Physical Anthropologist Robert Lynch over at The Laughing Ape" highlights some of the extreme deterioration of evidence-based scholarship in his field. We have heard stories like this, but it is interesting to see how some sectors are much worse than others. How Anthropology Lost Interest in the People it was Founded to Understand.
I was already used to the massive differences between the two wings of anthropology, and all the jargon (e.g. embodied subjectivity, intersectionality, structural violence, hegemonic knowledge production), but was still surprised when the cultural anthropology students went up one after the other and explained what they were going to find. Not what they were hoping to understand, or learn, or test, or discover, but what they were going to find. Here is an excerpt from a typical defense that was read1 to us called “Portside Synaesthetics: Sensing the Politics of Place”:
“Architectural models and projections in Marseille are experienced as uncanny, rather than as communicative… Based on the ethnographic evidence, I argue that there is progressive potential in taking seriously the impacts material ‘objects’ have on human ‘subjects.’”
There were no questions. No hypotheses. No data to be collected, let alone analyzed. There were claims about arguments being “based on the ethnographic evidence,” but no evidence was ever cited. Conclusions were drawn from a series of assertions. It sounded like they were all already done and weren’t seeking to learn anything at all. I remember asking one why they were even bothering to go into the field at all.
This is not a political essay. Most physical anthropologists are liberal as well. The registration is 42:1 of Democrats to Republicans among anthropologists in general.
2 comments:
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I wrote some junk of this sort at the beginning of my academic career. All I can say in my defense is that I later saw that it was junk and stopped writing it. I would not blame the silly graduate students in cultural anthropology because they are ignorant and the faculty of their graduate programs egg them on. This "literature" flourishes because it is easy and cheap to produce, although no one (including the student's graduate committee) actually reads it. All you have to do is learn a jargon and apply this barbarous vocabulary to some segment of the world, perhaps without even visiting it. It is a something like learning a foreign language, but much easier, since the vocabulary is small and the grammar all but nonexistent. Professors will make it harder by mystifying everything with bad explanations, but it all comes down to calling everyday things by weird academical names.
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