ABSTRACT
Boundaries in social science are not permanent fixtures; they come and go according to context. Sometimes they appear in the arena of academic politics, as the practitioners of each discipline stake out their territories in the contest for student allegiance and financial resources. Sometimes they acquire significance in scientific debate, as specialists in one discipline strain to grasp the subtleties of another’s jargon. Illusions of similarity are created by the tendency to use the same terms (structure, function, culture) for different things, and illusions of diversity are created by the opposite tend ency to call the same thing by different names. If social science is to meet the challenge of providing interdisciplinary approaches to the environment, we need to know first what each discipline has to offer. Since my main purpose in this book is to explore what anthropology has to offer to environmental discourse, it is import ant to begin by establishing what is distinctive about anthropology, what makes it different from the other social sciences.
