Two-Spirit Terminology

I started reading Evelyn Blackwood's article and got sidetracked by the entry I found on Wikipedia for "berdache". My search was redirected to "two-spirit" which, as it turns out, is the less offensive term for the Native American concept of cross-gender indivuals. The "perjorative etymology" of a word widely accepted by anthropologists, at least at the time that the assigned article was written, has introduced the negative connotations of male prostitution and imprisonment to an inherently sacred idea about both masculine and feminine energies existing in a single body. This struck me as a great example of how biases can inadvertently slip into scientific inquiries. Blackwood is not intentionally insulting Native American traditions by referring to these people as "berdaches". On the contrary, she is obviously trying to shed some less subjective light on practices that had previously been condemned or ignored by Western observers. Unfortunatley, a single word can sometimes perpetuate the same misconceptions that were prevalent in earlier writings into the current investigations which attempt to correct them.

The language of anthropology, like the language of biology, often carries much more weight than we realize. I would have never questioned the process by which Linneaus literally chose words such as "mammal" if it had not been brought to my attention. I think that, in the scientific arena especially, we take words at face value as descriptive tools without considering who originally named what, and why. In any field of research, people are constantly assigning new names to things. But most words have long histories. It makes perfect sense that people are going use terminology that may be inappropriate, whether they are aware of it or not . Keeping word choice in check is just one more way that critiques can make scientific arguments stronger. I wonder if "berdache" is still used today.