Friday, November 02, 2007

Not plaigiarism, just different cultural norms

Recently an anthropology professor claimed that the Army's counterinsurgency manual plaigiarized anthropology texts and did it badly. Today one of the manual's authors argues that this isn't the case -- the difference is in the citation norms in military writing. And he gets in a zinger against the professor:
Price describes the failure to cite all sources used in the manual as evidence of “shoddy academic practices”, but in fact he is applying the standards of one society to those of a very different one—a violation of the anthropological norm of cultural relativism as I understand it.

Counterinsurgency Author Hits Back on "Plagiarism" | Danger Room from Wired.com

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