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Re: sci.anthro ???
Julie Locascio (julie.cpc@mhs.unc.edu)
Fri, 18 Aug 1995 12:06:08
>I agree with your assessment of this group. There seems to be very little
>science here. I first checked it out a few months ago and even naively
>posted a question concerning theoretical issues. I got no responses, of
>course. This appears not to be a forum where substantive issues are
>discussed. The most active thread I saw was a discussion of breast and
>penis size, or the one involving professional sniping between an Australian
>anthropologist and his American counterparts. Well, maybe the breast and
>pudenda thread wasn't entirely frivolous, but if you're looking for
>serious scientific discussion of society, culture, human behavior or the
>nature of social change, this aint the place.
As a non-anthropologist and very new user of the Internet, I was not
really sure what to expect from newsgroups like this. My study and work
experience in academia leads me to pose a Devil's advocate sort of question
here: is it possible that the people with the most important things to say in
academic fields are still saying them primarily in journals, and that internet
user groups are actually dominated by students of these disciplines or
"amateur" interested parties? If you have been disappointed with this group,
you should see the environment group! Every now and then I see a very
professional, academic sort of posting, or a posting by a professional working
in something like waste management, but the group's dominant threads seem to
have been hijacked by people who have developed personal vendettas against
each other, and are not afraid to use 4-letter words to express their points
of view. It's sad.
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