Basically put, anthropology is divided into two camps: the right-handed (objective) approach, evolutionary anthropology, and the left-handed (subjective) approach, social anthropology.
The simple dividing line between them is whether people's behavior can best be explained in terms of animal mate-finding drives, in an entirely impersonal sense, or whether behavior must be viewed through the lens of culture.
Of course, this seems almost silly. Can't it be both?
That's the problem; each side claims basically to have the "inside-track" on why humans REALLY do what they do, and so they are both wrong. There is no possibility of separating evolutionary drives from human culture, or (at least as far as humans are concerned) vice-versa.
That's the basic story. Now to the article, to illustrate the issue better.
"The schism between the two is simple but deeply ingrained. Academics in the subject clearly align themselves with one side or the other; once that choice is made it defines their career."
-Firstly, the schism is as simple as is possible, do you ignore the subjective or the objective, and as deep as possible, the most basic division. Secondly, the "once that choice..." part shows a basic problem within academia at the present time: it's not just that your field is interesting, or helpful, it's that your field is right, and everyone else's field is only properly viewed from one's own, and this often dismisses fields entirely. Not only cross-field, but, as here, within one field.
"A lot of anthropologists are interpretivists; they are interpreting what they see. They're not working within the framework of the scientific method," says Ruth Mace, professor of evolutionary anthropology at University College London. "That's all well and good, but why should we be more interested in one person's interpretation over someone else's interpretation unless we have got some commonly accepted grounds for testing competing hypotheses?"
-There's a little too much in here. Humans are always interpreting, even math is an interpretation, that is, 2+2 is an abstraction, with correlates in our experience of reality. Denigrating somebody as an interpretivist is forgetting that you can't really use the word "reality," without the qualifying "our experience of..." Dr. Mace also isn't counting a rather thorough, and evolutionary, means of testing competing hypotheses: bunk gets junked. That is, the best and most likely hypotheses pass on, in the long term, because people start to agree with them because they work better, let alone the fact that commonly accepting grounds is a form of interpretation. Of course, she has a point in the end, and that is that it is certainly worthy and important to ground understandings in the world of experimental data. It's just not a litmus-test for validity.
"The scientific method is a common currency across all scientific disciplines, most of the social sciences included. In that way, disciplines can speak to each other."
-An example of the "all through my field" way of looking at things. As Dr. Ingold says, "They already assume they have the correct answer."
Now, it's not all bleak. The integral idea is growing in the world, and mostly from the ground-up, that is, not with the explicit help of people grounded in integral theory, but because it's practical, and leading/fringe thinkers in their respective fields are beginning to understand the limits of choosing either one (interior reality) or the other (exterior reality.) Dr. Whitehouse, the main example in the article, being one of them, along with the Royal Anthropological Institute. Dr. Barton's quote exemplifies this, " I don't think there's any future for an anthropology that doesn't combine the different approaches and perspectives." That, of course, has been the integral call for quite some time, substituting "understanding of humanity and its/my/your interaction with reality" for anthropology. (Though ironically in a way that could be thought of as being anthropology, I think we can mostly agree the scopes of these two projects are rather different.)
Of course, looking at the comments below, this magical age is still far-off, and of course, won't happen for at least another generation, as things change most not when individuals change their mind, but when generations die off. However, if a truly integral understanding can begin to pull all of this together, it could be a catalyst. That, of course, is in danger of falling into the same trap: everything must be viewed from an integral perspective, or it's not valid. This is not what I mean. The integral perspective itself is, of course, not really a single perspective, it's the injunction to state the weaknesses clearly just as you state the truths of your work and viewpoint. Every concept and argument is resting on a point of impossibility, there is nothing without caveat. Even the caveat. So live your life.
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