology: Science and Philosophy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

Beatriz Ruiz
Beatriz Ruiz*
Affiliation:
UNED, La Corúña/Ferrol Instituto de Sociologia de Nuevas Tecnologias, UAM-Madrid
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Extract

Boas, according to Harris, put the matter very succinctly: ‘Anthropology is a science, but science is history’. Malinowski sought a scientific definition of culture in his turn. In a posthumous text entitled A Scientific Theory of Culture, he offered a minimal definition of ‘science’ for the humanistic scholar, which would thus be differentiated simultaneously from abstract thought and from common sense.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 47 , Issue 188 , December 1999 , pp. 73 - 84
Copyright
Copyright © ICPHS 1999

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References

Notes

1. Marvin Harris (1968) The Rise of Anthropological Theory: A History of Theories of Culture (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul).

2. Bronislaw Malinowski (1944) A Scientific Theory of Culture and Other Essays (Chapel Hill, North Carolina Press).

3. Bronislaw Malinowski (1922) Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea (London, George Routledge and Sons Ltd.), p. 12.

4. Malinowski (1944), p. 18.

5. I owe this idea to Professor José Alcina Franch.

6. Cited in Harris (1968), p. 276.

7. The origin of this scheme are also to be found in the doctoral course that I taught as a professor at the Ph. D programs anthropology and psychology at the University of Santiago de Compostella. In 1997, after discussions with various scholars, I attempted to compare the paradigms and methods used by the so-called ‘hard' sciences and those of anthropology.

8. I started by explaining to these scholars what the basic principles of anthropology consisted of, and above all what ‘fieldwork' relied on, as a qualitative research technique sometimes neglected by the ‘hard social sciences' because considered too subjective in their eyes. This initial work led to a second series of con versations in which each of them attempted to give a reply from their particular science to the questions which I had formulated from anthropology: common endeavour gradually created a common language which anthropology, physics, biology, mathematics and logic could share and which aided the drawing-up of a discussion document for all the participants at the end of the course. This text demonstrated prin cipally how the paradigms and scientific methods studied (quantum physics, fractal geometry, evolutionary genetics …) were less dissimilar than one would have supposed at first sight.

9. Originally published in French as Benoit B. Mandelbrot (1984) Les objets fractals. Forme, hasard et dimension, 2nd edition (Paris, Flammarion); English translation: (1977) The Fractal Geometry of Nature, updated and augmented edition (W.H. Freeman and Co., New York).

10. Ibid.

11. Harris (1968), p. 282.

12. Ibid. p. 282.

13. M. Sahlins (1976) Culture and Practical Reason (Chicago, University of Chicago Press), p. 76.

14. George W. Stocking Jr. (1996) From fieldwork to functionalism: Malinowski and the emergence of British social anthropology, in After Tylor: British Social Anthropology 1888-1951 (London: Athlone Press), pp. 233- 297, quotation at p. 245.

15. R. Firth (1976) Introduction, in Bronislaw Malinowski, A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul), p. xviii.

16. Ken Plummer (1983) Documents of Life: An Introduction to the Problems and Literature of a Humanistic Method (London, George Allen and Unwin), p. 45.

17. E. Leach (1957) The epistemological background to Malinowski's empiricism, in R. Frith (ed.), Man and Culture: The Evaluation of the Work of Bronislaw Malinowski (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul), p. 121.

18. Ibid. p. 126.

19. C. Wright Mills (1959) The Sociological Imagination (New York, Oxford University Press), p. 67 n. 12.

20. Emile Durkheim (1981 [1937]) Les règles de la méthode sociologique (Paris, PUF).

21. Bronislaw Malinowski (1967), A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul), p. 114.

22. Ibid.

23. Malinowski (1922), p. 17.

24. Leach (1957), p. 119.

25. D. Greenwood (1999) Posmodernismo y positivismo en el estudio de la etnicidad: antropólogos teorizando versus antropólogos practicando su profesión, in B. Ruiz and J.M. Cardesin (eds.), Antropología Hoy: Teorias, técnicas y tácticas. Monográfico no. 19 de Areas. Revista de Ciencias Sociales (University of Murcia-Caja Murcia), pp. 193-210.

26. Manuel Castells (1998) La era de la información. Economía, sociedad y cultura, 3 vols. (Madrid, Alianza); published in English as The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, 3 vols. (Oxford, Blackwell).