Which Is In A Bigger Mess Over Culture—Psych. or Anthro. ?

Drawing by Paul Newton

I was dismayed, if not surprised, by Alice Dreger's post, No Science, Please. We're Anthropologists. As a psychologist who has worked to remedy psychology's misunderstanding of, superficial understanding of, lack of understanding of, or even lack of scientific interest in culture, I have devoted considerable effort to pointing out the relevance of anthropological knowledge and research methods to psychology. So the removal of references to "science" from the American Anthropological Association (AAA) mission statement was tantamount to pulling the rug out from under cross-cultural psychologists like me. It is difficult to make the argument to psychologists that human behavior is inextricably woven into a cultural matrix if the specialists in culture eschew science.

One of the results of excluding culture from scientific study is to define only biological explanations of behavior as scientific. Since academic rewards in the United States go to highly specific research with a sub-sub-disciplinary focus, one can easily imagine a future in which biologically oriented anthropologists who are uninformed about culture will be doing "scientific" research. Meanwhile, monolingual Americans are getting PhDs in sociocultural anthropology for studying other American monolinguals--as if the range of cultures around the world were of secondary importance. In anthropology as in psychology, scientists cannot evaluate the effects of subject matter they do not study.

The departure of scientific anthropologists from the AAA parallels the departure of scientific psychologists from the American Psychological Association (APA) to form APS. Originally called the American Psychological Society, its members eventually voted to keep the acronym and change the name to the Association for Psychological Science, for emphasis. In contrast to the science vs. humanities/politics split in anthropology, the split in psychology is science vs. profession--with clinical, counseling, school, and other applied psychologists greatly outnumbering experimental psychologist of all varieties. Two differences are: (1) nearly all psychologists--in part because of the field's narrow definition of science that often excludes culture--pay at least lip service to science and view professional psychology as an application of scientific psychological knowledge; and (2) because the number of anthropologists is so small in relation to the number of psychologists, there may not be the critical mass available to create a freestanding American association that is the anthropological counterpart of APS. The Society for Anthropological Sciences (SASci) exists both as an independent organization, not all of whose members are anthropologists or live in the United States (e.g., its website is at the University of Kent in the United Kingdom) and as an interest group in the AAA, where its acronym is changed to SAS.

The United States is in the midst of a wave of immigration from around the world. It is amazing that, at this very moment, scientists are either ignoring culture or being discouraged from studying it.

Image Source:
Drawing by Paul Newton

Check out my most recent book, The Myth of Race, which debunks common misconceptions, as well as my other books at http://amazon.com/Jefferson-M.-Fish/e/B001H6NFUI

The Myth of Race is available on Amazon http://amzn.to/10ykaRU and Barnes & Noble http://bit.ly/XPbB6E

Friend/Like me on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/JeffersonFishAuthor

Follow me on Twitter: www.twitter.com/@jeffersonfish

Visit my website: www.jeffersonfish.com