Bias In Anthropology

I have just finished War Before Civilization by Lawrence Keeley (there will be a post on that later today), who accuses any number of anthropologists of misreading the data in accordance with their philosophical biases.  I mention again, this level of scathe occurs more frequently than I expected among anthropologists.

(I mentioned this to my brother who assured me that the average faculty meeting does not even rise to that level of discussing academic topics, even poorly and viciously. That would be a relief.)

Yet I should expect it. In the physical sciences, in math or in much of engineering, the implications for how we should live are usually remote.  People might have something personal tied up in whether the ideas they have been announcing have turned out to be true or their career has been largely wasted, but that it is largely pride. The answers don't greatly impact how one should vote, or whether to have children, or how much responsibility we have to others.  At most, they have some philosophical or theological implications, which in turn might influence whether one believes in a god, and what kind.  But even this is usually oversold, raising no new questions but merely asking the old ones in more complicated ways.

Perhaps physicists and the occasional mathematician gets overexcited by this and just have to write a book on the topic because they feel left out.  All the biologists and sociologists get to play with the fun questions, why not us?

Climate and nutrition become political topics because they involve themselves with the questions of how people are supposed to live.  It quickly becomes apparent that the disputants are not merely arguing data, they are contending for one side or the other in the grand questions of what Society is supposed to do, or what Humankind is all about.

We used to have a lot more of that in mental health.  The long reign of the Freudians and their cousins was coming to an end, replaced by what was then sneeringly called the Medical Model, which was armed with medications which actually did relieve the symptoms of some people. It now appears that an entire century's trend in psychology grew up mostly because intellectuals in Europe, then America, wanted desperately to believe that it was all about secret sexual desires. Which is much more fun to talk about than receptors, eh?

That wasn't the work of a few psychiatrists, BTW.  That idea became dominant because people wanted it to. The culture wanted something like that, and so it was given to them.  This involved ignoring what was already known, and setting human understanding back by decades, but what is that, compared to being a Kinsey, hailed as a scientist while sponsoring the molestation of children, and giving your own sexual practices cultural justification?