We are engaged in a revolutionary discipline, as I have claimed, because of our ancestry. Modern anthropology is a child of the European Enlightenment, the axial age of the modern consciousness. The collapse of feudalism had, of course, destroyed many fixed medieval assumptions about the nature of man, the position of man in society, and the position of the earth in the cosmos. Two intricately connected traditions, which have since polarized the thinking of anthropologists without ever completely dividing it, and which can therefore be described as ambivalent, began to emerge clearly in the 18th century, throughout western Europe but most notably in France.