Ironically, in the epoch of westward expansion, the noble and admirable American Indians were seen by anglo-americans as being a terrorist threat equivalent to the way Americans view the Taliban today. It seems that their conversion into colonized subjects has paved the way for them to become ennobled.

I agree that Wade Davis did great work on Haiti and he’s a good example of how a good anthropologist can be sold out to the established institutions for the study of domesticated others.

“He thus concludes that anthropologists should study peoples living on the periphery of the world capitalist economy as a way of gaining critical insight into the anthropologists´ own culture. In short, this polemic shifts the anthropologists´ object of study from that of other cultures to that of their own, and repositions the former objects of anthropological study (e.g. indigenous peoples) as valued critical thinkers.”