ABSTRACT
Social anthropology has variously described itself as a science, a social science and a humanity over the years, emerging with a different way of describing itself in the US and Europe. But there appears to be a general agreement in contemporary debates that anthropology is found at the intersection of all three, even if the personal inclination is towards the humanities. The process of anthropological research is iterative and emergent because the researcher learns on the job with informants and not at a distance from them. There are different kinds of learning because there are different types of knowledge and Bloch points out that language-based knowledge has been over-emphasised by anthropology. Research requires multiple parallel processing, improvisation and attention to old and new. Anthropology can only be done with a sense of other disciplines – geography, history, cultural studies, feminism, political science, psychology and so on.
