ABSTRACT
The ideas of a great many people are worked into the argument presented here, but I owe the greatest debt to Eric Wolf, who battled the hydra of cultural essentialism so effectively in Europe and the People Without History. In this work, Wolf first shows how western ideas about cultural purity and the discreteness of tradition were pollinated and then blossomed within the intellectual history of the discipline of anthropology. He then shows how the application of this model of isolates allowed ethnographers to see crosscultural similarities as the result of human nature rather than the result of contacts and interrelations. The result was a naive, inaccurate, and often inherently racist construction of cultural difference, promoted inadvertently by many who strove mightily to be open-minded through an unexamined belief in cultural relativism.
