Make that sixty seven : a response to Whiteman and Cooper's 'sixty six ways to get it wrong'

In a recent issue of this journal we critiqued Whiteman and Cooper’s (2000) Academy of Management Journal article that described an ethnographic study of an Indigenous beaver trapper belonging to the Cree Nation (Banerjee & Linstead, 2004). Our critique was made in the interests of scholarly debate about what we felt were serious theoretical and methodological shortcomings in anthropological accounts of Indigenous knowledge. We welcome Whiteman and Cooper’s response to our critique and we thank the editors for giving us the opportunity to reply to their response. While we thank the authors for painstakingly identifying 66 criticisms we directed at their article, a more fruitful response would have been to address the specific points we made rather than simply list them. Whiteman and Cooper have summarized our criticisms as theoretical weaknesses, methodological and representative flaws, and substantive shortcomings. Actually our critique was made more at the level of epistemology as we will discuss later, but as a matter of convenience we will respond using the same categories identified by Whiteman and Cooper. Let us also hasten to add that our critique is not some kind of moral condemnation of colonial, neocolonial, or even by implication some forms of postcolonial ethnography. As Fabian (2002: 33) points out, bad intentions do not alone invalidate knowledge: for that to happen ‘it takes bad epistemology which advances cognitive interests without regard for its ideological presuppositions’. Let us explore some of these presuppositions from theoretical, methodological and representational points of view.