The Importance of Being Honest: Verifying Citations, Rereading Historical Sources, and Establishing Authority in the Great Karamoja Debate

Abstract

Anthropologists pay considerable attention to the writing style, the construction of a text, and the question of ethnographic authority, particularly since Derek Freeman's critique of Margaret Mead's Samoa writings. Although the issue of representation of the history and culture of far-flung peoples in the form of the written report is a long and distinguished tradition in the field of cultural anthropology, the Freeman/Mead debates have raised a number of questions ranging from the problem of faulty citation practices to the issue of vulnerable ethnographic authority. The debate over Freeman's critique of Mead has developed into a major controversy and was featured at the 1983 annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association (Marshall 1993:604). Since then, numerous articles and books have been written on the debate, and while many people have become tired of the “whole mess”, the case continues to attract scholarly attention.Critiques of Freeman often revolve around the sources Freeman used to support his historical argument against Mead, illuminating how Freeman used rhetorical devices, selectively omitted vital passages in historical documents that he cited, and “heavily” used partial quotations and (sometimes) ellipses, in order to “…undermine Mead's ethnographic authority and enhance his own” (e.g., Marshall 1993:604).