Critique of Anthropology

This article discusses relativism and the evaluation of belief in contemporary ethnography. Various examples of conflicting beliefs are described, as well as the author's experience of a disagreement with members of a Christian community, the New Order Amish, over the nature of evolution and spirituality. Because conflicts over `truth' are an increasingly prominent feature of our globalizing world, now more than ever they must be dealt with directly. With this in mind, pragmatic suggestions are given about how to evaluate beliefs in terms of differing domains of truth.

If we believe in any revealed religion and, for instance, we have to admit that Christ is the son of God, then he is not the Messiah still awaiting in Jerusalem. And if Mohammed is the prophet of Allah, then it is mistaken to offer sacrifices to the Plumed Serpent. If we follow the most enlightened and indulgent of deisms, prepared to believe at once in the Communion of Saints and the Great Wheel of the Tao, then we will reject, as fruit of error, the massacre of infidels and heretics. If we are worshipers of Satan, we will consider puerile the Sermon on the Mount. If we are radical atheists, every faith will be nothing but misunderstanding. Therefore, given that in the course of history many have acted on beliefs in which many others did not believe, we must perforce admit that for each, to a different degree, history has been largely the Theater of an Illusion. (Eco, 1988: 2—3)

It is sometimes suggested that creole language study provides important concepts and metaphors for the analysis of cultural processes within globalization and transnational flow. This article argues, however, that although it may have served as a useful heuristic in certain cases, most of creole linguistics has been grounded in a set of assumptions and procedures that now look increasingly doubtful, both within linguistics and anthropology more generally. After some critical comments on politics and methodology within this subdisciplinary area, there is an overview of the challenge presented by a number of larger shifts in language study, and the article concludes with a socio-linguistic analysis of situated interaction which, we argue, provides a much better framework for understanding the dynamics of syncretic practice than the study of creole grammar.¹

This article addresses the neglected subject of political violence in the Indonesian province of Irian Jaya, known locally as West Papua. It asks how this regime of political violence is reproduced in and through representations of culture, gender and difference. It argues that rumours about state-sponsored violence contribute to both the experience and expression of terror. It examines how West Papuans understand, subvert and imagine alternatives to the political and symbolic forms of violence in which they are enmeshed. Finally, it compares rumour to ethnographic accounts and human rights reports, arguing that anthropologists have both political and ethnographic responsibilities to `bear witness' to political violence and the mechanisms through which it is reproduced as terror.

In the 1960s the human geneticist James V. Neel and collaborators launched a research program aimed at investigating the human biology of South American indigenous populations, which would become one of the most influential such studies in the second half of the 20th century. In the first part of this article I explore the trajectory of some components of the Amazonian research program and situate it in the context of worldwide human biological research in the 1960s and 1970s. In the second half I suggest that the comparative analysis of previous research on the human biology of indigenous peoples might provide insights into highly debated issues pertaining to contemporaneous research agendas, including the `Human Genome Diversity Project' (HGDP).