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Anthropology, Social Science, and the March for Science

Tarter

This post is presented in this week’s series recognizing Earth Day, Saturday, April 22.

Anthropology has an unusual relationship with science. As scientist and anthropologist H. Russell Bernard points out in the preamble to his now-canonized Research Methods in Anthropology: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches:

With one foot planted squarely in the humanities and the other in the sciences, there has always been a certain tension in the discipline between those who would make anthropology a quantitative science and those whose goal it is to produce documents that convey the richness—indeed, the uniqueness—of human thought and experience. (2011: vii)