Premium
Margaret Mead and the Culture of Forgetting in Anthropology: A Response to Paul Roscoe
Author(s) -
Di Leonardo Micaela
Publication year - 2003
Publication title -
american anthropologist
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.51
H-Index - 85
eISSN - 1548-1433
pISSN - 0002-7294
DOI - 10.1525/aa.2003.105.3.592
Subject(s) - forgetting , citation , anthropology , sociology , history , art history , philosophy , library science , linguistics , computer science
EARLY A QUARTER CENTURY AGO, the late Eric Wolf published a ringing editorial in the New York Times titled "They Divide and Subdivide, and Call It An- thropology" (1980). Wolf's concern was the proliferation of mutually uncommunicative subfields in our discipline to the detriment of any overarching set of understanding s of the human condition. He laid out his larger history-of- thought vision in Europe and the People without History (1982), in which he argued for our discipline's release from the "bounds of its own definitions" in an historical political-economic vision uniting the social sciences and humanities sundered since the adaptive disciplinary radia- tion over the first half of the 20th century (1982:18). Since Wolf made that call, centrifugal forces in an- thropology have only increased. But the process has been