ABSTRACT
Anthropologists and their objects, the studied, despite opposing positions in the "scientific" equation have this much in common: if not equally, still they are each objects of contemporary imperial civilization. The anthropologist implies that structuralism, or whatever the name of the contribution ethnology is destined to make to the understanding of mind, is a higher truth, on the analogy of Freudian theory, in contrast to the psychoanalytic praxis. In the eighteenth century, men could still be rediscovered; mankind was an open system. The great questions concerning the nature of man and culture were being reformulated; it was the axial episode in the modern consciousness. The ethnocentric and abstract progressivism of the nineteenth century preadapts anthropology for the uses to which it is put in the twentieth century, the period in which the study of man becomes rationalized as an academic discipline and as a way of life for anthropologists.
