From the Ivory Tower: Newsweek Sees No Danger
In an article published in Newsweek this week, William Underhill tells the magazine’s readers that “fears of a Muslim takeover [in Europe] are all wrong.”
The article was published one week after Muslim youths, during consecutive nights of rioting, torched hundreds of cars and burnt the entire business district of the French town of Firminy to the ground.
Robert Edgerton’s ‘Sick Societies’ (1992) Revisited: Is Culture Adaptive?
A critique of cultural relativism by an ethnologist and anthropologist of longstanding high repute, Robert B. Edgerton’s Sick Societies: Challenging the Myth of Primitive Harmony(1992) has implications not only for how one might evaluate the pre-modern, non-Western folk-societies (primitive societies) studied by professional ethnographers and anthropologists, but for how one might understand both institutions and social practices – and perhaps even political ones – more generally. Sick Societies provoked moderate controversy when it appeared, but probably few remember the book today. Nevertheless,Sick Societies deserves not to disappear into the oblivion of the library stacks. Revisiting it nearly twenty years later indeed holds promise of intellectual profit. Sick Societies might well be a meditation on culture urgently relevant to the current phase of the West’s seemingly interminable crisis at the end of the first decade of the Twenty-First Century.
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