The axiom will let us deal with each ethnoscience as a system, and it lets us connect together various distant beliefs—distant in subject, time, and space. The second axiom is more crucial to my argument: a fundamental belief in the ethnoscientific system associated with a given society is not likely to fall into or remain in conflict with a fundamental value or norm that is held by the members of the society or by the policy-making élite if the society is highly stratified. In other words, crucial beliefs should conform to crucial precepts: the true should also be the good. If there were no such conformality between ethnoscientific system and value system, we would have science proving that religion is false, history undercutting patriotism and the like—dissonances that a culture certainly cannot tolerate in high degree.
III
I think I can identify a single ethnoscience that is characteristic of the European nations (or élites) which have participated directly or indirectly in the imperializing process. This ethnoscience spans the entire European culture world through five centuries of its history. This level of generality would be too broad to be useful in most other contexts, but that is not the case here, for two reasons. First, the span is quite normal for studies in the history of scholarly ideas. Second, whatever the variations among the national (or national-élite) ethnosciences, all should have a basic similarity in matters pertaining to imperialism, to relationships between Europe, with its set of wants, and the rest of the world, where the wants are to be fulfilled. This White, or Western, or European, ethnoscience is the intellectual underpinning of imperialism. It includes within it the varying paradigms of Western science and the propositions of history. Allowing for necessary variations, this is the common, general system of scientific and historical ideas in which we White, Western social scientists are working. Its growth has paralleled and supported the growth of imperialism, and it has become for us an almost irresistibly strong current of thought, pulling each new theory and interpretation in the same direction as the old: toward compatibility with the policies and goals of Europe and empire. There is nothing mysterious about this force, and some of us succeed in swimming against its pull (else there would be no Antipode!). But it has produced a general drift of bias in those parts of