Anthropology, or nothing.
“…The phonetic alphabet is made up of all known phonemic distinctions: of all differences in sound-segments known to signify differences in meaning in the natural languages of the world. So in principle the objective description of any language consists of its comparison with the meaningful order of all other languages.
The same for ethnography. No good ethnography is self-contained. Implicitly or explicitly ethnography is an act of comparison. By virtue of comparison ethnographic description becomes objective. Not in the naive positivist sense of an unmediated perception— just the opposite: it becomes a universal understanding to the extent it brings to bear on the perception of any society the conceptions of all the others…ethnography is Anthropology, or it is nothing”
-Marshall Sahlins, 2002. (Waiting for Foucault, Still. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. Pg 12)
