Science Quote by Alfred L. Kroeber

Anthropology, Kroeber insists, is the discipline that refuses to choose a side in academia's oldest custody battle: are humans best understood through measurement or meaning? The line is crafted like a diplomatic treaty, but it’s also a quiet power play. By naming anthropology "the most humanistic of the sciences", he grants it moral range: it can study ritual, kinship, belief, and art without treating people as lab specimens. By calling it "the most scientific of the humanities", he claims methodological seriousness: fieldwork, comparison, and evidence are not optional vibes but the price of credibility.

The subtext is less kumbaya than it sounds. Kroeber, writing in the shadow of early 20th-century debates over race, evolution, and cultural hierarchy, is defending a specific kind of science against both crude biological determinism and armchair theorizing. This was the era when anthropology was fighting to establish "culture" as a real explanatory category, not just a polite synonym for "custom". The sentence functions as a boundary marker: anthropology belongs in the modern research university, but it will not surrender its subject to reductive laws the way physics can.

It works because it flatters two audiences at once while setting a standard neither fully meets. The sciences are reminded they can be blind to lived experience; the humanities are challenged to be accountable to the world beyond interpretation. In eleven words of symmetry, Kroeber sells anthropology as the bridge and the critique.