Cultural Anthropology should not Stop Trying to Model Itself as a Science

Cultural Anthropology should not Stop Trying to Model Itself as a Science

Cultural Anthropology is defined as the study of the culture of human communities.  It usually focuses on cultural variations among people in current cultures and societies.  Culture is the way of life of everyday life shared by humans in a specific place or time.  In this regard, anthropology gains scientific basis for combining numerous disciplines to achieve significant anthropological results.  These results are seen when the well-known concerns of the application of culture and the use of academic authority and science are used in the case of fighting racism. While some authors maintain that cultural anthropology should stop trying to model itself as science, this idea should not be taken as such.

Humanities and sciences have often appeared to contest for validity, as though, the two disciplines are two opposing ends.  In this respect, the authors seem to provide contradictory ideas on the question of whether cultural anthropology should model itself as a science.  According to Geertz (p. 238), cultural anthropology is well done through interpretation (p. 238).  Interpretative anthropology is the approach to anthropology writing and practice connected to but different from other perspectives that established within socio-cultural anthropology in the time of the Cold War (Laidlaw, 2018).  Clifford Geertz developed this perspective, and his idea is to understand how people within that culture understand themselves and their experiences.  He argues that anthropologists should present interpretations of cultures in the format of “thick descriptions”.  Interpretative anthropology is meant to go much deeper than simply observing things from one’s perspective. Geertz argued that certain patterns of behaviour have a certain symbolic significance to the culture they are seeking to understand and that if we ignore this, then crucial information will be missed out.

However, other authors emphasize that cultural anthropology should focus on analysis as a science as contrasting to the humanistic method of interpretation.  Carneiro creates a rational and logical explanation that science should enable to explain cultural phenomena based on substantiation (p. 241).  He argues that cultural anthropology should focus on analysis as a science. Generally, a science comprises a search of knowledge covering comprehensive truths of fundamental laws.  Since anthropology is the study of human beliefs, ideas and cultures, scientific research should be applied to build further the knowledge of human beings and their interaction with one another in their surroundings (Scerri, 2017).  Carneiro presents scientific analysis, which is based on first-hand details to prevent misrepresentation.  His idea is combined with other scientific strategies to produce information.  No information should just be interpreted but should be analyzed to produce theoretical results.

Therefore, cultural anthropology should model itself as a science since the available literature suggests that cultural anthropology is a natural science.  Carneiro’s claims offer substantial evidence that indicates a broad scope of techniques of knowing and understanding humans as social beings and their behaviour.  Societies and cultures create sociocultural phenomena.  This phenomenon does not occur naturally like earthquakes, acts of weather, or pestilence.  In that case, Carneiro tries to explain a socio-cultural phenomenon in terms of cause and effect as opposed to interpretation.  His research methods seem to understand better how human beings act the way they do in a particular environment, and the impact on the social, physical, cultural and political contexts.  Hence, cultural anthropology should model itself as a science.