"Well, Firkin, the 20th century saw the death of many hundreds of ancient, "primitive" (some stone age) cultures. "We" felt a moral imperative to study and preserve as much of those doomed cultures as we could. I am proud of that, a few failures aside, much good work has been done.
I was being trained to learn unwritten, dying languages and create dictionaries, grammar books and to record as much of their oral traditions as possible.
I consider that a noble prupose.
Danny,
I agree with that one-hundred percent.
Here is an example that I am familar with:
What is still left of these cultures knows a lot of things about naturally ocurring substances in nature that can benefit all of us.
One of the paradigms of stylish "modern" pharmaceutical research is based upon collecting a random, huge collection of substances and using modern robotized technology enabled by the ability to produce cells with particular engineered properties to rapidly screen their interactions with the huge collection of random substances. Totally mindless. Various schemes to acomplish this whether based upon the proprietrary production of huge "libraries" of substances, or proprietrary mass-screening methods are the basis of much of the biotech industry.
Yet there are indigenous people that have a huge store of knowledge of where to look for natural substances that are in large being ignored.
So far most "leads" to drugs or actual drugs have come from nature. Why blow that off because some new paridigm has appeared?
Take both paths if they go somewhere, but constantly evaluate where they are leading.
What seems the shorter way to get somewhere?
Don't take me wrong.
My beef is with those who felt it necessary to impose their own ideas of the way things are upon the process of finding out what exists, at the expense of really finding out something.
Like expending all this energy worrying about what are basically philosphical questions and wondering about various models of perception instead of just finding out stuff before it dissapears.
I really think we are on the same page here.
All academic pursuits are politicized and influenced by what people want to believe.
My derogatory comments were directed to the "post-modernist" camp, some members of which seem more concerned with justifing their political and socialogical views than doing what you have described.
I think that the anthropology is perhaps more suceptable than some other areas of study, but I hope that my example of drug discovery illustrates that it exists everywhere.
Perhaps this will be a study of anthropologists in the future, as well as those who study the pracitice of science.
I am concerned that the path becomes more important than the
destination.
I hope that this makes sense. I am trying not to be confrontational.
