ABSTRACT
To claim that anthropology is “the whole science of what it is to be human” is not to be merely provocative. Rather, it seems important to draw attention to anthropology as science at this juncture in the history of the discipline, when it would appear to some to have been eclipsed by the rise of cultural studies, on the one hand, and of cognitive science, on the other. For a human scientist, words are analytical tools, so one wants to be able to use words with precision. But like everything else that is human, language is a historical phenomenon—that is, its continuity resides in continuing transformation. It follows that no explanation can be objective in the sense of being immune from history. Any psychologist would be likely to agree that imagined examples make sense but would continue nevertheless to conceive of mental states and bodily states as separable and interacting.
