Reality, Rationality,and the Possibility of Anthropology

Abstract

One paper in Knowledge and Control is in quite a different class from all the others. This is Robin Horton’s ‘African Traditional Thought and Western Science’. But its main appeal to Young is its one serious weakness. Young says: “Formal education is based on the assumption that thought systems organized in curricula are in some sense ‘superior’ to the thought systems of those who are to be (or have not been) educated. It is just this implicit ‘superiority’ that Horton is questioning when he compares Western and African ‘theoretical’ thought in his paper” (p. 13).