My doctoral degree is in anthropology (University of Rochester) and for 17 years I taught anthropology at Boston University, where I was tenured and also served in the university administration. My major publications—Diversity: The Invention of a Concept and A Bee in the Mouth: Anger in America Now, though aimed at an audience beyond anthropologists per se, still constituted works of ethnographic description and anthropological analysis. This seems worth mentioning as a prelude to the following comments on the intellectual turmoil surrounding a proposal at the American Anthropological Association. The AAA is my disciplinary home, and I have been a member of it since the early 1970s.
The weekend before Thanksgiving, at the closing of the annual convention held this year in New Orleans, the Executive Board of the AAA discussed a new long-range plan that alters the AAA’s mission statement. The new mission statement deletes the idea that anthropology is a science. It also blurs the intellectual boundaries of the discipline and, ironically, inserts a stronger warrant for using anthropology to engage in public advocacy.
The proposal has already prompted a strong dissent by, so far, at least one section of the AAA, i.e. the Society for Anthropological Sciences, which is objecting on several grounds. The Society’s listserve, SASci, reflects the widespread distress. One prominent anthropologist observed that the proposal makes the “mission exclusively educational rather than [focusing] on the discovery of knowledge.” Another sees the move as the latest attempt of cultural anthropologists “to rid” the profession of archaeologists, biological anthropologists, and perhaps even linguists. Another complains, “Those of us in applied anthropology are hired because of the scientific nature of our work,” a status that the proposed mission statement would undermine. Another anthropologist wonders what will happen to the flow of federal research funds predicated on anthropology’s contributions to science. And yet another prominent anthropologist, Murray Leaf, observes:
The only reason to expect the AAA to sway public opinion would be that it carries authority. What authority? Perhaps [post-modern anthropologists] could argue that good rhetoric or metaphor has an authority all by itself, but in fact any influence the AAA would have with the general public would be based on the public presumption that its views are grounded in science. So in effect, the AAA position is that the AAA should engage in speaking with authority of science but without actually bothering to do the work and exercise the critical restraint of science.
The old mission statement declared that the AAA’s purpose “shall be to advance anthropology as the science that studies humankind in all its aspects.” The new statement jettisons “science” in favor of “public understanding.” It begins, “The purposes of the Association shall be to advance public understanding of humankind in all its aspects.” What’s the nub of this distinction? Why does the Executive Board seek it?
The change reflects a long-standing and growing divisiveness within anthropology between those who stick with the classic conception of studying humanity by means of systematic, rigorous, and ideally objective forms of inquiry, and those who see anthropology as inextricably and profoundly tied to the subjectivities of its researchers and their admitted epistemological limitations. From its earliest days, anthropology sought the status of a science, though anthropologists necessarily dealt with materials that posed hard problems for a strictly scientific approach. Ethnography, the descriptive component of anthropology, doesn’t lend itself to controlled experiments, and attempts to grasp what we have come to call “culture” involve the researcher in matters that go beyond empirical inquiry. The next step for anthropologists who aspire to science (which historically meant virtually all anthropologists) was to examine ethnographic work [usually a society other than his own] through careful cross-cultural comparisons, in an effort to refine variables and to seek underlying constants.
That rough edge to the scientific aspiration of anthropologists long provided an opening for those who longed for a more humanistic conception of what anthropologists do. In the last few decades, the advocates for this humanistic approach seem to have gradually gained the upper hand. Especially prominent are those influenced by the late Clifford Geertz, whose idea of an “interpretive” anthropology emphasized the unsettledness and contingency of knowledge about culture. “Interpretation” opened not just one but dozens of exits from scientific rigor and was the beginning of what we have come to recognize as the postmodern moment in anthropology.
This Geertzian view also lends itself well to those who are eager to blend their “interpretive” work with ideological bias and political advocacy. Of course, “scientific” anthropologists can also be political activists, but their advocacy tends to be much more compartmentalized and separate from their disciplinary tasks. Their scholarship stands on its own in contrast to the work of the interpretivists who decline to draw any such boundaries.
So what seems to have happened at the AAA’s leadership roundtable is that the interpretivist faction has ridden roughshod over their rivals. The substitution of “public understanding” for “anthropology as the science” is a perfect intepretivist move. A “public understanding” rests on no bottom at all; it is just the play of opinion across ever-changing circumstances, and becomes virtually indistinguishable from popular myth, collective misunderstanding, political credo, and even sheer propaganda of one sort or another. The other changes to the mission statement follow suit.
Here is the marked-up copy of the mission statement showing the deletions crossed out and the additions bolded:
Section 1. The purposes of the Association shall be to advance anthropology as the science that studies public understanding of humankind in all its aspects. through This includes, but is not limited to, archeological, biological, ethnological, social, cultural, economic, political, historical, medical, visual, and linguistic anthropological research; The Association also commits itself and to further the professional interests of American anthropologists, including the dissemination of anthropological knowledge, expertise, and interpretation. and its use to solve human problems.
Section 2. To advance the science of anthropology the public understanding of humankind, the Association shall: Foster and support the development of special anthropological societies organized on a regional or functional basis; Publish and promote the publication of anthropological monographs and journals; Encourage anthropological teaching, research, and practice; act to coordinate activities of members of the Association with those of other organizations concerned with anthropology, and maintain effective liaison with related sciences knowledge disciplines and their organizations.
Section 3. To further the professional interests of anthropologists, the Association shall, in addition to those activities described under Section 2: Take action on behalf of the entire profession and integrate the professional activities of anthropologists in the special aspects of the science; and promote the widespread recognition and constant improvement of professional standards in anthropology.
Knocking out the word “ethnological” in section 1 and substituting “social, cultural, economic, political, historical, medical, [and] visual,” is another way of rubbing out the vestiges of science. “Ethnology” is the old word for the comparative scientific study of these things. The new language is akin to “Do what thou wilt.” Note as well that anthropological “knowledge” is now part of a triplet that includes “expertise” and “interpretation.” We are in the heady days when expertise and interpretation are enterprises in their own right, no longer dependent on knowledge per se.
My own view of anthropology is that it is a hybrid discipline. Its main scholarly tradition is rooted in science, or at least the aspiration for science. If those roots wither or are cut off, anthropology will lose any real claim to serious intellectual attention and perhaps even its identity as a discipline. Absent its scientific basis, anthropology would be little more than colorful travel literature (travelogues) occasionally mixed up with political hucksterism and theoretical obscurantism. But anthropology has never been only a science, and it ought to be sufficiently broad-minded to embrace the poetics of culture and some of its music as well. The best anthropologists have always been attuned to the aesthetics of their discipline as well as to the demands of science, and have managed this without letting go of the essential rational and universal basis of their inquiry. (Think of Bronislaw Malinowski and Claude Levi-Strauss as the exemplars in the British and French traditions; Franz Boas, Alfred Kroeber, and Robert Lowie as exemplars of the American tradition.)
We are at a point where it seems that a self-appointed radicalizing faction has taken hold of a discipline and is un-disciplining it. It is cause for alarm among anthropologists, most of whom still see themselves as a vanguard of relativistic liberalism and who further see the illiberal direction of defining the science out of the study of culture. That move ought to be cause for larger worry within the university, especially in times of tight budgets and a public increasingly skeptical of higher education’s evasions of accountability. The AAA’s decision to throw off science seems very close to an assertion of complete intellectual non-accountability, a strange move at a vulnerable moment. An important discipline is in trouble—and it is a species of trouble that has counterparts throughout the social sciences. We should pay attention.
12 Responses to Anthropology Association Rejecting Science?
marktropolis - November 29, 2010 at 8:14 pm
Let me get this straight. Mr. Wood, whose “major” works, which were published by a non-academic press with a clearly political agenda (i.e. leaning to the right), is troubled because the AAA may be shifting its focus more towards “those who see anthropology as inextricably and profoundly tied to the subjectivities of its researchers and their admitted epistemological limitations.” And yet that’s exactly what he did in the books he identifies as the major works of his career as a scholar.
Did I miss something?
11312609 - November 29, 2010 at 8:48 pm
Yes. The books you haven’t read and feel free to characterize anyway.
chuckkle - November 30, 2010 at 2:55 am
For those who aren’t aware of it, “11312609″ is Peter Wood, the Internet-challenged writer of the essay. If he could sign his name to his postings, this would clarify the exchanges.
Chuck Kleinhans
marktropolis - November 30, 2010 at 6:28 am
Actually, I wasn’t trying to characterize the books as much as the publisher. I’ll admit to not having read your books. That said, I think it’s curious that you are bemoaning what you see as the un-doing of the scholarly, scientific (dare I say academic) underpinnings of AAA, and you’re bona fides are two books that were published outside of the very realm you seem to be defending.
Encounter Books is publisher of conservative books (all you need to do is spend two minutes with their catalog), and is heavily subsidized by some of the recognized conservative funders. Back of the hand calculations, half of Encounter’s operating expenses in 2009 were paid for by Bradley. Using Encounter’s own words, they exist for the “publication of books about democratic society which have no other means of publication.”
Which basically means, Mr. Wood couldn’t get an academic or trade publication to touch his books. Which is really OK.
Mr. Wood, I’m not saying you can’t have an agenda – you clearly do, given your professional history and your current position. Just be cool with that and stop trying to do the whole smoke and mirrors thing of trying to establish your academic credibility, when you’re agenda is really to dismantle that very academy. OK, maybe not dismantle, but you want to return it to its glory days of pre-multiculturalism and speech codes.
chuckkle - November 30, 2010 at 7:57 am
Mr. Wood does seem to be so, well…angry…in his replies to his critics. I haven’t read his books, but here are some remarks by people who seem to have read them, posted on Amazon.com.
Daniel L. Henry:
Peter Wood is accurate, I believe, in suggesting that starting in the 1950s, a counterculture reinvigorated a national tradition of protest speech, some of which became institutionalized as baby-boomers aged. The author wallows in shock talk and angry lyrics. He describes Al Gore’s “bloated face” and Hillary Clinton’s “New Anger theatrics.” …Missing is a scholarly eye to the role of traditional conservatives in the rhetoric of anger.
Omitted is any textual analysis of the Fox attack dogs, Limbaugh, Coulter, O’Reilly; or the effect of the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s. Jerry Falwell, Billy Graham, and the Christian Coalition used the anger borne of ebbing power to broadcast a fundraising rhetoric that proved so effective as to swing a vast voting demographic into an Evangelical army. Righteous anger fuels whatever campaign Wants Our Nation Back now. The evidence spills from the airwaves, but that evidence never makes these pages.
Draped in academic robes, A Bee in the Mouth turns out to be a tool of the very rhetoric it pretends to study. Author Peter Wood has done some thinking on the subject, and has written a book solemnly tracing the link between New Anger and New Age. But he overlooks the delicate dance of messages, that we choose ways of expressing anger based on the acts of others, and, that Right or Left, we all share the same hive.
J. Davis:
The subject of anger in America could make an interesting read, but Wood’s conservative biases doom this book to mediocrity. In Wood’s world, anger resides almost solely on the left. Apparently, he’s never listened to AM radio, where right-wing hosts like Michael Savage ( strangely never mentioned in the book) froth at the mouth about subjects like immigration. Overall, a disappointment.
Now I’m not characterizing this book that I haven’t read, but these readers do seem to have a point.
Chuck Kleinhans
jffoster - November 30, 2010 at 9:48 am
Be Mr. Wood’s books about what they may, the post original was about what’s going on in the American Anthropological Association and its effects on the future of Anthropology. It’s been going on for several decades. It looked like there might have been a turn-around after the editorial, er, tedlock on the journal American Anthropologist was broken, but in recent years the trend has reasserted and the overt abandonment of science by the AAA appears to be a bad idea whose time is come.
Folks, I know very politically liberal anthropologists who find this development and de-progression in Anthropology utterly dismaying and reprehensible. As to me, I’ve had it. I resigned from the AAA last year after forty years of membership. If the Society for Anthropological Sciences secedes, I may join them.
barbarapiper - November 30, 2010 at 10:13 am
Rather than attacking the messenger here, perhaps we could respond to the issue he addresses. The AAA proposal to drop any reference to science in its mission statement is bizarre. Not only would this appear to disenfranchise a very large segment of the profession, it is politically foolish at a time when academic departments are under threat due to economic problems almost everywhere, and moving anthropology closer to the humanities is an awkward place to position it.
Dr. Wood traces the origins of the problem back to Cliff Geertz and his ilk, but it needn’t have been so. For example, during his long career Geertz pursued a number of team-based approaches to ethnography in a single region, so that ethnographic accuracy could be checked and double-checked, and more comprehensive accounts could be written of a single area. He then flipped this around in his grand study of Islam, working in two Islamic areas himself, and sending numerous students to Islamic countries and communities to study variations in Islam, to study co-variance, so to speak, of religion and culture. These approaches Geertz explicitly described as forms of science, and I think he would be appalled by the AAA proposal.
Anthropology might have run off the rails with the “writing culture” movement that sprung up via James Clifford and George Marcus (though I heard Marcus defend anthropology as ‘science’ and himself as a scientist at an AAA conference a number of years ago). But to suggest that ethnographies are written, and that writers are often oblivious to the deeper significance embedded in forms of writing, could have been read as a plea for more self-awareness when writing, instead of a complete abandonment of any expectations of objectivity, etc. I notice, for example, that a well-known anthropologist lists on her academic CV a novel that she published, completely blurring any line between the facts of fieldwork and the fiction of her imagination.
The other unexplored dimension to this AAA proposal is more ironic. For a number of years now biological anthropologists and many archaeologists have accused cultural anthropologists of being “anti-science.” Cultural anthropologists have denied this vigorously (including George Marcus in the conference I mentioned), yet the charge took on a life of its own. When the Tedlocks edited the AAA flagship journal, the American Anthropologist, they found that many biological anthropologists and archaeologists declined to submit articles for publication, on the prior assumption that the Tedlocks were “anti-science,” leading many to conclude that they did not accept “science” submissions. Yet the figures developed by the AAA showed that the Tedlocks accepted “science” articles, including those from biological anthropologists and archaeologists, at a higher rate than more humanistic submissions from cultural anthropologists. We’ve been frustrated by the aggressive insistence of biological anthropologists that we are “anti-science” – without much real evidence, reminding many of us of classic witchcraft accusations – and I wonder if this new proposal by the AAA emerges in part from a sense of exasperation with these frustrating and (until now) unfounded criticisms. That would be amusingly ironic, but I hope that the AAA will drop this proposal before it does real damage.
anthroboy - November 30, 2010 at 4:54 pm
To briefly reply to marktropolis, there is some data in a forthcoming publication that graduate students in evolutionary anthropology (many of whom are members of both the Evolutionary Anthropology Society and the Society for Anthropological Sciences) are as liberal in their political orientation as other anthropologists. That research is a replication of similar work done among evolutionarily-inclined psychologists: http://www.unm.edu/~psych/faculty/articles/tybur%202007%20politics.pdf
As for the larger issue (and thanks to jffoster for steering the discussion back to the real issue), the attempt by the AAA executive committee to strike science from the mission statement is a gross misrepresentation of the diversity of perspectives in the discipline. Virtually all of the scientific anthropologists are willing to acknowledge the legitimacy of humanistic perspectives. Why can’t the humanistic anthropologists similarly acknowledge the place of scientific anthropology?
barbarapiper - November 30, 2010 at 6:59 pm
@anthroboy asks “Why can’t the humanistic anthropologists similarly acknowledge the place of scientific anthropology?”
Let me offer a different perspective, since I do not know any humanistic anthropologists who fail to acknowledge the place of scientific anthropology.
The problem, as I mentioned in my early post here, and pace anthroboy, is that for years “scientific” anthropologists have accused humanistic anthropologists, without justification, of being “anti-science.” Marshall Sahlins wrote a well-known article on this, even identifying an anti-anti-positivism. Humanistic anthropologists have long felt that “scientific” anthropologists expect all anthropology to conform to their understanding of positivistic social science, while humanistic anthropologists have been happy to adopt a live-and-let-live attitude. One of my biological anthropology colleagues once dismissively called cultural anthropology “nothing more than Navaho toenail painting – and who needs that?”
There’s a place for all of us: but for scientific anthropologists, too often the assumption has been that there is only one place, and you have to convert to the positivist model of anthropology to be there; for humanistic anthropologists, there are two places, albeit sometimes quite distant from each other, one for humanistic anthropologists, the other for the scientific anthropologists.
One of my primate behavior colleagues once seriously argued with me that an evolutionary psychology framework was all we needed to “explain” Shakespeare. I suggested that there were two approaches, at least: the meaning of a literary text, and its historical and cultural location, issues best explored by a humanistic field; the themes of competition for reproductive success could be explored by the evolutionary psychologist. “Why,” she asked, “would you need more than the evolutionary psychology framework?” She was serious. That’s the problem.
anthroboy - November 30, 2010 at 10:21 pm
I hear what you’re saying, barbarapiper, and it’s certainly true that I find most humanistic anthropology to be unpalatable and virtually incomprehensible at times. That said, I freely admit that there are certain kinds of questions that cannot adequately be addressed with scientific methods. What does it really “mean” for a Navajo girl to paint her toenails, for instance? I am happy to leave such questions and the meaning of Shakespeare to other folks.
m13905 - December 2, 2010 at 7:03 am
I can see why the executive board of the AAA wants to change some of the language in the mission statement. The original statement that the association exists to advance anthropology as a science would exclude those anthropologists who do not consider what they do to be a science. As previous commentators indicate this is a sizable portion of anthropologists. I would, however, argue that the cuts and changes go to far by seemingly writing science out of the association. Anthropology is a big tent and its main value lies in that diversity. As an anthropological archaeologist, I deal daily with fellow anthropologists whose views range from strongly scientific to strongly humanistic. These poles also tug and pull at my own research. This tension has characterized my entire academic life and I strongly feel that I am a better scholar for it. The executive committee would do well to modify the mission statement of the AAA to be more inclusive but the mission statement still needs to reflect the presence and importance of science in the discipline.
Randy McGuire
barber5 - December 11, 2010 at 5:15 pm
I completely disagree with Randy McGuire above.
I would say that you would call a person to whom a scientific approach is available but who rebuffs it a charlatan. And I don’t think the Anthropology tent needs to be expanded to include any of these. There is nothing about the discipline that is -worth saying or worth putting public funds toward- which is humanistic by necessity.
Unlike literature or philosophy or other humanistic pursuits, there exist empirical things which can be said about the cultures that anthropologists propose to study and to say anything else should either be done under the auspices of a new branch of philosophy or should be reserved for the writing of fiction or editorials.
In other words, where it is difficult to uncouple the other humanities from the humanistic approach–which is what makes studying them as humanities legitimate, that difficulty does not exist with anthropology or, say, chemistry, and hence anything speaking in the humanistic dimension of these disciplines is what should be jettisoned–not the language which makes these parts of the field feel unincluded, which they should feel.