modern life-rapidly disappearing, but the an- thropologists are virtually stepping on each other's toes to study those that remain. Whether in the highlands of New Guinea or Amazonia, re- searchers find "not just 'natives' and mud huts, but economists calcu- lating Gini coefficients, political scientists scaling attitudes . . . sociologists counting houses."
Such changes have outmoded the old dirt-under-the-toenails ap- proach to the study of foreign cultures that initially attracted...