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You are wrong. That is why anthropology is a science and psychiatry is an art. You CAN make assumptions in science. They are called theories and until disproven they are the way the world works. But you call it a theory because science CAN be disproven and no one debates against that.
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Except the assumptions you are talking about don't relate to accepted truths in the scientific world, they relate to highly disputed areas. Anthorpology may be a science but it's a social science. It is not the same as chemistry and impirical evidence is much more difficult to come by for many areas of the field. How do you gather empirical evidence about people's attitude to sex, for example? How do you gather empirical evidence about people's happiness? What evidence you can gather is passed through two human filters: the subject and the observer. Unless you are measuring the raw data of birth rates and disease frequency then you are dealing with an evidence type that is difficult, some would argue impossible, to quantify in as reliable way as one can quantify the dimensions of an atom.
Anthropology and history share many characteristics. There is a good deal of crossover. The use of the word theory in physics may denote a solid assumption. The use of 'theory' in social sciences bears more resemblance to it's use in the humanities. Much less about assumption and more about conjecture and hypothesis.