[patcon]

I appreciate what you're saying, but convergence (via alternative paths, of various depths) is its own signal. Repeated rediscovery perhaps isn't necessarily wastefulness, but affirmation and validation of deep truth for which there are multiple paths of arrival :)

[tysam_and]

I wish that this worked out in the long run! However, watching the field spin its wheels in the mud over and over with silly pet theories and local results makes it pretty clear that a lot of people are just chasing the butterfly, then after a few years grow disenchanted and sort of just give up.

The bridge comes when people connect concepts to those that are well known and well understood, and that is good. It is all well and good to say in theory that rediscovering things is bad -- it is not necessarily! But when it becomes groundhog day for years on end without significant theoretical change, then that is an indicator that something is amiss in general in how we learn and interpret information in the field.

Of course, this is just my crotchety young opinion coming up on 9 years in the field, so please take that that with a grain of salt and all that.

[imtringued]

Meanwhile in economics you have economists argue that the findings of anthropologists are invalid, because they don't understand modern economic theory. It's history that needs to change.