ABSTRACT
The conference participants made it clear that they longer try to produce holistic portraits of culture that exist outside world history. Long gone is the lofty goal of salvage ethnology, that of discovering cultural and linguistic universals before modernity destroys human diversity. Block and Frank had assimilated into the culture of occupational therapy to better serve their respective clients. Sundar and Craig Howe, whose paper does not appear in this collection, wrote, respectively, cultural critiques of Indian anthropology and of the new United States National Museum of the American Indian. The collaborative-activist anthropologists at the Wenner-Gren conference expressed many of these same modernist notions of science and knowledge production. Politically engaged “collaborative anthropologists” produce in-depth, theorized ethnographies much like those of cultural critics, but with one significant difference. Sundar’s account of Indian anthropology, however, highlights the enduring hegemony of more traditional anthropological practices.
