mound of buffalo skulls from buffalo shot by U.S. government hunters 

                                                                      (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

In response to these criticisms of the “unscientific-ness” of their subject, some social scientists have tried to be more rigorous in their work. But they do admit that the studies done in their fields are difficult to replicate because relevant background conditions to the belief or custom being studied can’t be reset. For example, how could a tribe go back to living as fishers when the fish species they once ate are gone? For how long could we get a modern nation to live without its computers and cell phones?  

We also accept that customs can’t be forced on any tribe. Trying to force a tribe to go back to living naked once they have begun to wear clothes would be immoral as well as impracticable. Tribes in the Amazon rainforest, once they come out into a larger society where clothes are worn almost all the time by almost everyone, don’t want to live naked in the jungle anymore. Cultural anthropologists would not try to make these people go back to living as they did even just a few years ago. The moral code of the anthropologists tells them that trying to reverse changes to a tribe’s freely chosen way of life is wrong, even if returning this tribe to their old way of life would be useful for research purposes.    

In addition, the ways in which a researcher’s own biases influence what she looks for and how she sees the data are impossible to avoid, no matter how carefully the studies are designed. People in the Amazon rainforest see crushed grasses as trails of peccaries. Most Westerners notice other details entirely. Western anthropoligists need years of training before they get any good at tracking peccaries.    

Social scientists also admit that the models guiding their research usually can’t be expressed in rigorously logical terms; the connections the researchers describe are often not reducible to formulas.

Furthermore, a social scientist’s way of watching a tribe of people also changes what is being watched, namely the way of life of the people in that tribe. In the process, some of the beliefs and customs of the people being studied get altered or cease to exist. For example, often, a Western anthropologist can’t work without shoes. Soon, many of the people she’s studying want shoes.  

Finally, many human customs make sense only when they are viewed in the complicated, detailed context in which the humans being studied usually live. Outside of their whole, complex contexts, human actions often look pointless. In ancient markets, which kiosks sold batteries? Before they went overseas, where did the Crusaders get their typhus shots?

For all of these reasons, social scientists admit they often must settle for a single print of any custom or belief that they wish to study. Societies vary widely in their beliefs and morés and these morés keep changing even while we’re studying them. There are great numbers of human tribes to study (including the anthropologists' own tribes) and each has many customs that are changing all the time. We’ll never catch up.