as Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Gadamer, or Ricoeur, such critics as Burke,
Frye, Jameson, or Fish, and such all-purpose subversives as Foucault, Ha-
bermas, Barthes, or Kuhn makes any simple return to a technological con-
ception of those sciences highly improbable. Of course, the turning away
from such a conception is not completely new--Weber's name has always
to be called up here, and Freud's and Collingwood's as well. But the sweep
of it is. Caught up in some of the more shaking originalities of the twentieth
century, the study of society seems on the way to becoming seriously irregu-
lar.

It is certainly becoming more pluralistic. Though those with what they
take to be one big idea are still among us, calls for "a general theory" of
just about anything social sound increasingly hollow, and claims to have
one megalomanic. Whether this is because it is too soon to hope for unified
science or too late to believe in it is, I suppose, debatable. But it has never
seemed further away, harder to imagine, or less certainly desirable than it
does right now. The Sociology is not About to Begin, as Talcott Parsons
once half-facetiously announced. It is scattering into frameworks.

As frameworks are the very stuff of cultural anthropology, which is
mostly engaged in trying to determine what this people or that take to be
the point of what they are doing, all this is very congenial to it. Even in
its most universalist moods--evolutionary, diffusionist, functionalist, most
recently structuralist or sociobiological--it has always had a keen sense of
the dependence of what is seen upon where it is seen from and what it is
seen with. To an ethnographer, sorting through the machinery of distant
ideas, the shapes of knowledge are always ineluctably local, indivisible from
their instruments and their encasements. One may veil this fact with ecu-
menical rhetoric or blur it with strenuous theory, but one cannot really
make it go away.

Long one of the most homespun of disciplines, hostile to anything smack-
ing of intellectual pretension and unnaturally proud of an outdoorsman
image, anthropology has turned out, oddly enough, to have been preadapted
to some of the most advanced varieties of modern opinion. The contextual-
ist, antiformalist, relativizing tendencies of the bulk of that opinion, its turn
toward examining the ways in which the world is talked about--depicted,
charted, represented--rather than the way it intrinsically is, have been
rather easily absorbed by adventurer scholars used to dealing with strange
perceptions and stranger stories. They have, wonder of wonders, been
speaking Wittgenstein all along. Contrariwise, anthropology, once read

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