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In the 1970s, when the social science history movement emerged in the United States, leading to the founding of the Social Science History Association, a simultaneous movement arose in which historians looked to cultural anthropology for inspiration. Although both movements involved historians turning to social sciences for theory and method, they reflected very different views of the nature of the historical enterprise. Cultural anthropology, most notably as preached by Clifford Geertz, became a means by which historians could find a theoretical basis in the social sciences for rejecting a scientific paradigm. This article examines this development while also exploring the complex ways cultural anthropology has embraced—and shunned—history in recent years.

Discussions of the scope and proper definition of anthropology make it worthwhile to outline why and how anthropology can be treated as a natural (and exact) science. The paper describes its multidisciplinary components and how the deterministic properties of biological individuality and the probabilistic constraints of the cultural dimensions can be brought together. Such a synthesis enables us to treat values within a biological framework and suggests the old term "humanics" for the multidisciplinary nexus. [anthropological biology, humanics, multidisciplinary synthesis, interaction measurement, behavioral biology]