Nomothetic science and idiographic history in twentieth‐century Americanist anthropology

Abstract

For over a century, Americanist anthropologists have argued about whether their discipline is a historical one or a scientific one. Proponents of anthropology as history have claimed that the lineages of human cultures are made up of unique events that cannot be generalized into laws. If no laws can be drawn, then anthropology cannot be a science. Proponents of anthropology as science have claimed that there indeed are laws that govern humans and their behaviors and cultures, and these laws can be discovered. Interestingly, both sides have the same narrow view of what science is. The same sorts of debates over science and history were played out in evolutionary biology over a half-century ago, and what emerged was the view that that discipline and its sister discipline, paleontology, were both history and science--hence the term "historical sciences." Anthropology and its sister discipline, archaeology, have only recently begun to realize that they too are historical sciences.

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