Exam 2: Claims and Critiques of Anthropological Knowledge

According to Roy D'Andrade, a politically engaged "moral model" of anthropology is not subject to refutation by contrary evidence.

Opponents of epistemological relativism, such as Marvin Harris, contend that it empowers all claims to knowledge, even those with noxious or oppressive implications

The interviewer effect refers to the fact that the identity (nationality, race, gender, age, sexual orientation, etc.) of the researcher will often skew how people answer the questions he or she poses during the study.

Bronislaw Malinowski specified that his Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term was not to be published until after his death so that it would not diminish the attention given to his academic publications.

In advocating a "reflexive" anthropology, some postmodern ethnographers view themselves as story-tellers whose accounts foreground their own experiences, subjective and emotional state, and values

According to postmodern philosopher Michel Foucault, when government and corporate bureaucracies claim to have scientific expertise they often use that claim to extend control over other, less powerful members of society.

Postmodernists often point to inconsistencies in different ethnographic studies of the same societies (for example, Tepotzlan, Mexico, and Samoa) as evidence that "objective" accounts of culture are impossible to attain.

In Coming of Age in Samoa, Margaret Mead admitted that she had little knowledge of the Polynesian language and that most of her information had been gathered through translators.

Traditional ethnographic accounts by past anthropologists such as Mead, Lewis, and Malinowski made extensive use of the first person pronoun "I", emphasizing the anthropologist's personal experiences in the field.

Nineteenth-century social theorist Auguste Comte argued that human behavior simply did not permit the kind of scientific generalization then developing in the fields of physics and chemistry.