Anthropology Reconsidered argues that anthropology can and should be considered a genuine science of humanity. The work traces the evolution of anthropological thought from its 18th-century origins through contemporary debates, analyzing how competing epistemological traditions—empirical/skeptical versus dogmatic—have shaped theoretical approaches to social organization and kinship studies.
The book provides a comprehensive historical framework that includes the development of empirical theories of social organization, an extensive ethnology of ethnology itself, philosophy of science perspectives, crucial political history including the New Deal and Vietnam War, and a detailed introduction to epistemology as the essential link between empirical ethnology and psychology. It demonstrates that ethnology now possesses a complete empirical theory of social organization based on experimental methods for analyzing the idea-systems that construct social organizations, effectively placing anthropology "on a new plane" with findings on the same empirical footing as the physical sciences.
The primary audience includes student and professional anthropologists, particularly ethnologists, along with historians of ethnology, social psychologists, sociologists, philosophers of science, and intellectual historians, written to be accessible while maintaining scholarly rigor and international relevance.