a proposal that looks like it just wants to tell an interesting story... Anthropologists and historians are much more inductive in
their approaches, much more sort of “empirical dirty hands,” to a
degree. Certainly much less inclined to [the] sort of typical de-
ductive kind of process that you run into in introductory classes
in sociology, for example...Political science is relatively nar-
rower for what passes for acceptable science than sociology...on
the dimension of do you need to be hypothesis-testing or theory-
generating, as opposed to just engaging in interesting storytelling.
In addition to separating “generalizable theory” from “story-tell-
ing,” academics frequently distinguish between the pursuit of pure
versus applied knowledge. Some view the social sciences as having an
applied dimension and the humanities as contributing to “the pro-
duction of meaning,” and to being “ultimately about the kinds of
questions people ask of a range of kinds of texts.” An anthropologist
invokes this distinction to explain his preferences in scholarship:
I’m not the kind of person who tries to reduce a highly compli-
cated social situation to a one-sentence synthesis...I’mmuch
more interested in looking at the multiple layers and complexities
of human social experience...Idon’tseemyself as being some-
body who’s going to come up with a unified theory of all human
life; I’m not particularly interested in doing that. So in a way, I
guess my leaning is much more humanistic than is conventional
in social science.History, even more than anthropology, defies consistent categori-
zation. Whether panelists consider the field as belonging to the hu-
manities or to the social sciences depends largely on the place they
accord narratives and theory in their own work. The social sciences
have had a huge influence on history over the past forty years, and
On Disciplinary Cultures / 63