Sometimes I lie awake at night and I think to myself, Phrenology used to be accepted as a real science. I can't believe people could actually go to school and get a college education in the study of how white people are smarter than other races because of the shape of their head.
Which makes me think about how some of the stuff in my own field, along with psychology and anthropology, will probably be seen as stereotyped junk no better than phrenology 20 years from now because no one is ever as objective as they think they are being. A true blue Pandian-style critique. Though at least more effort has been made in recent years for sociologists to account for their own bias in their methodology.
At the same time, I get why people sometimes call these fields useless--unless you're going to grad school and getting into research there really isn't anything for you to do with them--but I think that in a world where all of these -ologies didn't exist... well, people would recreate them. Because it's just so interesting. People are egotistical and we are fascinated with ourselves. Our culture, our society, our minds. It may not have the same kind of practical application or employability as STEM fields, but people gravitate towards it anyway because it really is fascinating--to draw from individual experiences to explain the larger context, or vice versa, depending on what field you're studying. It's human nature to study and try to explain our own behavior. Though there are too many people getting degrees in these things and then never using them, myself included (I mean, I'm still in school, but I'm not planning on going into research or something).
But to study ourselves--not just in the past, but in the present, and how our present selves study the past--fucking interesting.