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Ethics?
John Mcreery (jlm@TWICS.COM)
Wed, 8 Feb 1995 14:52:41 JST
Alx Dark writes,
"That's our
responsibility and we can ask if the discipline overall has lived up to
this -- do we approach this question with defensiveness or a calculus of
individual actions? I think a combination of looking at specific
instances, good and bad, and relating them to various colonial and
imperial regimes and the role that anthropological endeavors (like other
forms of knowledge production) have played in this (of course its neither
black or white -- to forstall further arguments along these lines)."
Phrased this way, I've got no problem with what you say. But for someone
who is concerned with people being dismissive, I feel for one that you
have previously been pretty dismissive of other peoples' arguments.
Personally, it hardly matters. I feel quite comfortable dismissing
proposals like Johnson's which seem to me to embody the worst kind of
primitive, 19th century, ethnic essentialism of the kind which kindles
flames (on the net) and wars (in the world). By all means let us
look at particulars. Few, indeed, will be left who can cast the first
stone.
Awareness is cheap, compassion hard, self-sacrifice the province of heros
and saints. I claim to be neither and remain very skeptical, indeed, of
those who would pose as one or the other.
John McCreery (JLM@TWICS.COM)
$@~r (J
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