05-10-2005, 05:24 PM
Searching for the reason(s) why anti-democratic pinkos get into fields like "Anthropology", came across this...
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>The decline and fall of anthropology </b>
by Stephen Goode
Summary: Anthropology has lost much of its luster in recent years. The glamour days of Margaret Mead are long gone, and the discipline's leaders now squabble amid increasing irrelevancy. At issue are questions that go to the foundation of academic study - <b>how to measure one society against another and whether one con judge based on one's own values. </b>
Time was when anthropology was the most romantic of academic disciplines, luring students with the promise of studying in the South Pacific or doing field work in the far north among the Eskimo - a discipline, too, that dubbed itself the science of man and promised to <b>unlock secrets of human behavior and how societies were formed</b>.
No longer. In many of the cultures once studied firsthand by such famous researchers as Margaret Mead, <b>anthropologists have been declared persona non grata, busybodies whose help Third World governments don't want and whose snooping is deemed deeply suspicious</b>. <i>{What better than third worlders themselves to dump on their own societies? Like a pig in the mud cheaterjis of the world will thrive on this} </i>
At a deeper level, the discipline itself is in crisis. Stephen Tyler, professor of anthropology at Rice University in Houston, says that with the exception of economics, <b>no field is now more "dishonest" in its pretensions to scientific truth and precision. </b>
Among anthropologists, Tyler claims, there is "dissatisfaction with the way we do things." At bottom, he says, "it is a crisis of discourse" - a failure of communication so profound that anthropologists have little left to say to one another, let alone the public.
Marvin Harris, longtime anthropologist at Columbia University and now at the University of Florida in Gainesville, fears the field may degenerate into little more than "a literary form," with specialists merely talking about what earlier anthropologists have written. <b>Much of contemporary anthropology he describes as "dadaism, ego-tripping and self-gratification." </b>
To an outsider, these comments don't seem far off base. Academic stars of the profession, such as Tyler and Clifford Geertz of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., have called into question whether various societies can even be usefully compared, because languages and cultures differ o radically Stanford University's Renato Rosaldo has written, "My own group aside, everything is alien to me."
<b>Anthropology's past, too, is suspect. The work of onetime greats such as Mead and Ruth Benedict is in disrepute these days, in part because their excessive zeal led them to paint rosy pictures of the societies they studied, in part, too, because they deliberately (according to critics) omitted data that contradicted the pictures they painted of harmonious, happy (nonmodern) cultures. As one prescient critic of the field put it many years ago, an anthropologist is someone who believes every cultural pattern but his own is good. </b> <i>{Now, for pinkos it is revolutionary society vs. democratic societies}</i>
What, then, do anthropologists do if they find their field so undermined by the limitations of language and culture, and<b> their own culture so dissatisfying? </b>
Says Robert Edgerton, "When asked that question, their answer is typically lame. They reply that our duty is to go into the field and point out how distorted previous accounts are." Edgerton, a professor of anthropology and psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles, is the author of just such a corrective. His recent book, Sick Societies, not only takes to task many colleagues but also outlines criteria for judging societies as sick and in need of help.
The idea of judging other societies flies in the face of the most treasured orthodoxies of modern anthropology, a <b>widely accepted tenet of which is that every society evolves the institutions it needs.</b> Related to that is the belief that it's certainly not the duty of outsiders to subject those institutions to critical scrutiny based on the attitudes of the researcher's own society
Edgerton, by contrast, comes down heavily on practices he regards as wrong. These include foot binding in China, the burning of widows on their husband's funeral pyres in India, tattooing, and institutionalized feuding that leads to murder.
Each of these traditions - and the full list is much longer - has been justified by anthropologists in Darwinian language as "adaptive," a society's way of handling its unique problems. Adaptive traditions, by definition, are above reproach because they are necessary, just as a bird needs feathers to fly. Removing ritual feuding from tribes in Papua New Guinea would be like removing feathers from a bird. The result in both cases would be disaster.
Edgerton calls all this nonsense - and notes that anthropologists defend in other societies practices they would never tolerate in their own. His larger purpose in the book is to attack the notion that small, premodern societies are harmonious and well-off in ways that large, modern societies are not.
The message has not made him popular inside or outside the profession. In letters and on radio talk shows promoting the book, he has been denounced as ethnocentric, indicted for attempting to judge the world by American standards and values. Edgerton says he's unhappy about the charge since "it's precisely what I'm not trying to do." His goal, he says, is to establish guidelines for determining when things go wrong with a society - guidelines that can be applied to all societies at all times.
Edgerton's quest for universal guidelines is strikingly ambitious for a field of study that otherwise seems lost in a deep funk. Wilcomb Washburn, director of American studies at the Smithsonian Institution, describes anthropology as a field in which researchers have tended to adopt every new jargon-laden academic fashion with a rapidity that borders on the unseemly - <b>from Darwinism to Marxism, structuralism to deconstructionism. </b>
<b>Opinions are "passionately held, but never quite validated," </b>says Washburn, before a "monkey wrench is hurled into the theory" and it's shown to be a dead end. The result: a discipline whose foundations, if they still exist, are shaky indeed. Anthropology, as Washburn sees it, "clasped too close to its bosom the values of the non-West." It's an understandable fault, he says: "When you have an experience in an exotic place, a kind of bonding goes on."
But this love affair with the subjects of their research blinds anthropologists to faults in the societies they study - and and at the same time causes them to reject the values of their own societies; hence the overwhelmingly leftist politics of the field.
The irony, according to Washburn, and a source of deep frustration for anthropologists, is that the small-scale societies they glorified increasingly exclude them. Even more humiliating, says Washburn, is the fact that many Third World governments actively recruit Western agronomists, medical technicians and other experts while shunning anthropologists. When anthropologists offer their research into ritual, symbolic systems or mores, those governments are likely to reply, "So what?"
<b>Partly for this reason, anthropologists have been forced to fall back on studies of their own culture, researching American or European "subcultures" such as law firms or welfare systems, an academic pursuit that doesn't distinguish the field all that much from sociology. </b> <i>{Perfect wasteleands for Pinkos}</i>
Nor do such studies promise a cure to the profound malaise in the profession - exemplified in the soul-searching debate over whether anthropology has contributed anything worthy of consideration to the fund of human knowledge. At the heart of this debate is the question of whether anthropology is, in Edgerton's words, "perhaps a flawed science, a science in the making," but nonetheless "a science capable of making generalizations." "If it's not, he says, "We are in the wrong business."
Rice's Tyler, at the forefront of what might be called the field's most adventurous wing, does an end run around the question. He calls Western science itself "oppressive," an outgrowth of imperialism and colonialism. <b>Anthropologists pretending to be disinterested seekers after scientific truth are not dissimilar, in this view, from colonists carrying guns.</b>
Western science is hypocritical, Tyler says, because it requires that to be objective one must suspend belief in everything - except science itself - to discover truth. There are many sciences - Hindu, Chinese - that are as true as Western science, he argues.
Far from seeking universally valid truths through science, Tyler has written, contemporary anthropology "denies that the discourse of one cultural tradition can analytically encompass the discourse of another cultural tradition."
Translated, that means that foreign languages and cultures - the traditional subject matter of anthropologists - can't be objectively explained or studied by Western scholars.
It's a view that fills opponents with outrage, says Florida's Harris. Science is not an oppressive invention of Western powers out to rule the world, he says emphatically. This is "an argument that has no proof in fact or history. The whole 20th century, the century of broken dreams," argues to the contrary. Not lesser doses of objectivity and science, but greater ones might have warded off the likes of Hitler and Stalin, both of whom rejected modern science as "bourgeois" and "too rational."
Harris says the idea that knowledge should dissolve into a maelstrom of sciences - Hindu, Chinese or Japanese - reminds him of nothing so much as Lysenkoism, the doctrine of a Soviet biologist backed by Stalin that subordinated science to politics and attempted to explain biology in Marxist terms. "Monstrous," says Harris, to underline the gulf that separates him (and other anthropologists who agree) from Tyler and his numerous like-minded colleagues.
Nothing could be more antagonistic to the views of Tyler than Edgerton's attempt to set up objective criteria for judging societies. He proposes a threefold test for anthropologists to determine if a society is sick. One, if a population is failing to survive, that's a clue things are going wrong. Two, a society can be deemed sick if dissatisfaction with the way things are is so widespread that it threatens "the viability of the system." And three, a sick society is one in which poor nutrition, bad hunting or farming techniques, or other poorly chosen habits put people under mental stress and physical disability
Edgerton hopes these guidelines will bolster the objective and scientific side of anthropology. In addition, he hopes they will undermine the extreme cultural relativism that is a hallmark of the field. In mild form, he notes, cultural relativism has almost universally been regarded as essential to anthropology. When it first appeared in the writings of such greats as Franz Boas of Columbia in the early part of the century, anthropologists saw it as an antidote to the racism rampant among earlier anthropologists, many of whom wrote about what they regarded as the clear superiority of the West.
Carried to an extreme, though, cultural relativism began to bother many people, including cultural relativists themselves. In the 1950s, notes Edgerton, some anthropologists observed that far from being happy with their own customs and rejecting the West, many small-scale societies wanted precisely what America and Europe had to offer. They wanted iron instruments. They wanted Western medicine. They didn't want to live in ways that made survival contingent on killing "the kids and granny." <b>(Anthropologists had declared both infanticide and geronticide "adaptive" in the societies that practiced them.) </b> <i>{No wonder commies can justify anything with an anthropology degree - earner or assumed} </i>
Customs such as female circumcision also made even relativists squeamish. Common in several African and Arab societies, the practice was defended by committed relativists, who said it was a society's way of protecting the virtue of its unmarried women. Other anthropologists responded that many societies have found far less drastic ways to defend chastity, and that the pain caused girls who are so treated, not to mention the lifelong physical and emotional difficulties to which they are prone, hardly justified its continuation.
In such debates, considerations of right and wrong began slowly to I wedge their way back into anthropology. At first, in the 1960s, many anthropologists still regarded it as improper to assert their own values in their work. They feared losing contact with societies whose practices they condemned, says Edgerton. Harris, for example, was strongly criticized for attacking cannibalism in his popular 1977 book, Cannibals and Kings. Reviewers called him unprofessional.
Now, however, even as avant-garde an anthropologist as Tyler (although there are many others who won't go even this far) says that he'd condemn practices - such as animal sacrifice - that the encountered 20 years ago during field work in India. He wouldn't have dreamed of openly condemning them then, he says. Tyler urges intellectual "modesty," however, advising that the anthropologist say "in my opinion" rather than "according to anthropology."
There are horror stories aplenty - of anthropologists behaving like bulls in china shops - to support the call for modesty. Colin Turnbull, for example, worked among the Ik of Uganda in the 1960s, researching his book The Mountain People. Turnbull found the Ik so completely demoralized and uncertain of their future that he suggested to a Ugandan official that the tribe be dismantled and its members distributed among other peoples of the country.
Many thought Turnbull had gone too far. None knew of any instance where the lot of people from a small-scale society was improved by uprooting them and planting them elsewhere.
And their fears were justified. Subsequent investigation showed that Turnbull was wrong in much of what he wrote about the Ik. He later admitted that he hadn't bothered to learn the language. Much of his information was superficial - and had been gleaned from an interpreter.
Such stories tend to make anthropologists cautious, as do the inevitable questions hurled at adaptivists. <b>Should anthropologists say that the effort at "ethnic cleansing" by the Serbs is adaptive to that society and therefore good for Serbian society? Was Hitler adaptive to German society? </b> <i>Hmm.. wonder what cheaterji will say....</i>
More and more, says the Smithsonian's Washburn, anthropologists admit that professionalism should not extend to remaining mute in the face of evil, much less justifying it.
Edgerton sees his three guidelines influencing the field in another way: by making anthropology more useful as a tool in studying what happens as societies evolve - and how, perhaps, they can be altered if sick institutions and customs develop. But usefulness (once the oft-stated goal of many in the field) isn't a side of anthropology that he's happy with these days.
Describing the state of his profession, he writes: "A lot [of anthropologists] lose sight of the goal of contributing to the well-being of society by spending too much time on studies that have no practical applicability." His pessimistic conclusion: "It is increasingly true that only anthropologists read anthropology," which makes the field very parochial indeed.
It wasn't always so. In the 1930s, notes Washburn, anthropologists were among those chosen by Commissioner of Indian Affairs John Collier to draw up new tribal constitutions based on traditions and needs. The result was a system of law that provided, in many cases, meaningful tribal sovereignty and autonomy, says Washburn, who has written widely on American Indian affairs.
Things began to change after World War II. The 1947 statement submitted by the American <b>Anthropological Association to the newly formed United Nations is a case in point. Drawn up by Northwestern University Professor Melville Herskovits, one of the best-known anthropologists of his time and an ardent defender of cultural relativism, it purported to be the collective wisdom of anthropology on the subject of human rights.</b> Herskovitz urged tolerance of others, something few would disagree with. <b>But he went on to condemn the values of America and Europe, an early example of the rejection of the West now commonplace on American college campuses. </b>
<b>He noted that democracy need not be admired - since in many cases it was the product of slave-owning societies. And he wrote, "The history of the expansion of the western world has been marked by the demoralization of human personality and the disintegration of human rights." </b>
From there it was but a short step to the 1960s fashion of anthropologists condemning as traitors anyone of their number who aided the U.S. government by supplying information on Vietnamese society. <b>Anthropologists began to find themselves frozen out of government agencies and committees, says Washburn, as their anti-Western rhetoric became more shrill. </b>
<b>Anthropologists indeed began talking only to each other, and the politicization of the field was nearly complete. </b>
Things have changed little since then. In 1986, Washburn tried - to no avail - to get the American Anthropological Association to condemn "necklacing" in South Africa - the execution by black radicals of other blacks suspected of being government informers by placing gasoline-filled tires over their heads and setting fire to them.
On another occasion, he asked the organization to investigate an anthropologist who had allied himself with a maverick group of Hopi Indians who hoped to take over the tribe. (His argument was that if the association called into question service to the government in Vietnam, it was wrong for an anthropologist to ally himself with an Indian political group.) Not surprisingly, he lost this one, too.
In 1988, however, he gained his first success. After a struggle, Washburn convinced the association that it should condemn apartheid in Burundi - a black African nation where individuals are segregated by tribe - just as it had condemned South Africa.
For a profession in such flux, the question of what to teach and how to train students is problematic.
Some opt for a familiar, traditional approach of sitting at the feet of masters, as it were. Grant Jones, a professor of anthropology at North Carolina's Davidson College, for example, teaches a course based on the writings of famous anthropologists, from A. R. Radcliffe-Brown to Geertz. Even earlier figures, such as Bronislaw Malinowski, from anthropology's golden age (the 1920s and 1930s), still are read by undergraduates and in graduate school, he says. But they are read more with an eye toward analyzing rhetorical excesses (where the anthropologists went wrong) and as a cautionary tale than for their methodology and sense of discovery.
Not surprisingly, Tyler advocates a radically different pedagogy. He regards books as "irrelevant" in today's world. There are too many books and respect for them diminishes as their number increases, he says. In their place, he recommends multimedia events - much like performance art - that include "handouts, slides, blackboards," and anything the imagination comes up with, "including the professor acting things out."
The only published notice of such events would be short abstracts in learned journals. Word of the event might be passed on informally by professors sending messages back and forth through their computers. Tyler has a very contemporary sounding name for this. "the presentness of the presentation." It's a novel vision of the teacher-researcher's role, and probably one that few professors would be able to live up to - even if they so desired.
The field of anthropology also has some perpetual problems - no doubt a result of human nature itself. Edgerton admits it's still common for anthropologists to hedge when it comes to telling the whole story about societies they study. "Wife-beating and conspicuous cruelty are ignored," he says. As are the torture of animals (a widespread practice) and ridicule of the handicapped.
Over coffee or cocktails, says Edgerton, anthropologists will talk about these things among themselves, but they don't put them in their books or articles. He concedes, "I haven't written about these things as much as I could have."
There are optimists, albeit cautious ones. Washburn thinks the "tumultuous" nature of anthropology is likely to continue, but says that's all to the good. It's part of a process of cleansing the field of too much theorizing, too much wishing that societies were the way anthropologists want them to be.
"We're discovering the world is a great deal more complex than we thought it.was," Washburn says, and not easily reducible to anyone's set of principles or changeable by the latest agenda. He discerns a "greater toleration" among anthropologists. "They have become noticeably less dogmatic in asserting their own points of view," he says.
Florida's Harris is more combative. "For a long time I thought it would go away," he says about what he calls the loss of direction in anthropology Contact with the real world, he hoped, would bring some common sense to the debate and dissolve the "general ennui" But he concludes that the only answer to the ongoing tumult between those who say anthropology can know little and those who think it a science with claims to accuracy is to "salvage the Western tradition of objective science."
In the final analysis, he says, "it is the only thing we have left." Harris does add a caveat: "We must remain skeptical" and accept "nothing with finality."
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>The decline and fall of anthropology </b>
by Stephen Goode
Summary: Anthropology has lost much of its luster in recent years. The glamour days of Margaret Mead are long gone, and the discipline's leaders now squabble amid increasing irrelevancy. At issue are questions that go to the foundation of academic study - <b>how to measure one society against another and whether one con judge based on one's own values. </b>
Time was when anthropology was the most romantic of academic disciplines, luring students with the promise of studying in the South Pacific or doing field work in the far north among the Eskimo - a discipline, too, that dubbed itself the science of man and promised to <b>unlock secrets of human behavior and how societies were formed</b>.
No longer. In many of the cultures once studied firsthand by such famous researchers as Margaret Mead, <b>anthropologists have been declared persona non grata, busybodies whose help Third World governments don't want and whose snooping is deemed deeply suspicious</b>. <i>{What better than third worlders themselves to dump on their own societies? Like a pig in the mud cheaterjis of the world will thrive on this} </i>
At a deeper level, the discipline itself is in crisis. Stephen Tyler, professor of anthropology at Rice University in Houston, says that with the exception of economics, <b>no field is now more "dishonest" in its pretensions to scientific truth and precision. </b>
Among anthropologists, Tyler claims, there is "dissatisfaction with the way we do things." At bottom, he says, "it is a crisis of discourse" - a failure of communication so profound that anthropologists have little left to say to one another, let alone the public.
Marvin Harris, longtime anthropologist at Columbia University and now at the University of Florida in Gainesville, fears the field may degenerate into little more than "a literary form," with specialists merely talking about what earlier anthropologists have written. <b>Much of contemporary anthropology he describes as "dadaism, ego-tripping and self-gratification." </b>
To an outsider, these comments don't seem far off base. Academic stars of the profession, such as Tyler and Clifford Geertz of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., have called into question whether various societies can even be usefully compared, because languages and cultures differ o radically Stanford University's Renato Rosaldo has written, "My own group aside, everything is alien to me."
<b>Anthropology's past, too, is suspect. The work of onetime greats such as Mead and Ruth Benedict is in disrepute these days, in part because their excessive zeal led them to paint rosy pictures of the societies they studied, in part, too, because they deliberately (according to critics) omitted data that contradicted the pictures they painted of harmonious, happy (nonmodern) cultures. As one prescient critic of the field put it many years ago, an anthropologist is someone who believes every cultural pattern but his own is good. </b> <i>{Now, for pinkos it is revolutionary society vs. democratic societies}</i>
What, then, do anthropologists do if they find their field so undermined by the limitations of language and culture, and<b> their own culture so dissatisfying? </b>
Says Robert Edgerton, "When asked that question, their answer is typically lame. They reply that our duty is to go into the field and point out how distorted previous accounts are." Edgerton, a professor of anthropology and psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles, is the author of just such a corrective. His recent book, Sick Societies, not only takes to task many colleagues but also outlines criteria for judging societies as sick and in need of help.
The idea of judging other societies flies in the face of the most treasured orthodoxies of modern anthropology, a <b>widely accepted tenet of which is that every society evolves the institutions it needs.</b> Related to that is the belief that it's certainly not the duty of outsiders to subject those institutions to critical scrutiny based on the attitudes of the researcher's own society
Edgerton, by contrast, comes down heavily on practices he regards as wrong. These include foot binding in China, the burning of widows on their husband's funeral pyres in India, tattooing, and institutionalized feuding that leads to murder.
Each of these traditions - and the full list is much longer - has been justified by anthropologists in Darwinian language as "adaptive," a society's way of handling its unique problems. Adaptive traditions, by definition, are above reproach because they are necessary, just as a bird needs feathers to fly. Removing ritual feuding from tribes in Papua New Guinea would be like removing feathers from a bird. The result in both cases would be disaster.
Edgerton calls all this nonsense - and notes that anthropologists defend in other societies practices they would never tolerate in their own. His larger purpose in the book is to attack the notion that small, premodern societies are harmonious and well-off in ways that large, modern societies are not.
The message has not made him popular inside or outside the profession. In letters and on radio talk shows promoting the book, he has been denounced as ethnocentric, indicted for attempting to judge the world by American standards and values. Edgerton says he's unhappy about the charge since "it's precisely what I'm not trying to do." His goal, he says, is to establish guidelines for determining when things go wrong with a society - guidelines that can be applied to all societies at all times.
Edgerton's quest for universal guidelines is strikingly ambitious for a field of study that otherwise seems lost in a deep funk. Wilcomb Washburn, director of American studies at the Smithsonian Institution, describes anthropology as a field in which researchers have tended to adopt every new jargon-laden academic fashion with a rapidity that borders on the unseemly - <b>from Darwinism to Marxism, structuralism to deconstructionism. </b>
<b>Opinions are "passionately held, but never quite validated," </b>says Washburn, before a "monkey wrench is hurled into the theory" and it's shown to be a dead end. The result: a discipline whose foundations, if they still exist, are shaky indeed. Anthropology, as Washburn sees it, "clasped too close to its bosom the values of the non-West." It's an understandable fault, he says: "When you have an experience in an exotic place, a kind of bonding goes on."
But this love affair with the subjects of their research blinds anthropologists to faults in the societies they study - and and at the same time causes them to reject the values of their own societies; hence the overwhelmingly leftist politics of the field.
The irony, according to Washburn, and a source of deep frustration for anthropologists, is that the small-scale societies they glorified increasingly exclude them. Even more humiliating, says Washburn, is the fact that many Third World governments actively recruit Western agronomists, medical technicians and other experts while shunning anthropologists. When anthropologists offer their research into ritual, symbolic systems or mores, those governments are likely to reply, "So what?"
<b>Partly for this reason, anthropologists have been forced to fall back on studies of their own culture, researching American or European "subcultures" such as law firms or welfare systems, an academic pursuit that doesn't distinguish the field all that much from sociology. </b> <i>{Perfect wasteleands for Pinkos}</i>
Nor do such studies promise a cure to the profound malaise in the profession - exemplified in the soul-searching debate over whether anthropology has contributed anything worthy of consideration to the fund of human knowledge. At the heart of this debate is the question of whether anthropology is, in Edgerton's words, "perhaps a flawed science, a science in the making," but nonetheless "a science capable of making generalizations." "If it's not, he says, "We are in the wrong business."
Rice's Tyler, at the forefront of what might be called the field's most adventurous wing, does an end run around the question. He calls Western science itself "oppressive," an outgrowth of imperialism and colonialism. <b>Anthropologists pretending to be disinterested seekers after scientific truth are not dissimilar, in this view, from colonists carrying guns.</b>
Western science is hypocritical, Tyler says, because it requires that to be objective one must suspend belief in everything - except science itself - to discover truth. There are many sciences - Hindu, Chinese - that are as true as Western science, he argues.
Far from seeking universally valid truths through science, Tyler has written, contemporary anthropology "denies that the discourse of one cultural tradition can analytically encompass the discourse of another cultural tradition."
Translated, that means that foreign languages and cultures - the traditional subject matter of anthropologists - can't be objectively explained or studied by Western scholars.
It's a view that fills opponents with outrage, says Florida's Harris. Science is not an oppressive invention of Western powers out to rule the world, he says emphatically. This is "an argument that has no proof in fact or history. The whole 20th century, the century of broken dreams," argues to the contrary. Not lesser doses of objectivity and science, but greater ones might have warded off the likes of Hitler and Stalin, both of whom rejected modern science as "bourgeois" and "too rational."
Harris says the idea that knowledge should dissolve into a maelstrom of sciences - Hindu, Chinese or Japanese - reminds him of nothing so much as Lysenkoism, the doctrine of a Soviet biologist backed by Stalin that subordinated science to politics and attempted to explain biology in Marxist terms. "Monstrous," says Harris, to underline the gulf that separates him (and other anthropologists who agree) from Tyler and his numerous like-minded colleagues.
Nothing could be more antagonistic to the views of Tyler than Edgerton's attempt to set up objective criteria for judging societies. He proposes a threefold test for anthropologists to determine if a society is sick. One, if a population is failing to survive, that's a clue things are going wrong. Two, a society can be deemed sick if dissatisfaction with the way things are is so widespread that it threatens "the viability of the system." And three, a sick society is one in which poor nutrition, bad hunting or farming techniques, or other poorly chosen habits put people under mental stress and physical disability
Edgerton hopes these guidelines will bolster the objective and scientific side of anthropology. In addition, he hopes they will undermine the extreme cultural relativism that is a hallmark of the field. In mild form, he notes, cultural relativism has almost universally been regarded as essential to anthropology. When it first appeared in the writings of such greats as Franz Boas of Columbia in the early part of the century, anthropologists saw it as an antidote to the racism rampant among earlier anthropologists, many of whom wrote about what they regarded as the clear superiority of the West.
Carried to an extreme, though, cultural relativism began to bother many people, including cultural relativists themselves. In the 1950s, notes Edgerton, some anthropologists observed that far from being happy with their own customs and rejecting the West, many small-scale societies wanted precisely what America and Europe had to offer. They wanted iron instruments. They wanted Western medicine. They didn't want to live in ways that made survival contingent on killing "the kids and granny." <b>(Anthropologists had declared both infanticide and geronticide "adaptive" in the societies that practiced them.) </b> <i>{No wonder commies can justify anything with an anthropology degree - earner or assumed} </i>
Customs such as female circumcision also made even relativists squeamish. Common in several African and Arab societies, the practice was defended by committed relativists, who said it was a society's way of protecting the virtue of its unmarried women. Other anthropologists responded that many societies have found far less drastic ways to defend chastity, and that the pain caused girls who are so treated, not to mention the lifelong physical and emotional difficulties to which they are prone, hardly justified its continuation.
In such debates, considerations of right and wrong began slowly to I wedge their way back into anthropology. At first, in the 1960s, many anthropologists still regarded it as improper to assert their own values in their work. They feared losing contact with societies whose practices they condemned, says Edgerton. Harris, for example, was strongly criticized for attacking cannibalism in his popular 1977 book, Cannibals and Kings. Reviewers called him unprofessional.
Now, however, even as avant-garde an anthropologist as Tyler (although there are many others who won't go even this far) says that he'd condemn practices - such as animal sacrifice - that the encountered 20 years ago during field work in India. He wouldn't have dreamed of openly condemning them then, he says. Tyler urges intellectual "modesty," however, advising that the anthropologist say "in my opinion" rather than "according to anthropology."
There are horror stories aplenty - of anthropologists behaving like bulls in china shops - to support the call for modesty. Colin Turnbull, for example, worked among the Ik of Uganda in the 1960s, researching his book The Mountain People. Turnbull found the Ik so completely demoralized and uncertain of their future that he suggested to a Ugandan official that the tribe be dismantled and its members distributed among other peoples of the country.
Many thought Turnbull had gone too far. None knew of any instance where the lot of people from a small-scale society was improved by uprooting them and planting them elsewhere.
And their fears were justified. Subsequent investigation showed that Turnbull was wrong in much of what he wrote about the Ik. He later admitted that he hadn't bothered to learn the language. Much of his information was superficial - and had been gleaned from an interpreter.
Such stories tend to make anthropologists cautious, as do the inevitable questions hurled at adaptivists. <b>Should anthropologists say that the effort at "ethnic cleansing" by the Serbs is adaptive to that society and therefore good for Serbian society? Was Hitler adaptive to German society? </b> <i>Hmm.. wonder what cheaterji will say....</i>
More and more, says the Smithsonian's Washburn, anthropologists admit that professionalism should not extend to remaining mute in the face of evil, much less justifying it.
Edgerton sees his three guidelines influencing the field in another way: by making anthropology more useful as a tool in studying what happens as societies evolve - and how, perhaps, they can be altered if sick institutions and customs develop. But usefulness (once the oft-stated goal of many in the field) isn't a side of anthropology that he's happy with these days.
Describing the state of his profession, he writes: "A lot [of anthropologists] lose sight of the goal of contributing to the well-being of society by spending too much time on studies that have no practical applicability." His pessimistic conclusion: "It is increasingly true that only anthropologists read anthropology," which makes the field very parochial indeed.
It wasn't always so. In the 1930s, notes Washburn, anthropologists were among those chosen by Commissioner of Indian Affairs John Collier to draw up new tribal constitutions based on traditions and needs. The result was a system of law that provided, in many cases, meaningful tribal sovereignty and autonomy, says Washburn, who has written widely on American Indian affairs.
Things began to change after World War II. The 1947 statement submitted by the American <b>Anthropological Association to the newly formed United Nations is a case in point. Drawn up by Northwestern University Professor Melville Herskovits, one of the best-known anthropologists of his time and an ardent defender of cultural relativism, it purported to be the collective wisdom of anthropology on the subject of human rights.</b> Herskovitz urged tolerance of others, something few would disagree with. <b>But he went on to condemn the values of America and Europe, an early example of the rejection of the West now commonplace on American college campuses. </b>
<b>He noted that democracy need not be admired - since in many cases it was the product of slave-owning societies. And he wrote, "The history of the expansion of the western world has been marked by the demoralization of human personality and the disintegration of human rights." </b>
From there it was but a short step to the 1960s fashion of anthropologists condemning as traitors anyone of their number who aided the U.S. government by supplying information on Vietnamese society. <b>Anthropologists began to find themselves frozen out of government agencies and committees, says Washburn, as their anti-Western rhetoric became more shrill. </b>
<b>Anthropologists indeed began talking only to each other, and the politicization of the field was nearly complete. </b>
Things have changed little since then. In 1986, Washburn tried - to no avail - to get the American Anthropological Association to condemn "necklacing" in South Africa - the execution by black radicals of other blacks suspected of being government informers by placing gasoline-filled tires over their heads and setting fire to them.
On another occasion, he asked the organization to investigate an anthropologist who had allied himself with a maverick group of Hopi Indians who hoped to take over the tribe. (His argument was that if the association called into question service to the government in Vietnam, it was wrong for an anthropologist to ally himself with an Indian political group.) Not surprisingly, he lost this one, too.
In 1988, however, he gained his first success. After a struggle, Washburn convinced the association that it should condemn apartheid in Burundi - a black African nation where individuals are segregated by tribe - just as it had condemned South Africa.
For a profession in such flux, the question of what to teach and how to train students is problematic.
Some opt for a familiar, traditional approach of sitting at the feet of masters, as it were. Grant Jones, a professor of anthropology at North Carolina's Davidson College, for example, teaches a course based on the writings of famous anthropologists, from A. R. Radcliffe-Brown to Geertz. Even earlier figures, such as Bronislaw Malinowski, from anthropology's golden age (the 1920s and 1930s), still are read by undergraduates and in graduate school, he says. But they are read more with an eye toward analyzing rhetorical excesses (where the anthropologists went wrong) and as a cautionary tale than for their methodology and sense of discovery.
Not surprisingly, Tyler advocates a radically different pedagogy. He regards books as "irrelevant" in today's world. There are too many books and respect for them diminishes as their number increases, he says. In their place, he recommends multimedia events - much like performance art - that include "handouts, slides, blackboards," and anything the imagination comes up with, "including the professor acting things out."
The only published notice of such events would be short abstracts in learned journals. Word of the event might be passed on informally by professors sending messages back and forth through their computers. Tyler has a very contemporary sounding name for this. "the presentness of the presentation." It's a novel vision of the teacher-researcher's role, and probably one that few professors would be able to live up to - even if they so desired.
The field of anthropology also has some perpetual problems - no doubt a result of human nature itself. Edgerton admits it's still common for anthropologists to hedge when it comes to telling the whole story about societies they study. "Wife-beating and conspicuous cruelty are ignored," he says. As are the torture of animals (a widespread practice) and ridicule of the handicapped.
Over coffee or cocktails, says Edgerton, anthropologists will talk about these things among themselves, but they don't put them in their books or articles. He concedes, "I haven't written about these things as much as I could have."
There are optimists, albeit cautious ones. Washburn thinks the "tumultuous" nature of anthropology is likely to continue, but says that's all to the good. It's part of a process of cleansing the field of too much theorizing, too much wishing that societies were the way anthropologists want them to be.
"We're discovering the world is a great deal more complex than we thought it.was," Washburn says, and not easily reducible to anyone's set of principles or changeable by the latest agenda. He discerns a "greater toleration" among anthropologists. "They have become noticeably less dogmatic in asserting their own points of view," he says.
Florida's Harris is more combative. "For a long time I thought it would go away," he says about what he calls the loss of direction in anthropology Contact with the real world, he hoped, would bring some common sense to the debate and dissolve the "general ennui" But he concludes that the only answer to the ongoing tumult between those who say anthropology can know little and those who think it a science with claims to accuracy is to "salvage the Western tradition of objective science."
In the final analysis, he says, "it is the only thing we have left." Harris does add a caveat: "We must remain skeptical" and accept "nothing with finality."
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