“Contemporary archaeology,” says Kohl in his recent state-of-the-art review, “is nothing if not tortuously self-conscious” (1981:108), yet, as he observes, this self-consciousness has been curiously limited. While, in an archaeology context, self-consciousness led to a “vehement advocacy” of positivist methods for realizing objective, validated knowledge of other (past) cultures, other social sciences were led, by similar selfcriticism, to “question[ing] the possibility of impartial, value-free social science research” (Kohl 1981:93). The reason for this discrepancy has to do, I suggest, with the fact that archaeologists were motivated to reassess and overhaul their discipline by a deep concern to make it more “relevant.” It was recognized that, so long as research remained descriptive, it would yield only curiosities and relics while, if a method could be devised for reliably interpreting the data as evidence of the cultural past, it might be in a position to provide information of quite broad and even pragmatic value. Thus, the New Archaeologists promoted positivism as a methodology capable of progressively eliminating error and, in this, of assuring approximation to an ideal of objective and possibly useful truth in knowledge claims about the past. By contrast to this, the self-consciousness of sociology and social anthropology referred to by Kohl did not arise so much from a perceived need to make research relevant as from a concern to take stock of the social and political interests that it was already serving, deliberately or inadvertently. Kohl notes with a touch of irony that, while archaeologists were refining their methodology so that it would yield information relevant to “explaining the past and possibly directing future social change” (1981:92), social anthropologists were “acknowledging their discipline’s unsavory relationship to colonialism” (1981:92) and its role in transforming formerly isolated, noncapitalist and nonindustrial societies. They were also beginning to acknowledge what Handsman (1981a) has