One of the goals I developed during my anthropology program was a desire to reunite the fractured social sciences into one coherent whole. When social science was first practiced by casual individuals, I believe it drew from many traditions. Over time, the academic and practitioner communities worked to specialize each of its components. Anthropology was cut off the main trunk and relegated to dealing with non-Western, so called non-modern, exotic topics. Sociology, history, political economy, economics, and psychology dealt primarily with Western European and North American domains while anthropology focused on groups in Africa, Latin and Southern America, and Asia….

During the 1960s through 1990s, anthropology worked at reevaluating itself. It moved from synchronic, exotic studies, to more diachronic, less exotic categories. It started looking beyond local groups of people in remote areas. Anthropologists looked at how these groups (themselves very fluid) interacted with distant groups and globalized processes. In order to fill-in the gaps in its tool bag, it started to draw from history, political economy, economics, and psychology. Anthropologists also started using quantitative tools developed by sociologists. This bolstered their qualitative research methods and also allowed for more decisive grant proposals before funding boards.

This borrowing, in my opinion, was not welcomed by the other disciplines within the social sciences. They saw anthropologists as poor historians or trying to usurp their domains. But, each of these social sciences has expanded its own boundaries and borrowed from each other. Social psychology borrows from various fields. Historians also need to dabble in other disciplines in order to provide a more accurate picture of the events they describe and analyze. It is important to see this borrowing as not stealing. An anthropologist is not trying to say that a sociologist is not as important. An historian isn’t worse than an economist. What I see is that each of these groups realizes that its canonical frameworks are insufficient for tackling the problems they are researching.

Anthropology’s borrowings have made it a more holistic social science. Any study of social phenomena requires a broad approach. Otherwise, the resulting data and analysis are simply a fragment of the greater whole. I believe psychological territoriality and limited funding sources work to keep the social sciences divided. We need to work against this mentality to unite our social disciplines into a cohesive, holistic whole. Only then will we have the basic foundation in which to explore the mutual topics that each sub-discipline currently claims as its own.