Re: This used to be on disease and immunity
Eric Brunner (brunner@mandrake.think.com)
20 Sep 1996 15:41:07 GMT
Tom Brown (tbrown@weber.ucsd.edu) wrote:
: To Eric Brunner, regarding his response to sisial@ix.netcom:
: Your elitist academic tone is abhorrent. You may have a
Why thank you.
: few good points to make, and some worthwhile evidence to offer;
I do have some familiarity with the literature.
: however, my impression of your entry is that you truly value
: form over substance. Essentially, what you are saying is that
: if someone does not have a firm grasp of the so-called "key"
: academic terminology, then there is no point in entering into
: any conversation in the general field. However, if you were
Would you like pointers to the literature?
: really interested in getting at the approximate truth of an
: argument, you'd be more concerned with trying to determine what
: someone is saying (whether or not they use your own forms of
: jargon) rather than attempting to eject them from the debate with
: elitist bullying. I implore you--from one anthropologist to
: another--
: to LIGHTEN UP and let people have their contributions!
Some contributions are less useful than others, neh? As one Native
to one (presumably) non-Native, I remind you that the Contact Period
Populations Problem is one of the oldest, and most contentious of
topics in Americanist anthropology, and a great deal of fundamentally
silly writings have accumulated on various aspects of the subject.
As an aside from the general topic of castigating myself, I note that
the poster Sisial no longer posits non-specialist dictonary and/or
encyclopedic meanings as preferable to those usually employed in the
specialist literatures.
--
Kitakitamatsinohpowaw,
Eric Brunner
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