This is especially ironic given any reference to Foucault, of course: the
whole "genealogy" thing of tracing ideas back (and derived from
Nietzsche)...

-----Original Message-----


On the negative side in many disciplines (especially a field like 
"ethnohistory") a younger scholar comes along and takes some fully 
accepted  statement or conclusion and traces it back many steps to 
the original source (document) only to find out the original source 
was unclear, misread or actually said the opposite of what a Swanton 
or a Wissler said decades ago. Yet their interpretation has become 
standard in the field. This canonical knowledge problem is very 
common in all "historical" disciplines.