"Why do we think of the healing techniques of "primitive" peoples as interesting cultural practices, when what our own doctors do - to most of us no more intelligible than magic incantations - is unquestionably science? Why is it that when tribal people know something about the natural world, anthropologists call it "ethnoscience" rather than simply "science?" Are such systems simply different stages of a universal understanding? Or are they different kinds of knowledge altogether?" "When Peter Worsley, one of our most distinguished social scientists, set out to write an account of the scientific knowledge of an aboriginal tribe on Groote Eylandt, Australia, he was led to explore such seemingly disparate issues as pre-European navigation on the Pacific and the rise of Western biomedicine." "Worsley makes a powerful case for the plurality of knowledge systems. He questions our definitions of culture by looking at the ways cultures are differentiated within the group or national boundaries that are thought to contain them, and the ways in which they spill out of those borders to feed into a global mass society. On the way, he treats us to a lively and accessible examination of the diversity of Australian aboriginal thought about the natural world, Western medicine, sub- and countercultures, nationalism, religion, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and the iconology of Disneyland."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved