George Walford: Evidence

Speaking of the difficulty of providing reliable evidence in ethnography, Morton H. Fried notes that harder sciences share the problem. The eminently respectable photograph of the night sky taken by the astronomer, for example, “is something of a fiction. The ‘stars’ and other phenomena in the picture never were, are not now, and never will be, in the positions shown.” (Fried M. H. 1967, The Evolution of Political Society. NY: Random House 38)

from Ideological Commentary 54, Winter 1991.