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Re: IS ANTHROPOLOGY A SCIENCE?DETA
Fred Pearl (Fred@ACS.TAMU.EDU)
Tue, 30 Apr 1996 09:20:24 -0500
>Thanks for your response. I was very pleased that you take the notion of a
>synthesis of physical and cultural anthropology seriously. But you can't
>just say Shapiro's book is "not very good" because ..
You are right. I apologize for dismissing the book without at least
supporting my case a little better. I'd love to respond in more detail, but
I would need to check the book out again (from the Library that is). I seem
to recall that the short chapters were interesting, but did not seem to be
consistent with other accepted general sociobiological and human ecological
theory. It was very different in fact, and I suspect that it was not taken
very seriously either by anthropologists or sociobiologists. I'm afraid I
can not offer a better criticism at this time.
On the other hand. The book is older (what year is it?) and would have been
considered fairly progressive at the time it came out. I think there are
much better books on the same subject nowadays. It is a thought provoking
book, and provides many testable hypotheses, which makes it a theoretically
scientific book.
I agree that works like this make anthropology a science.
Fred Pearl
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Center for Environmental Archaeology
Texas A&M University
College Station, TX 77843-4352
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FRED@ACS.TAMU.EDU http://http.tamu.edu:8000/~fbp6743/index.html
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