complete investigator

is a rigorously objective, dispassionate figure of high science who is at once thorough, exact, and disciplined.

[on malinowski] to project in his ethnographical writings two radically antithetical images of what he variously refers to as 'the competent and experienced ethnographer,' 'the modern anthropological explorer,' [and] the fully professional 'specialized field-worker' On the one side, there is the Absolute Cosmopolite, a figure of such enlarged capacities for adaptability and fellow feeling, for insinuating himself into practically any situation, as to be able to see as [others] see, think as [others] think, speak as [others] speak, and on occasion even feel as they feel and believe as they believe. On the other, there is the Complete Investigator, a figure so rigorously objective, dispassionate, thorough, exact, and disciplined, so dedicated to wintry truth as to make Laplace look self-indulgent. High Romance and High Science, seizing immediacy with the zeal of a poet and abstracting from it with the zeal of an anatomist, uneasily yoked (1988:79).

complete investigator, n.All

complete investigator