ABSTRACT
Preface We begin with an observation and a particular point of view. American anthropology emerged as an integrative discipline, one which has espoused holism and engaged in a “four-field” conversation since its inception (Boas 1940). There have been challenges to this holistic framing of the discipline as more “myth” than reality (Borofsky 2002; Segal and Yanagisako 2005; see also Calcagno 2003), and equally strong concerns over fragmentation and fissioning of disciplinary subfields that advocate for a holistic anthropology (Peacock 1995; Brown and Yoffee 1992). We come to this essay as anthropologists committed to the vision of anthropology’s unique ability for the integration of multiple perspectives on humans and humanity that is the promise of a four-field, holistic, approach. By ‘four-field’, however, we do not mean four, five or six silos of expertise that can somehow, if uncomfortably, inhabit the single space of a department or discipline. Departments that ‘cover’ and ‘represent’ anthropological breadth, but without integration, are hardly more holistic than those units that eschew one or more perspective (usually from biological anthropology) or that have split into separate departments or programs over seemingly irreconcilable differences in approaches to anthropological sciences. Rather, we are talking about the sort of anthropology that blurs divisions among the subfields, that occupies hybrid spaces at the margins of normative approaches, that bleed into and demand input from other perspectives within and out of anthropology, and that allow for and even privilege the anthropological promise of integration of natural and social sciences and humanities.
