>But I wonder if the dichotomy early (bad) anthropology, later (good)
>anthropology works.
oh i didn't mean to suggest this. rather, i was responding to ange's claim, among others, that sociology imported ethnography from anthroplogy. this wasn't really the case in the US, particularly since "import" suggests that anthro/soc were unrelated. they were often considered one dept and, indeed, the academic division of labor wasn't quite as specialized as it is today.
It is often argued that the early is bad because it
>loads preconceptions onto the people being studied, where the later is
>aware of its limitations. Kelley points out that the early explorers
>imposed a model of progressive development (like Morgan).
what i was trying to get at was that, at the time the first claims about importing anthro methods were based on an anthropology that didn't use ethnography as it is conceived of today. fieldwork among "the people" wasn't yet thought of as crucial to anthropology as it is today.
>But isn't it also the case that the later anthropology imported its own
>Arcadian vision of stability and order. This from Levi-Strauss' lecture
>on structural anthropology:
yes. i wouldn't disagree. still does. "empirical" evidence in the form of ethnographic fieldwork didn't necessarily undermine the presuppositions handed down from the ethnologists.
and i'd add that sociology is quite guilty of the same.
now there are entire academic cottage industries basically built on weeding out and exposing these bad visions of stability and order, even when social theorists/researchers appear hellbent on moving away from that paradigm.
as i said early on in this exchange, the cottage industry, then, depends on finding these problems everywhere it looks even in what folks might think are more radical and progressive visions of social theorizing and research.
this isn't necessarily a bad thing. it seems to me, though, that the critique of the enlightenment vision of knowledge applies. if enlightenment thinkers valorized science against myth and tradition then in doing so it obscured from its vision its own dependence of myth and tradition. it found myth and tradition everywhere but failed to see its reproduction within the very development of science itself.