Although I lean heavily upon the Scientific side of Anthropology, I have noticed that the two must go hand in hand - one often pulling the other along with it. For me the Scientific side pulls along the traditional. But why is this important?
Ethnography, a traditional survey of culture and cultural traits in Anthropology, has become very limited in explaining and alluding to the natural processes that underlie cultural behaviors and adaptations to environments. Anthropologists focused solely on ethnography clearly have preserved much by way of description but missed out on explanation and a fuller understanding. However, an Anthropologist practicing nothing but natural sciences might as well be a natural scientist. This juxtaposition is made very apparent by my school schedule.
On Tuesdays and Thursdays I attend Indians of North America - a very ethnographic, traditional course, followed by Hunter-Gatherers - a science based course focused on experimentation and modeling, with hints of ethnographic history to characterize the variation. After going from one to the other and immediately switching frameworks, two things have occurred to me:
1.) The use of ethnography, while mildly significant for causation, is one of the defining characteristics of Anthropological thought. Without it, we would likely be just like any other lab-rat, natural scientist.
2.) This unique perspective is only made possible by application of a fuller understanding of evolutionary theory to ethnographic data. While most Biologists, Physicists, etc. do have an understanding of evolutionary theory, but they lack understanding of practical evolutionary theory. In other words, they likely can experiment and characterize the mechanisms behind the transmission of genetic material, but do very little to actually link it to observable behaviors and adaptations, and even less to link it to prehistoric behaviors and cultures.
However, this is not to support poorly constructed ethnographic work of previous scholars, or to deny that any natural scientists are presently doing or capable of linking the aforementioned phenomena. Clearly, sociobiology is on the rise and opening long closed doors to understanding the human condition. Rather, this statement illustrates the unique perspective of the Anthropologists as well the differences between the goals of these disciplines. Anthropology strives to link behavior, both past and present, with evolution processes with examples from ethnographic detail. Natural science only recently lends itself to this, but has historically been focused on identifying causality behind responses, on very discreet levels.
