Cultural Anthropology: A Science

Abstract

The tendency to separate ethnology from the natural sciences is vicious. Ethnology is simply that branch of objective knowledge which defines the spatial, temporal, and functional relations of cultural phenomena. It uniformly applies those canons of scientific logic which are consistent with its varying problems. When these are chronological, ethnology inescapably applies the procedure of geology and political history, the techniques again varying with the case in question-from textual criticism to stratigraphic determination. The complexity of ethnological data may preclude Newtonian universals, but is not inconsistent with inductively established correlations, such as are in fact persistently proclaimed but practically never demonstrated.

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