On the Absence of the Political in Four‐Field Anthropology

The absence of politics as a subfield in four-field anthropology—physical/biological, archaeological,linguistic, and cultural-social—has often puzzled me. I first encountered the exact term “four-fieldanthropology” during my doctoral training at University of Amsterdam. If these subfields are whatmake anthropology a holistic discipline, how can politics be excluded? The absence of politics as asubfield unto itself actually does something quite insidious: it divides the world into them and us,where “they”are “primitive,” “pre-modern” peoples studied by anthropology, and “we” are “modern”Westerners, studied by sociology and other disciplines. The division was instituted through “holism,”and it is still an idea at anthropology’s core