Consider the debate over who should be credited as the inventor of calculus. All intellectual enterprises have a human element to them. But that's really not the ultimate point. In this case it has become a banner around which people coalesce, to tear it down or defend it. Nevertheless, our understanding of many empirically tractable issues is enhanced by considering historical, narrative, or normative information. In each field, quantitative data may actually settle some questions, but not others. Psychology, political science and sociology all encompass some body of normative and descriptive theory that is not especially subject to empirical testing. How can we have a coherent, rational study of humankind without much of its subject matter being ultimately humanistic in content? I don't think our situation is very different from most of the social sciences. Still, I argue that anthropology is a science, even while I acknowledge that many anthropologists are not scientists. Alfred Kroeber became more well known as the oppressor of Ishi than for his synthetic work. Lewis is quite correct - many students of anthropological theory were no longer required to read extensively of early anthropologists. If they had not themselves been tools of the colonialist oppressors, they were dupes of their knowing research subjects. Of course, by the 1980's, anthropology was already disowning many of the central figures of its early development.
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