The Arcane Archive

[Magical Realist]

http://www.arcane-archive.org/

"a cache of usenet and other text files pertaining
to occult, mystical, and spiritual subjects."

[C C]

Well, I guess it could be considered no less a resource than the beliefs of tribal communities which anthropologists like Edward Burnett Tylor and Franz Boas studied. "There is this online district of clans... Here is a record of their customs, interests, rites, and canonical disagreements. Let us commence an investigation and understanding of these doxastic kindreds..."

Franz Boas: "I often ask myself what advantages our 'good society' possesses over that of the 'savages' and find, the more I see of their customs, that we have no right to look down upon them ... We have no right to blame them for their forms and superstitions which may seem ridiculous to us. We 'highly educated people' are much worse, relatively speaking..." --to Marie Krackowizer, 23 December 1883

"Boas was one of the most prominent opponents of the then popular ideologies of scientific racism [...] Among Boas's main contributions to anthropological thought was his rejection of the then popular evolutionary approaches to the study of culture, which saw all societies progressing through a set of hierarchic technological and cultural stages, with Western-European culture at the summit. [...] Boas also introduced the ideology of cultural relativism which holds that cultures cannot be objectively ranked as higher or lower, or better or more correct, but that all humans see the world through the lens of their own culture, and judge it according to their own culturally acquired norms.

"For Boas the object of anthropology was to understand the way in which culture conditioned people to understand and interact with the world in different ways, and to do this it was necessary to gain an understanding of the language and cultural practices of the people studied. [...] Boas created the four field subdivision of anthropology which became prominent in American anthropology in the 20th century."