I therefore feel no hesitation in rejecting the validity and utility of the entire body of anthropological theory

From Anthropology's Mythology, The Huxley Memorial Lecture 1971 by George Peter Murdock. A clear-sighted indictment that is even more pertinent today and for many more fields than just Anthropology.

When I characterise the concepts of culture and social system as 'myths', I do not imply that they bear no relation to reality, for they are obviously derived from observations in the real world. I mean merely that, as reified abstractions, they cannot legitimately be used to explain human behaviour. Culture and social aggregates are explainable as derivates of behaviour, but not vice versa. All systems of theory which are based on the alleged or inferred characteristics of aggregates are consequently inherently fallacious. They are, in short, mythology, not science, and are to be rejected in their entirety-not revised or modified.

This conclusion is supported by a variety of evidence. In any established science, for example, there is substantial agreement among its leading practitioners on the essential core of its body of theory, whereas in anthropology there is virtually no such consensus. In analysing the recent volume by Fortes I discovered - to my astonishment in view of my great respect for his work - that it contained scarcely a single theoretical assumption, postulate, generalisation, or conclusion which I could accept as valid without serious qualification. I had had a similar reaction once before - in reading the theoretical work of Leslie White. And I have since experienced it a third time when, stimulated by Fortes, I reviewed the theoretical writings of Alfred Kroeber. Having known all three men fairly intimately, I am aware that none of them - has found my own views any more acceptable than I have found theirs, and that each of them has felt an equally profound scepticism regarding the views of the others. It is inconceivable that four men of comparable standing in any established field of science, such as astronomy, nuclear physics, or genetics, could differ so radically from one another on basic theoretical issues. One can only conclude from this that what Fortes, White, Kroeber, and I have been producing is not scientific theory in any real sense but something much closer to the unverifiable dogmas of differing religious sects.

[snip]

I therefore feel no hesitation in rejecting the validity and utility of the entire body of anthropological theory, including the bulk of my own work, which derives from the reified concepts of either culture or social system, and in consigning it to the realm of mythology rather than science. Some of the fragments of existing theory which escape such stigmatisation will engage our attention toward the end of this paper.

[snip]

In conclusion, I would like to relate an anecdote which is famous in the unwritten history of the Departnent of Anthropology at Yale. Almost exactly forty years ago, when the late Edward Sapir was conducting a seminar on primitive religion, he had a student who came from the society later studied by John Beattie, the Banyoro of Uganda. This student, in reading a rather pedestrian paper on the religion of his own people, happened to mention that in his country the shrines of the war god were tended exclusively by pries`tesses. At this, Sapir pricked up his ears and interrupted to comment that, since war is the most masculine of all occupations, it seemed remarkable that the cult of the war god should be conducted by women only.

'Why should this be?' he inquired, and proceeded, on the spur of the moment, to propound a possible interpretation, highly complex and liberally seasoned with Freudian and other symbolism. The students sat upright in fascinated attention. As he was concluding, an alternative explanation occurred to him-equally brilliant, equally complex, and equally symbolic - and he developed this in like fashion, while the students perched on the edge of their chairs, utterly entranced by this doulble demonstration of his virtuosity. When he came to the end, he turned to the African to inquire the extent to which either hypothesis accorded with Banyoro culture, but, flushed with enthusiasm at his own performance, asked him instead which interpretation was the correct one.

'Actually,' replied the student, 'neither is correct. The explanation is really quite simple. You see, when war occurs in my country, all the men go out to fight, and no one is left except women to tend the cult of the war god.'

This anecdote might well stand as an allegory of both the fascination and the falsity of all forms of anthropology's mythology.