Legitimizing Four Years of Study

I wrote this shortly after commencement:

There is a debate in anthropology about if the discipline should be a science, or part of the humanities. At first, I wanted it to be a science because I wanted the legitimacy and authority afforded science in today's Western hegemony. But I also didn't want it to be a science because then it would be narrow minded and restrictive, perhaps isolated, ignoring the ideological and ethical concerns that must be debated to ensure it's applications are "good" and "right" (think atom bomb for a "bad" and "wrong" case study in applied science).

So then I decided that it should be in the humanities because my professor said it was, and I liked her, and it seemed easier for me, for the way my mind works, just shy of an excuse for why I struggled to explain anthropology and its concepts. Everyone had accepted a certain ambiguity in the humanities; it was ok to be engaged in lengthy discourses that went round and round-- the process was respected, not just the end result.

Anthropology has many names and definitions, and it's literal translation: the study of man, necessitates further discussion. The shortest of these (although I cannot recall to whom to attribute it) is "the study of common sense;" it is also the one that got the most giggles in my anthropology theory course.

Ultimately, the debate stems from one of anthropology's favorite activities: problemitization. In a sort of post-modern thought, anything that exists can be problemitized, even existence, except that is generally left to the philosophers, from whom anthropology has been drawing of late. (Anthropology has a habit of sampling other fields, but it does go both ways; the ethnography is ours.) Other anthropology thinkers have decided perception and conception of existence is culturally specific. Either way it is assumed.

One cannot help but assume some things, and must put parameters on discourses and debates, to keep them from getting out of hand, like what Geertz's thick description skirted. I have no doubt that this monologue will become contextually reasonable, if it is not already, as I cannot remove myself from my own cultural lens and historical setting.

For now, I will leave it at this: anthropology is both and neither. It's still developing. It can never be a science in the same sense as physical sciences because it deals with living people in situations that cannot be identically reproduced, making experimentation impossible. I feel inadequate to elaborate beyond this, having only a BA in the subject, and that only barely earned.

What if I were I to do it again? I don't really know. Possibly major in rhetoric, double minor in anthropology and creative writing. I love words, but not the way a linguist does, more like an artist with an emphasis on what words can do when put in the right order.