Steps Toward a Unified Anthropology [and Comments and Reply]

It is generally recognized that there exists currently a strong trend toward the "fractionation" of anthropology and the "absorption" of its several subdivisions into other disciplines. On the other hand, if we are striving for a balanced perspective on present-day anthropology we should not ignore a concurrent movement toward the integration of biological and sociocultural anthropology into a unified science. In this paper an attempt is made to appraise certain aspects of this latter trend and to suggest some steps which may be taken immediately by anthropologists to accelerate the development of a unified science of mankind. The long-standing conceptual dichotomy in the study of man has become, in the United States at least, an institutionalized vested interest. This situation, together with resistance to such new orientations as population thinking, bioecological thinking, and neuropsychiatric thinking, are obstacles to unification at both the theoretical and the methodological levels. On the other han...