http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/tasadays.html > Perhaps the most glaring example of this sort of behavior > in recent times was the "discovery" the Tasaday tribe > in a remote location of the Philippines. There was a > major publicity rollout and the anthropologists responsible > assigned to them all the politically correct behavior > anyone could dream of.
I don't think it was "political" necessarily, as much as a kind of nostalgic anxiety that isolated primitive cultures are getting pushed to the brink of extinction. I was reading an interesting piece the other day on the "Selling of the Last Savage" http://www.michaelbehar.com/outside/sellinglastsavage.html Many of the so-called "soft" sciences were considered "fringe," even in my college days, and anthropology was right in there because some of the higher profile disciples (not Mead) arguable did not receive the same rigorous training which is the norm today, nor did some of them even care about the "scientific method" as much as they should have - yet they were getting bigger headlines than others who trained with more demanding subjects.... and, of course, a few did look at science more like a Safari, or an Indiana Jones adventure. But, there is a big dose of jealousy from the more rigorous sciences in there somewhere... all of us would like to have an adventure, get paid for it, and also get recognition and our 15 seconds of fame... and many girl-geeks who are as arguably unattractive as Margaret was, would certainly love to think about having the attention of a lot of savage studs, get paid for it, and also get recognition the15 seconds of fame. OTOH, rightly or wrongly, she will go down in someone's history as a great scientist... I think rightly but for the wrong reasons. http://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/expeditions/treasure_fossil/Treasures/Margaret_Mead/mead.html?cults ... just as Amelia will go down in history as a great "aviatrix", when everyone who saw her fly and crash airplane after airplane (the tales are legendary around Oakland) got a huge laugh out of the spectacle. There is inequality among sexes but it is not so simple as to be corrected by a quota system. The war in Iraq has taught us that well-trained women pilots make excellent aviators, with fewer (hormonal) distractions than their male counterparts, and if Amelia had not been their role model, early-on... rightly or wrongly (given her questionable flying ability), then who knows... they might all still be WAACs. I don't think it was the same story you mention about the savages, but it was in this same time frame that some magazine ran a cover story... a little less politically correct shall we say, but there was a stone age tribesman like this one in the article above, but grinning like the cat who just ate the pet canary, with the caption underneath: "I ate Michael Rockefeller" which is more in keeping... burp... with the kind of sensationalism that the soft sciences once needed in order to make them appear to the public as rigorous. Substituting bravery for brilliance. To add my piece of obligatory P.C. let me say that few male scientists have been both as brave and as brilliant as Madame Curie, and that is what equality in the sciences should be all about. Jones
