Why Anthropology Needs Biocultural Ethnography

Many cultural anthropologists have long been skeptical of collaboration with the other subfields of the discipline at large—in particular, biological or evolutionary anthropology—for fear of treading over long-settled ground regarding the problematic roots of anthropology in which the so-called “evolutionists” and social Darwinists promoted pseudoscience in an attempt to legitimize a range of bigoted and ethnocentric assumptions about humanity. In many anthropology departments, the entire research faculty is comprised solely of cultural anthropologists who neither think of themselves as scientists nor of their field as scientific. This is to anthropology’s detriment, as it needlessly limits not only the scope of discovery anthropologists can make, even in fieldwork, but it also reframes anthropology departments and their associated research projects within the scope of federal funding as strictly social science and humanities initiatives, putting them in financial and academic jeopardy. While it is certainly true that anthropology has a problematic history intertwined with pseudoscience, this does not justify a conscious initiative to rhetorically and conceptually divorce real science from cultural anthropology. In this chapter, the authors demonstrate through their own prior works across both theory and practice the tangible benefits and essential breakthroughs of approaching cultural anthropology and ethnographic fieldwork, when applicable, via biocultural frameworks that take holistic and ontological considerations of field sites, persons, and cultural modalities into account. The authors argue that by embracing the entirety of anthropology as a science, rather than shying away from this fact, the design and nuance of many more ethnographic projects—and their subsequent findings and insights about the human condition—stand to be greatly enriched.