I think there is some value to the idea of a truth beyond any form of science because the scope of any discipline is necessarily incomplete. An anthropological approach will give insight into the human effects of social change but is limited by the number of people it can reach; a historical analysis will net valuable data on societal trends while neglecting the personal impact of those trends in every way but outcomes. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t see the truth. A blended approach, one combining a macro understanding of trends with an eye for the human detail, can move closer to the truth than any single method alone.

This type of synthesis is attempted by Masha Gessen in “The Dying Russians”. He examines the work of both an anthropologist and an economist to try to understand why Russians are dying so young after the fall of the Soviet Union. Parsons, the anthropologist, provides a compelling answer: they feel unneeded. The transition from Soviet-communism to capitalism and the plunder of the Soviet coffers by western businesspeople rapidly shifted the views of the average Russian towards their job – they went from feeling needed and secure to superfluous and exploited. Their early deaths are a product of their alienation. This explanation is persuasive in context, but, as Gessen notes, fails to account for the previously high rates of death in Russia. According to Eberstadt’s statistical analysis, Soviet mortality rates spiked in multiple periods before the fall of the Berlin wall. These increases cannot be explained by a feeling of uselessness after the implementation of robber-capitalism. Instead, Gessen suggests, they’re a product of hopelessness. The Soviet system ground down Russians, who started to perish from despair; this was not stopped by a transition to capitalism, and indeed increased. The feelings of Parsons’s Russian subjects are not wrong, but are poorly contextualized. With a combined approach, a shrewd examiner can mesh the experiences of people with their historical frame to better understand a society and its outcomes.