Word: anthropologist
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Margaret Mead, anthropologist, ruminating on matrimony: "Throughout history, females have picked providers for mates. Males pick anything...
...usually the least reliable observers of curious customs and events. They interpret them and, "to lend weight and conviction to their interpretations, they cannot help altering history a little," he said. This observation, made in 16th century France, applies all too well to the most recent work of cultural anthropologist Marvin Harris, Cannibals and Kings. This exposition of how the varieties of cultural behavior can be explained as adaptations to ecological conditions is unquestionably the product of an exceedingly clever brain...
...half. The book does not provide a step into understanding the destiny of our culture. It does add a wealth of fascinating material to the debate on the origins of culture but even then, Harris ignores so much. The concept of cultural lag, for example, proposed by the anthropologist W. F. Ogburn, describing the same endemic recurrence of survival crises that Harris focuses on, sees the differing rates of change (of different elements of society) as the chief disruptors of the relationships between old structures of behavior and technology...
...throughout, one should remember that 16th century warning about relying on the clever for unbiased information. Certainly, Cannibals and Kings is entertaining and unburdened by the gobbledygook much recent writing on sociology is infamous for. Its chief fault is its glibness. Levi-Strauss, discussing the theories of geographer-turned-anthropologist Boas, wrote: "Social experiences and those constant interactions between the group and the individual cannot be inferred; they must be observed...
Heyerdahl, who is at least as good a fund raiser as he is an anthropologist, has sold all rights to the story of the Tigris to the British Broadcasting Corp., which has assigned a cameraman to film the voyage from beginning to end. He has engaged a nine-man crew that includes an American, a Russian, an Italian, a Mexican, a Japanese, a German, two Scandinavians and an Iraqi (three Indian dhow skippers, hired to help navigate through some difficult waters on the route, withdrew from the expedition when they got a look at the craft...