Anthropology

To the Editors of The Crimson:

We wish to express our dismay at the omission of anthropology from the agenda of the conference recently held at Radcliffe on "Challenging the Conventional Wisdom: A Decade of Research on Women and on the 3rd World "This conference was reported on in your edition of April 9. The omission of the empirical findings and theory of anthropology from the panels was inexplicable in light of the critical contributions the discipline has made to the issues addressed by the conference.

We were particularly disturbed by the panel on sociology, during which two of the panelists openly confessed lamentable ignorance of the topic they were expected to address, and another made totally unacceptable generalizations, some of which were reported in the local press.

As practitioners of anthropology and members of Harvard, we find it deeply distressing that such uninformed opinion has been associated with these fields of study and with this university. Jane I. Guyer   Assistant Professor   Department of Anthropology   Pauline E. Peters   Associate, Harvard Institute for   International Development