WHEN I WAS in college, I had a wise philosophy professor. Whenever any of us raised the question of cultural relativity or the subjectivity of perception, this merchant of universal truth would smile and say, in that wonderful Oxonian-Central European baritone of his: “Of course, you know, the Kwakiutl do it differently.”
I thought of my dear old professor again last April at the American Museum of Natural History’s symposium ‘Sustaining Cultural and Biological Diversity in a Rapidly Changing World’, when the way to the lectures led through the Hall of Northwest Coast Indians. There were the ...
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