However, this programmatic proposal has not always been achieved, and this is closely related to the characteristics of the local contexts in which anthropologists are formed and in the way they carry out their research. This previously stated integration of disciplines would result in an emergent of the concrete practices which relates scientists that are also formed and do their research in the same environment.
The Faculty of Natural Sciences and Museum of La Plata is an example in which the anthropology acquires a particular profile that is based in the contribution of our species and its cultural outputs to biodiversity: its origin, evolution, dissemination, variability indicators, adaptability, and its interrelations with others natural species in different environments. Throughout the institutional history, the evolution theory has provided the necessary frame for the possible integration of disciplines at an explanatory level. Nevertheless, it is possible to visualize differences in the frequency, reach and continuity of the usage of the evolutive notions and principles as explanatory resources in the different areas of anthropological specialization -biological, archaeological and socio-cultural-. Adopting some aspects of the Darwinian population theory of the "variation and natural selection" as an example of a more general form of historical explanation, it is intended to utilize them in the analysis of the stability and variability of the usage of evolutionary concepts and assumptions in the explanation of the human phenomena in the mentioned institutional setting.
In this way to grant a comparative and holistic view in the boasian sense is one of the objects established by the institutions related to the "sciences of the man". Nevertheless, in cases as the Museum of La Plata it hasn't been exceeded the mere verbal defence of such a programme.
The main thesis of this paper is that the realization of this programmatic proposal is in fact related to the characteristic of the local contexts in which the anthropologists are formed and do research. That is to say, the particularities of the intellectual and professional requirements of the scientific community in certain moment. In that sense, the integration or disciplinary unit just seated would result to be an emergent -among other circumstances- of the concrete practices that interrelate the scientists of the same environment.
In our country, specially during the last years, several explanations of the differences and obstacles of every order opposed to the dialogue and the intradisciplinary collaboration were offered. Nevertheless, there is an aspect not taken in account that, however, is significant every time we want to explain our differences: the fact that we are anthropologists "from La Plata Museum" or "from Buenos Aires University" or "from Rosario University". We also amuse caricaturing the porteño anthropologist or the platense one, acknowledging in them the profile of certain institutional environments. And is specifically this institutional profile which we want to emphasize as a necessary explicative factor when we need to explain the disagreement in the implantation of the anthropology in each institution. This is clear when we consider their curricula, and we see how they mix in different proportions humanistic and naturalistic subjects, giving rise to disparate specialization, tacitly recognized among the anthropologists. Thus, for example, the anthropologists humanistically oriented of Buenos Aires University are more or less clearly distinguished from the ones naturalistically oriented from La Plata University.
Therefore, although the present paper only tries to state the problem and defends the evolutionistic epistemology as a means to discuss it, we believe that looking for the particularities of the institutions which take in charge the production and reproduction of knowledge in our countries, we'll be able to understand better the background that limits or reinforces the instances or levels of articulations between different specialization areas in our discipline.
In particular, it will be the post-Darwinian or population view the epistemological girdle of our research. That involves to work under the supposition, in first place explored by Stephen Toulmin, that "the Darwinian population theory of 'variation and natural selection' is an example of a more general way of historic explanation, and that this same scheme is suitable, in proper conditions, to entities and historic populations of other kind". In this way, both in the case of the biological species as in the intellectual one, the change and the continuity can be treated as alternatives in the variation and selective perpetuation that reflexes the relative success with which each one satisfies the requirements of their environment.
We can summarize the advantages of this epistemological frame in the following main points:
We want to point out this critical judgments in order to avoid the temptation to exaggerate the explicative power of the analogy proposed. However, we don't believe that it loses its heuristic power when we try to understand the differences that appear in considering each particular case in which the anthropology adapt itself to its local context.
To describe and to evaluate the conditions of such institutional surrounding in relation to the boasian project of disciplinary integration, it seems to us a workable goal, especially in view of the copious available documentation concerning the alternatives and projections of the anthropological research at the La Plata Museum since its origins in 1884 up the present days. This documentation - among which it's prominent the Revista del Museo de La Plata and publications related - appear also as a privileged corpus to explore the use - tacit or explicit - of the concepts and evolutionary principles in each anthropology branch.
To expound upon the natural history of the man suppose to work under the explicative standards of the natural science, that is, in the frame of the synthetic theory of evolution. Nevertheless, it's possible to recognize at La Plata Museum disagreements in the frequency, scope and continuity of the use of this principles and notions as explanatory means in each anthropological area - that is, biological, archaeological and socio-cultural. The proper fitness to this principles is a point always present in the academic controversies that the incorporation of the anthropology to the natural sciences generate all along its institutional history. As a result of this, a common feature, as much in anthropology as in natural sciences, is the fact that the systemic and evolutionistic conceptions alternate as explanatory resources of natural variability. But in both of them, the museistic atmosphere had a repercussion in the hypertrophy of the descriptive, typological and classificatory instances they take for granted. In this way, specific requirements of the Museum have introduced a notorious emphasis in researches focusing the typification and systematization of natural diversity.
Furthermore, the anthropological collections of La Plata Museum are basically formed by human rests and material culture fragments which must be exhibited in reference to the sequence imposed by biological theories with a high degree of consensus. We can see that even in the building arrangement itself and in the itinerary propounded, both of which follow the evolutionistic and positivistic standards of the ending of last century and beginnings of the present one.
Consequently, the local theoretic development is constrained to descriptions and interpretations of "low level", with only regional scope, and which perhaps we can assimilate to the "half-range theories" stated by Robert Merton. This is perhaps the reason why the appeal to evolutionistic-systematic patterns appears as a peculiarity of the research tradition at La Plata Museum, as distinguished from what happens in other institutions.
Finally, although this institutional circumstances impose a number of constraints to the local anthropological work, we need to take in account that the very nature of the disciplinary development as adaptative strategy, involve to act, and not only react, against this environment.
These considerations were the ground of our suggestion to inquire the settings which made possible the adaptation of our discipline to a particular institution. And we assume that we can grasp this circumstances only by means of a careful empirical research of the local context of the production and reproduction of the anthropological knowledge. That is the investigation that we undertake in the future, and that promises to be full of implications to understand the anthropology evolution as a discipline.
Here rises the question: must we say that the human behavioral characteristics not explainable in terms of the natural science are not natural? The usual answer is that they are of a different order: "cultural", "socio-cultural", "symbolic", "ideological"... and, consequently, they require a separate consideration. In this way they are excluded from the minimal ontology needed to the natural sciences explanations when, on the contrary, they should be a challenge to the natural science explanatory power.
Accordingly, it's not casual that the attention to the human adaptation process, under an evolutionary view, has been patrimony of the materialistic conceptions, and that the human symbolic constructions were not integrated in such evolutionistic accounts. In this way the discussion of its possible value in adaptative terms was avoided. Furthermore, the constriction of the natural selection and adaptation process' to strategies of material subsistence (related to the energy and information involved in the technologies and developments of the material culture), leaves unexplored the possible selective and adaptative value of the cognitive and symbolic features of human behavior (this idea was stated by Cerroni-Long in her paper to the IUAES Congress at Mexico in 1993).
In fact, human symbolism was usually considered an epiphenomenon related to materialistic adaptative parameters. That's the reason why the approach of culture in symbolic terms originate almost separated developments of the naturalistic view enlarging the breach between naturalistic and humanistic anthropologists, which projection explain the high degree of specialization and the absence of disciplinary integration.
Lastly we can see how, such divergent contentions of the man-nature relationship constitutes itself items of each local environment and, consequently, can be taken as a final example of the power of the institutional settings in the particular profile of the anthropology in each institution, in the way as we pointed out in this paper.