ABSTRACT
We have to begin somewhere. I scanned the raw material available and finally closed on the paper reproduced as chapter 2. It seemed to me to express the mood of the period (the late Classic and the transition to post-Classic era) rather well, and contains references to some of the methodological and philosophical issues developed in other chapters. As noted in chapter 1, it defines that half of the dualism concerning the culture concept in Classic anthropology, which views culture in humanistic terms; with chapter 3 giving the other half—the analytic and scientific. Now, chapter 3 was written at the close of a decade or more of interdisciplinary and applied social research in various places and on various topics, and as the essay makes clear, traditional culture-bound theories were inadequate to the task. However, chapter 2 actually was written a decade later, following my first year of field research in the northern Great Plains—where I focused on the behavior and patterns and values of North American post-frontier communities. This type of work obviously could benefit from “traditional culture-bound” or humanistic approaches. In other words, the duality of anthropological approaches to culture is usually shaped by the subject matters. The reader will note the similarity of some of the arguments in chapter 2 to late-Classic and post-Classic discussions in cultural anthropology, such as skepticism over the ability or even desirability of anthropologists to adhere to scientific canons of objectivity and detachment. The most important idea in the essay is the characterization of some of the great ethnological monographs as creating “stories” and “myths” about tribal society and culture which continue to exist in the literature even though the way of life of the original group is drastically altered by time and modernization.
