Abstract:
Professor Salmon argues that the controversies about
Mead’s work and about cannibalism encourage healthy discussion
of anthropological standards of evidence and definition,
and provide an opportunity to consider the scientific status of
anthropology. Her paper is broad in scope, concerned as it is
particularly with how Arens’s criticisms make an impact
across the discipline and apply to a number of general theoretical
controversies. I would like to look in somewhat more
detail at some of the issues on which her discussion of the cannibalism
controversy touches.