AUTHORIZING KNOWLEDGE IN SCIENCE AND ANTHROPOLOGY

An analogy exists between today's ''defenders'' of science in the ''sc ience/culture wars'' and 19th-century ''defenders'' of euclidean geome try. Current critics have appointed themselves as arbiters of truth in a manner analogous to that of 19th-century mathematicians and theolog ians who argued against noneuclidean geometry that challenge Euclid's mathematically, philosophically, and theologically entrenched fifth po stulate. The science wars then and now are not about science versus an tiscience, objectivity versus subjectivity, but about authority in sci ence: what kind of science should be practiced, and who gets to define it?.