Of tribes and territories

Extract

Do good fences make good neighbours? According to their account, Duncan Garrow and Elizabeth Shove each inhabit ‘neighbouring territory’ (p. 127) and are undertaking an exercise in ‘intellectual tourism’ (p. 127). In the process, they find that they live in ‘substantially different worlds’ (p. 128). It is not for me to cast doubt on the veracity of their personal experience, but I do not think it is representative of the state of ‘interdisciplinary working’. Disciplines do inhabit different territories, some are quite distinct; physics and French probably share few boundaries. Others -- archaeology, sociology and anthropology – constantly rub up against each other. Boundedness can be emphatic where disciplines are more ‘urban’, clustered tightly around specific methodologies and data; others are more ‘rural’, with a diversity of topics, methods and theories which are likely to overlap with other disciplines (Becher 1989). Archaeology falls into the latter category; there are wide differences of approach between prehistory, classical archaeology, Egyptology, historical archaeology or archaeological science. My impression is that sociology would also fit the rural description.