ABSTRACT
In explaining their opposition to a scientific anthropology, postmodernists often invoke past inconsistencies in ethnographic accounts. These, they argue, illustrate the breakdown of scientific assumptions when one set of human beings (anthropologists) makes another set of human beings (“their” culture or informants) a subject of study. At times in the history of anthropology, inconsistencies in the ethnographic record posed intense controversy, even long before the postmodern wave of discontent. Two famous controversies are regularly cited in the debate of whether anthropology could or should model itself after the other sciences.
