Regarding the politics of anthropology-- At one time, the Smithsonian Institution had a much broader, inclusive view of anthropology. A perusal of old Smithsonian annual reports years ago revealed that the "Department of Anthropology" once included anything man-made, regardless of culture. Thus collections of European and American technological and scientific artifacts were considered "anthropological," as opposed to the "natural history" departments of geology and biology. This simple structure had a great deal to recommend it. However, I caution people not to read too much into arbitrary distinctions which place certain areas of cultural anthropology into the realm of "natural history" while others get separated out into other categories. Based on my experience with museum and other institutional reorganizations--which sometimes are driven by internal politics and arbitrary rationales to justify them, rather than really critical and logical divisions of fields of knowledge--I would suggest that institutional imperatives in museums and universities sometimes influence the ways we look at the world, rather than the other way around. It's a complex process. I don't discount the roles of prejudice and unenlightened views of non-Western cultures in determining how museums and scholars divide up the world and knowledge about it in terms of collections, disciplines, etc., but it seems to me that sometimes purely organizational motives--getting an institution to look good on a chart, balanced in terms of collections, staff distribution, etc.--can have unintended consequences. After you reorganize your institutional departments, you then have to dream up names for them, and linguistic factors then come into play. It becomes "politically incorrect" to refer to the old names for a previous structure because they don't coincide with the new structure, and the memory of the old structure and its nomenclature fades. In other words, it seems to me that "practical" considerations can trump ideology. To what extent such factors did or could have played a role in relegating some cultures, but not others, to "natural history" or "anthropology" departments, I don't really know, but I do think that such mundane considerations can have a much greater impact than is generally recognized. David Haberstich ========================================================= Important Subscriber Information: The Museum-L FAQ file is located at http://www.finalchapter.com/museum-l-faq/ museum-l.html. You may obtain detailed information about the listserv commands by sending a one line e-mail message to [log in to unmask] The body of the message should read "help" (without the quotes). If you decide to leave Museum-L, please send a one line e-mail message to [log in to unmask] The body of the message should read "Signoff Museum-L" (without the quotes).