Pasts and presents: History, politics, and the representation of self and other in pacific ethnography
Foerstel, Lenora and Angela Gilliam, eds. Confronting the Margaret Mead Legacy: Scholarship, Empire, and the South Pacific. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. 1992. xxxv + 298 pp. $34.95 cloth. Hays, Terence E., ed. Ethnographic Presents: Pioneering Anthropologists in the Papua New Guinea Highlands. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. xv + 301 pp. including combined bibliography and index. $40.00 cloth.
In Search of the Primitive: A Critique of Civilization
Anthropology is a kind of debate between human possibilities-a dialectical movement between the anthropologist as a modern man and the primitive peoples he studies. In Search of the Primitive is a tough-minded book containing chapters ranging from encounters in the field to essays on the nature of law, schizophrenia and civilization, and the evolution of the work of Clause LEvi-Strauss. Above all it is reflective and self-critical, critical of the discipline of anthropology and of the civilization that produced that discipline. Diamond views the anthropologist who refuses to become a searching critic of his own civilizations as not merely irresponsible, but a tool of Western civilization. He rejects the associations which have been made in the ideology of our civilization, consciously or unconsciously, between Western dominance and progress, imperialism and evolution, evolution and progress.
Conservative Thought in Applied Anthropology: A Critique
Most of the people in Latin America countries live in an actual state of unrest which frequently manifests itself in outbursts of violence. This is a reflection, without doubt, of a growing demand from large sectors of the population to achieve a rapid and complete satisfaction of their established needs, as well as of the new ones which arise from contact with forms of modern urban life. Even with national and international efforts undertaken to raise the living standards of millions of Latin Americans, our region continues to be one of the poorest in the world. This fact cannot be ignored by those who work applying social science knowledge to the integral development of our countries. Do the social sciences, particularly anthropology, possess the theoretical equipment necessary to understand Latin American problems and to propose effective solutions for them? Undoubtedly the social sciences are indeed prepared to contribute their part in such tasks, even though, of course, the contribution of other disc...