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.