The Ideal of Integrated Social Science

Why is most cultural anthropology largely irrelevant? The voice of that particular field in broader academic discussions is almost inaudible, its scholars are no longer among the recognizable and important public intellectuals of the day, and its contribution to public debates is close to nonexistent. This last feature is all the more troubling, as the subject matter of cultural anthropology would seem to place it at the center of crucial social debates. Although I will substantiate this rather harsh diagnosis, the point of this chapter is less to offer a jeremiad than to propose an etiology and perhaps a cure for the current predicament of cultural anthropology. My diagnosis is that this is a largely self-inflected condition. What is clear is that a vast domain is open to cultural anthropological investigation, provided that the practitioners accept substantive re-tooling and discard old fetishes. If slogans are needed, an integrated study of culture should proclaim the great values of reductionism, the ambition to understand the causal processes underpinning behaviors; opportunism, the use of whatever tools and findings get us closer to that goal; and revisionism, a deliberate indifference to disciplinary creeds and traditions. The integrated view of human culture—what some may call a “vertical integration” in the field—will allow cultural anthropology to return to the highly ambitious set of questions it should have addressed all along.