ABSTRACT
In recent years the 'human sciences' and their culturalist terminology have been replacing the old concept of the 'social sciences', as scholars become dissatisfied with narrowness and reductionism in socioeconomic explanations of human behavior. Traditional sociology addresses collective human behavior through universalizing scientific categories; and partly for this reason, after an impressive cycle of imperial expansion, the discipline has entered into decline. The life sciences, too, have been admitted to the human sciences, as the body, biological inheritance, and the biosphere are included within the horizons of cultural studies, especially under the impact of feminist theory. Like other human sciences, anthropology has often heard, and given way to, the siren song of reductionism; but the study of religion and myth continues to resist assaults by naturism, animism, and other theories of the mechanics of human nature across centuries and cultures.
