Word: anthropologist
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...dismayed by the naiveté of some of your readers who wrote defending Steven Mosher, the Stanford anthropologist expelled for publishing photographs of forced abortions in rural China [April 4]. An anthropologist has a responsibility to the people he studies not to put them in a position where they can suffer physical harm for any information they have given him. When Mosher took no precautions in his article to protect the identities of the Chinese he interviewed, he showed an insensitivity to their welfare. The university was right to expel him. Well done, Stanford. Richard Mack Jr. Hollis...
...describes the immense influence of Francis Galton, the late-19th century advocate of eugenics and a staunch believer that heredity is all a man brings with him into the world, that all is already determined at birth. It was against this school of thought, Freeman explains, that the anthropologist Franz Boas and others reacted around the turn of the century when they advanced the doctrine of cultural determinism...
...study adolescence, but "devised" her research so that it would produce the corrects results. Often, Freeman portrays Mead Mead as merely a mindless extension of Boas--something her work in the fifty years after she was in Samoa probes wrong Moreover, Mcad if cast as a through incompetent anthropologist. By her own admission, she was not an experienced fieldworker when she went to the South Seas in 1925, but she was not untrained; it is worth remembering tht she was working at a time when scientific research and experimentation was far least empirical, codified, or extensive than it is today...
...news that Samoan society is not as peaceful and permissive as once thought is probably inevitable. Anthropologists once thought the! Kung San Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert were a people for whom war and violence were unknown, but recent studies have revealed that they have a crime and suicide rate as high as that of many western countries. Moreover, several previous studies including at least one by an amateur anthropologist had concluded that Mead's picture was a little too rosy...
Originating in the South Bronx in the mid-'70s, rap music is a cultural anthropologist's mother lode. It combines musical influences as disparate as disco, George Clinton funk, conventional R & B and Ennio Morricone scores for Italian westerns, cross-pollinates them with the Jamaican disc jockey's art of "toasting" (talking over the instrumental breaks in records) and a street kid's fondness for boasting, synthesizes the results with some distinctly contemporary audio technology and winds up with a sound that invites deejays at local dance palaces to "scratch" the surface. The deejays...