COMMENTARIES 151

tainly children don’t learn “wood-use’’ when they learn “tree.”

Notes ‘Thus, the Inuit of East Hudson Bay have

(at least) two overlapping systems of func- tional categories: game animals (umajuq) -ex - cluding bugs, shellfish and mollusks, and do- mestic animals (umajuguti) like the dog and horse-can be subdivided into animals too small to feed a family (umajurait), sufficient for a family (umajuit), and big enough for a whole community (umajumarit); or they may be sub- divided into sea animals (imarmiutait), includ- ing the polar bear, land animals (nunamiutait), like the ptarmigan and fox, and lake animals (tasiqmiutait), including trout and some seals. Now, fish may be small, medium, or large, and lake or sea animals, whereas birds may be small or medium and sea or land animals. But my questioning of Inuit hunters also lends evi- dence for life forms: a l l a n d only birds ( t igmiut) , fish ( igal iut) , bugs (hupaquit) and “bottom-lying sea creatures” (igamiut) like mollusks and shellfish. Mammals, by far the most evident creatures of the Arctic, are un- derstandably not put into a single life form, nor are they residual in Brown’s (1979) sense.

*Natural causality implies a conditional ne- cessity: necessarily, if a natural feature p is manifested, then if the organism has propens- ity P to manifest p , and nothing interferes, then indeedp must be manifested [Nec(P(x) & nothing interferes p ( x ) ) ] (Atran 1987).

’Presumption of nature is also a necessary condition for any appreciation of temporal de- velopment (maturation) or spatial distribu- tion (ecological proclivity), and so for a proper notion ofutilization. Thus, the Inuit may have a dozen or so terms for various developmental stages of the reindeer linked to utilization; but only the presumption that reindeers all have the natures of their kind allows this (Collo- quium 1986).

References Cited Atran, S.

1986 Fondements de I’Histoire Naturelle. Pour une Anthropologie de la Science. Brussells: Editions Complexe.

Ordinary Constraints on the Seman- tics of Living Kinds. Mind and Language 2(1). ( In press.)

1987

Berlin, 3. 1970 A Universalist-Evolutionary Ap-

proach in Ethnographic Semantics. In Current Directions in Anthropology. A. Fisher, ed. Bulletin of the American An- thropological Association 3.3(Part 2):3- 18.

Brown, C. 1979 Folk Zoological Life-Forms: Their

Universality and Growth. American An- thropologist 81 :366-385.

Colloquium 1986 Les Inuit du Nouveau-Qutbec: Ap-

propriation du Milieu Nature1 et Savoirs Autochtones. Centre de CoopCration Franco-QuCbCcoise and Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris, May 28-30.

Gilmore, M. 1932 Importance of Ethnobotanical In-

vestigation. American Anthropologist 34:320-327.

Gilmour, J. 1937 A Taxonomic Problem. Nature

137: 10404042. Hough, W.

1897 The Hopi in Relation to Their Plant Environment. American Anthropologist 10:33--44.

Taylor, P. 1978-79 Preliminary Report on the Eth-

nobiology of the Tobelorese of Halmah- era, North Moluccas. Majalah-Ilmu- ilmu Sastra Indonesia 8:215-229.

Reply to Wilk’s Review of World View

MICHAEL KEARNEY Department of Anthropologll University of California, Riverside

In his review (AA 87:68%91, 1985) of my book World View, Wilk is critical of my histor- ical materialist model of world view. Does it contribute to the study of world view? You won’t get a n answer from Wilk’s review. Throughout the book there are numerous ap- plications of the model to different communi- ties, including three chapters that are about 40% of the text, yet there is no mention of these case studies in the review.

Wilk accuses me of substituting a Marxist praxis for American anthropology’s “cultural discourse.” This is inaccurate. At the begin- ning of the book I said: “In criticizing the cul- tural idealist tradition I do not mean to imply that there is nothing that can be salvaged from it” (Kearney 1984:3). Furthermore, chapter 2-not mentioned by Wilk-includes a review of concepts used in the idealist model of world view. I have little quarrel with the techniques and results ofidealist anthropology, as is dem- onstrated by the degree to which I have incor-

152 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST [89, 19871

porated them into my work. The issue is not their validity, but the ideological loading they carry as the dominant style of anthropology in the United States. I have made a serious at- tempt to explore why this paradigm domi- nates our anthropology and have argued that the primary cause is to be found in the struc- ture of U.S. society and the place of anthro- pology in it. A possible indication of the depth of this ideology is that Wilk misquotes me in citing a passage that describes how world view and reality interact. He omits a key phrase which says that world view “in this way alters theenvironment” (p. 690; Kearney 1984:121).

Wilk objects that I do not define “reality” with “philosophical precision.” I am content to let reality be that which is external to the brain that perceives and dialectically interacts with it. In my view, to define reality a priori would involve metaphysical issues compara- ble to the search for absolute “ t ruth” and “beauty” typical of the very idealist philoso- phy that I oppose.

Wilk also says that I limit world view to a “system of knowledge” and as such my model cannot deal with affect, whereas he feels that “world views may be organized on an emo- tional logic rather than or in addition to a cog- nitive logic” (p. 690). Although an “emotional logic” is a contradiction in terms, my world view model is capable of dealing with emotion in the psychological construction of reality. This is demonstrated in chapter 7, which of- fers an analysis of envy and fear in Mexican peasant world view. Here and elsewhere in the book I have borrowed heavily from Freudian psychology’s concern with emotion. My model makes extensive use of the concept of projection, linking it to that of reification so that they interact dialectically. Again, I would have preferred that my model of world view had been judged on its applications rather than on what it might have been.

Reference Cited

Kearney, Michael 1984 World View. Novato, CA: Chandler

and Sharp.

A Commentary on a Review of Egyptian Nubians: Resettlement and Years of Coping

HUSSEIN M. FAHIM Department of Anthropology University of Utah

As the author of Egyptian Nubians: Resettle- ment and Years of Coping, reviewed by Peter s. Allen of Rhode Island College (AA 87:462- 463, 1985), I found that the review deserves a commentary for the purpose of delineating the objectives of the study and the purpose of the book. I put my reply in the following points of clarification:

1. The book’s subject matter. In addition to de- scribing the condition ofNubians displaced by the Aswan High Dam, as the review indicated, the book also records the history and dynam- ics of a resettlement scheme, through its dif- ferent stages, juxtaposing the viewpoints of both the Nubians and the government circles. Moreover, the book discusses the complexities involved in social research in developing countries and how local researchers cope with their subjective perspectives and the need for objective neutrality.

2. The book’s organization. The reviewer crit- icized the book’s organization and viewed it as “poor.” He does not, however, say what is wrong with it. For the sake of clarification, I should indicate that the book is divided into four parts with 1 I chapters. These parts are ( I ) Technical Development a n d Forced Change, (2) Cul ture Change and Coping Strategies, (3) Recent Developments and Fu- ture Trends, and (4) Research, Theory, and Policy. Each part is preceded by a statement on the chapters and their interrelatedness. Each chapter has an epigraph that voices the main thrust of the discussion.

3. Theory and methodology. At the theoretical level, the book examines the Nubian situation in context of concepts, propositions, and hy- potheses developed thus far in the field of re- settlement schemes that imply forced change. Regarding the absence of new theoretical in- sights, according to the review, I should indi- cate that the book does offer several theoreti- cal insights, and they are easy to find if one looks for them. T o cite just a few examples, I refer here to the new theoretical insights that are presented when conceiving homes “as a tangible barometer of impact of social change on a culture and as an indicator of the mech- a n i s m s used by p e o p l e t o c o p e w i t h change”(p. 518, and chap. 4). Other examples ofnew theoretical insights are found in the dis- cussions on the separation between develop- ment and resettlement, as well as on what is meant by feeling at home (see chap. 10).

With regard to methodology, I would like to refer here to what I said in the Preface and in the book’s last chapter entitled “Research Notes and Reflections.” I n the Preface, I wrote “If I were to conduct the Nubian study anew, it would not be at all the way I have pre-