Department of Anthropology | University of Waterloo

From A.L. Kroeber (1958) “The Personality of Anthropology” pp. 4-5. Kroeber Anthropology Society Papers 19:1-5.

[…] Since personalities are initially determined by their ancestry, it is highly relevant that anthropology was not a social science at all originally. Its father was natural science; its mother, aesthetically tinged humanities. Both parents want to attain reasoned and general conclusions; but they both also want to reach them by way of their senses. After a brief first childlike decade of outright speculation, anthropology settled down to starting directly from experienced phenomena, with a bare minimum of ready-made abstraction and theory, but with a glowing conviction that it was entering new territory and making discovery. Its discovery was the world of culture, an enormous product and a vast influence, with forms and patterns of its own, and a validating principle: relativity... The pursuit of anthropology must have seemed strange to many people; but no one has ever called it an arid or a dismal science... If at times some of you, like myself, feel ill at ease in the house of social science, do not wonder; we are changelings therein; our true paternity lies elsewhere.