This collection of essays treats general topics of anthropology. The essay form presented in this collection is meant to be exploratory. Short in length, treating focally some central topic deemed important in general anthropological perspective, grouped thematically into larger sets, this essay form is particularly fitting to anthropological textuality and discourse, and deserves its own place among longer manuscripts, monographs, journal articles, and reviews. The essay comes out of the academic side of Anthropology--remains the primary form for representing of key readings in many anthropology seminars, embedded as these usually have been within larger texts, and it would not be too far-fetched to claim that many important anthropological insights began within a stack of student essays upon professors' desks.

These essays are meant to be experimental and creative. If they violate certain cannons of literary style or certain codes of professional discourse, they do so with the deliberate intention of bringing into question the modern, immediate necessity of many of our literary or profession-bound prescriptions. In written style and form of presentation, they are meant to be novel and not just a stagnant rehash of interminable coursework or of the general anthropological literature borrowed off the shelves of some university library.

They were written during a time when anthropology as an academic institution; has been passing through some rather fundamental and far-reaching transitions. The larger socio-political environment has been increasingly hostile to anthropology. Underemployment, long term joblessness, and the attendant social anomie, have become an expected part of the average student anthropologists' career trajectory. The anthropologist's world itself has been radically changing, and it sometimes seems as if little room remains, either at home or abroad, for the academic creature called the anthropologist.

I would say that anthropology is indeed a science, a human science, one with such vigor that it does not need to harness itself to any narrow positivistic or naturalistic framework. If anthropology suffers in the world today, it does so alongside a suffering world. If anthropology falls short of funds and recognition in the academic ranks, then its practitioners have only themselves to blame--the pursuit of their own narrowly defined professional involvements at the expense of any larger good of the anthropological community. It has always been up to anthropologists, both personally and professionally as a community of scholars and scientists, to provide a place for themselves in the world whether the U.S. government offers them funding or not.

The principle dilemma confronting anthropologists today is to come to terms with, both theoretically and methodologically, a changed and rapidly changing world, without selling itself out as a change-agent of the world, and from a more philosophical perspective, to learn better how to deal with the general problem of change in the World. If anthropologists fail to change with the world, the world will surely go on changing without anthropologists.

It is a paradox that though the place of the anthropologist in the world has been changing and in many ways diminishing, the real need for a more realistic anthropological perspective in a world facing its greatest historical dilemmas and problems centrally tied to global human overpopulation has only increased. The world is rapidly growing to need more anthropology, whether it needs its anthropologists or not.

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Anthropology is an on-going, professionally circumscribed dialectic about the science of human reality. It had its birth in the contact with alien peoples and their strange lifeways. Like all such kinds of contact between different peoples, it tended to erode and eventually undermine any monolithic, universal charter for our view of how we see our selves and others in the world in relation to us. Contact brought about the need to understand basic differences and different identities. Such contact was the cross-cultural equivalent of a major paradigm shift--for the quirks and oddities encountered in the world could no longer be neatly fit within a Eurocentric version of the world, and still lay claim to the title of "empirical science." As usual, stereotypes, labels and patent falsehoods which commonly accompany any chauvinistic, ethnocentric point of view hide more than they reveal, and so soon become no longer adequate means by which too realistically comprehend our world.

The dialectic of Anthropology continues today, much better informed, more specialized and compartmentalized than before, and yet one in which the very intention of the inquiry is, implicitly and often unwittingly, to undermine the basis for its own legitimacy. For contact is always a double-edged sword, no sooner do we learn to interpret and accommodate human differences within our world-view, then the very foundations of that world view come crashing down around us.

The object of anthropology as science has always been to bring into critical focus the very foundations of its own premises--to come into contact with the strange, to render the strange familiar through a process of reinterpretation, and in the process to reflexively make the familiar strange, and to excoriate and eliminate the hidden ethnocentrisms and biased presumptions in which its theory and praxis is cast.

As the dialectic continues, between what one anthropologist has referred to as the collectivizing orientation of the invention of Culture and the "relativizing" counter-process of the discovery of cultures, anthropology has been building a kind of trans-cultural, pan-human bridge between the gulfs separating peoples and their realities and relativities. Ideally, this bridge provides a kind of value-free, neutral ground upon which differences can be mediated, on which different peoples, separated by time, place and social difference, can meet peacefully, and equally, on common ground.

We have built our bridges without recognizing them for what they really are--and we have always been quite ready to burn them down at the first sign of trouble. But the work of bridging continues, as the dialectic unwinds itself in increasingly complex convolutions, and know it or not, greater gulfs separating people have no been spanned in the name of anthropological science.

Anthropology's claim to science rests in its strong, broad-based emphasis upon empirical observation. Anthropology as an empirical science will remain long after all the theoretical castles have been razed. It does not matter so much what form we choose to encase our experience in. It is the anthropological experience itself that will remain of greatest importance, whatever theoretical script it may have been conceived and written in. From the standpoint of anthropology as an empirical science, one good descriptive metaphor is worth a thousand words of definitive explanation.

A strong emphasis upon empirical observation would seem to make anthropology primarily an inductive discipline, and the word "observation" would tend to deemphasize the subjective component of the process of participation. But humans can intuitively observe with their feelings and feel with their observations, and feelings may be no less empirically relevant than observations. Furthermore, anthropology claims a broader-based view of science as a discipline than what our philosophical models of inductive and deductive theory allows for. We may say instead that the dialectic of anthropology remains essentially abductive, but in a self-realizing, apperceptive and critical way.

Before we delve more deeply into the dialectics of anthropological discourse, it is important to note that the terms of the dialectic are not so important as the dialectical process itself. We can engage in an on-going question and answer dialogue about the nature of human reality, all the while keeping in mind the fact of the dialectic itself.

Anthropology as science holds as its principle object the description and explanation of human reality. Enhanced realism is the main point of anthropological inquiry. Such realism brings with it its own Pandora's box and its own price tag. We must be willing to regard our selves and others in the world without the help of our sacred illusions, without the deceptive veil of our ideological beliefs or our most fundamental mythoi. Some would say that the price to be paid is the price of reality itself--perhaps too great of a paradox for mere human mortals. We must walk among the mountains of gods while remaining tethered to the common human ground of our own being.