Margaret Mead and the Culture of Forgetting in Anthropology: A Response to Paul Roscoe

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