Grenzwissenschaft

Anthropology, Fabian says, is border control: “It patrols, so to speak, the frontiers of Western culture. In fact, it has always been a Grenzwissenschaft , concerned with the boundaries: those of one race against another, those between one culture and another, and finally those between culture and nature.”

Fabian thinks that this “liminal” preoccupation makes it difficult for anthropology to settle “in any one of the accepted domains of knowledge” other than the catch-all of “social science.”

Two comments: First, if Milbank is right, anthropology is an extension of earlier forms of social theory, which patrol the boundaries within Western civilization; second, Fabian is offering something of an anthropological analysis of anthropology, one that clarifies its role as a kind of priestcraft, making distinctions “between holy and profane, and between clean and unclean.”