YOU TALK FUNNY

You know I studied anthropology so this is definitely of interest to me. But I kind of don’t care. I see how it’s a big deal but, I don’t know. You know what the real problem is? Anthropology is all over the place! You got linguistics, archeology (only god knows why), ethnography, biology, and sociology. That’s too many things! Like the article says, people studying genetics totally feel like they are doing science—when I was in Race and Physical Biology, I was definitely up in the lab, looking at skulls. Then on the other hand, I also definitely wrote a paper about the language of DJs and it just doesn’t seem like science. But then again, I read about scientists documenting animal behavior all the time—there’s plenty of pure observation which is what I was doing with the DJ vocab and the other more ethnographic/sociological stuff I did. So what’s the difference?

I hate “soft-science” though, totally jerky. Social-science is a great term I think. But then again, you’re going to have biologists all over that scale too. Sigh.

Here’s the free dictionary’s first definition of science:

1.

a. The observation, identification, description, experimental investigation, and theoretical explanation of phenomena.

b. Such activities restricted to a class of natural phenomena.

c. Such activities applied to an object of inquiry or study.

That clears all of about nothing up! Thanks science! But all the things I did in my anth classes could fall under that definition. Moral of the story: it’s arbitrary and MDs are just being snobs.

UPDATE: I just noticed that the title says Anthropology group drops science. You know, like droppin’ science. Hilarious.