It was Stephen Leacock, European Canadian humorist, who observed half a century
and more ago that upon being granted a Ph.D, part of the ceremony involved
being pronounced "full," whereupon no new understanding could henceforth be
imparted to the honoree!
I like the allusion to thundering over the horizon - a nostalgic image of the
plains with buffalo as far as the ear can hear and then as the eye can see. But
questioning the paradigms of anthropology hardly makes one into someone whose
ears are dull and eyes dim, any more than Thomas Szasz' iconoclastic critique of
the field of psychiatry makes him anti-intellectual.
Seems to me certain academic types can dish it out, but feel too elitist by
virtue of their own arcane subculture to have to take it, too. And by no
means am I one who would chant, "Hey, hey, ho, ho, western culture's got to
go" as a disastrous portent of some form of Americanized cultural revolution.
The best ideas of western culture, in my opinion, have already been abandoned
over the last two centuries. Anthropology may have used certain techniques
based on the empowering principles acted on by the best of Europeans, but its
motivation was already an abandonment at its heart of the concepts of absolute
justice discovered in those principles.
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Peshewegunzh
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mthvax.cs.miami.edu!mamia.UUCP!peshe
peshe@mamia.UUCP
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