Anthropology and Psychology

Anthropologists who work at the interface of psychology and anthropology are by and large committed to anthropology as science. The problem for us, however, is that the institutional development of the human sciences in the late 19 th and early 20 th centuries effectively allotted different aspects of what it is to be human to different disciplines. Faced with separate epistemological domains of anthropology, psychology, sociology, linguistics, philosophy and biology, scientists in the latter half of the 20 th century found themselves having to work hard to put the pieces back together again – body and mind, for example. As is often the case, however, new subdisciplinary domains intended to overcome conceptual difficulties served rather to entrench them. The 1970s saw the invention of psychological anthropology, the 1980