Yes, it was a rather bad reply. I was tired and not too enthused with the argument to begin with, as I hope I have made apparent.
Ethnography is as you mentioned incapable of being entirely objective. But that is in the nature of the social sciences. You quoted some very bad examples of anthropologists, come now Neo, Ruth Benedict? Ms. Cultural Relativity? Tsk tsk. What about Chagnon, and his studies of the Yanomamo? By all means a first rate ethnographer. But you are right, there was an entire generation of anthropologists that had the "noble savage" hangup. That, happily, is disappearing from the field. But just as sociology attracts an inordinate number of Marxist thinkers who inevitably shade the research , you will inevitably find the hippies in the woodpile so to speak. When you have data that must be interpreted, as opposed to say Physics, whose answers are objectively arrived at, you will have these difficulties. Skepticism is the most healthy deterrant for the kind of "Meadian" inventions that all scientists deplore.
As to archaeology, it seems its been a while since you examined any research in that area. Today archaeology is a methodical, multi-disciplinary field that can all but rebuild a site. Geology, biology, all the hard sciences, are involved. Two friends of mine are doing research in New Jersey on a "lithic factory." To the lay person, it would appear to be a hill with a lot of quartzite rocks on the surface and even more tiny chert flakes. Phil is a geologist by training, Matt is a geoarchaeologist. It is amazing what can deduced from the remains of what was, 3000 years ago, a flat river bottom and an uprising of chert ore. If you had to carry out the full ton of evidence that we gathered, all marked, mapped, and labeled, down to chips the size of a millimeter in diamater, you would hardly say the evidence is fragmentary, unless it were meant as a pun! ;) All said, archaeology is the science of extending history into the prehistoric past. And just as historians have to make due with reliance on fragmentary commentaries and scant documentary evidence, archaeology has to make due with what it has, and learn as much as we can. How much would we know of ancient Egypt, or ancient Mesopotamia, if not for archaeology? |
