Ethnographic Salvage and the Shaping of Anthropology

systems of explanation that provide us with a scientific view of the various universes that we occupy and seek to understand. The notion, however, that data collection is itself value free, that facts are facts, is old-fashioned and naive; it oversimplifies the understanding of the scientific process and invests the extensive bodies of "fact" with a false sense of truth. It should not surprise those engaged in the search for understanding and knowledge that the kinds of data we seek-and therefore find-are conditioned by the particular problems we define and, in a more general way, by our view of the universe. Similarly, the kinds of data we collect and the particular viewpoint each of us selects skew the resulting theoretical systems. Science in general, or any scientific system in particular, is culture-based in that it reflects the particular values, the particular epistemological view, that a society accepts, sanctions, and uses as a basis for the behavior of its members. A clear example of this occurs in the history of human biology. The science of human biology-and its derivative, physical anthropology-is a product of medical, and more particularly surgical, interests. These inevitably emphasized the pathological in contrast to the normal. In fact, it is difficult to grasp the concept of normality within a population except in terms of the pathological whose very existence demands its recognition. Thus the valuable contributions of John Hunter during the eighteenth century derived from his collections and systematization of the abnormal in man, and it was this emphasis on the abnormal, the pathological, that channeled the discussions as it provided the data for the interpretations of racial differences, their origins, and their meanings throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries. Only with the emergence of the concept of population and its linkage to genetics does a pathological view of human variability and change for the meaning of races lose its appeal and importance. There is then a complex interplay of data and theory in any science that affects both the kinds of data collected and the theory that results. Further, the exact nature of this interplay is situationally determined, that is, it is a function of the particular intellectual milieu that itself is a product of a time-centered sociocultural system. Thus, science, whatever the phenomena with which it deals, is a part of culture, and each science is part of a culture. Man's self-awareness accounts in only a very general way for his anthropological concerns. If one adds the awareness of differences occasioned by the group contacts that human mobility ensures, it is not difficult to recognize that the existence and consequent description of human differences-any of which could have severe social consequences-are continuing problems in the creation and maintenance of "thought systems" and/or culturally defined environments. Such a process was particularly noteworthy in the Western intellectual tradition not only because of the increased awareness of human differences that, at various times, more intense mobility and migration produced, but also because of the ability, through writing, to record such differences, a record that in its accumulation provided data that demanded some form of classification and systematization, which, in turn, raised the common problems of the classificatory level of modern science. Both the accumulation and use of the data concerning human differences led within the Accepted for publication 22 December 1969.