Anthropology a Science? Statement Deepens a Rift

Anthropologists have been thrown into turmoil about the nature and future of their profession after a decision by the American Anthropological Association at its recent annual meeting to strip the word “science” from a statement of its long-range plan.

The decision has reopened a long-simmering tension between researchers in science-based anthropological disciplines — including archaeologists, physical anthropologists and some cultural anthropologists — and members of the profession who study race, ethnicity and gender and see themselves as advocates for native peoples or human rights.

Dr. Peregrine, who is at Lawrence University in Wisconsin, said in an interview that the dropping of the references to science “just blows the top off” the tensions between the two factions. “Even if the board goes back to the old wording, the cat’s out of the bag and is running around clawing up the furniture,” he said.

He attributed what he viewed as an attack on science to two influences within anthropology. One is that of so-called critical anthropologists, who see anthropology as an arm of colonialism and therefore something that should be done away with. The other is the postmodernist critique of the authority of science. “Much of this is like creationism in that it is based on the rejection of rational argument and thought,” he said.

Dr. Dominguez denied that critical anthropologists or postmodernist thinking had influenced the new statement. She said in an e-mail that she was aware that science-oriented anthropologists had from time to time expressed worry about and disapproval of their nonscientific colleagues. “Marginalization is never a welcome experience,” she said.

[Excerpted from link below] ...It is part of the ethos of designer tribalism to foist all of one’s own attitudes and longings onto the apparently blank canvas of whatever primitive populace happens to be in vogue at the moment. To some extent, this is simply a matter of ignorance, as illustrated, for example, by Christopher Columbus’s report that the people he discovered “are very gentle, and know nothing of evil.” But the culture cultist supplements ignorance with heavy helpings of ideology and idealization. He looks at an exotic culture and, lo and behold, he finds himself looking into a flattering mirror. This is one reason that natives always seem to be non-smoking, vegetarian, sex-worshipping, drug-taking, eco-conscious, progressive-thinking pacifists—according, anyway, to the press releases distributed by the culture cultists.

Sandall speaks in this context of anthropology’s tendency to “normalize the primitive while treating civilization as aberrant.” Consider the Maoris. In contemporary New Zealand, Sandall notes, one finds “a miscellaneous army of teachers, academics, government servants, clergy, radical lawyers, progressive judges, journalists, and numerous other bien pensants promot[ing] the revival of traditional Maori culture even more fanatically than the Maori do themselves.” He cites an Anglican priest who rails against the “monocultural grip on all our institutions” that British colonialism supposedly still exerts (if only!), and cites various teachers who wish to return the education of Maori children to the tribes. In the background is a rose-tinted view of the Maoris as a peace-loving, ecologically conscious, spiritually delicate people who have been abused for two centuries by hard-bitten, materialistic Europeans.

In fact, the ecological record of the Maoris would not win any plaudits from the Sierra Club. Shortly after paddling up to New Zealand in their canoes eight-hundred years ago, the Maori indiscriminately burned huge swathes of forest. They also decimated the wildlife. Actually, “decimate” is far too weak a word. Within a short time, Sandall notes, some 30 percent of the bird life on New Zealand had become extinct thanks to the depredations of the Maoris. All twelve species of moa, for example, a large, flightless bird without natural predators before the Maori arrived, became extinct some six-hundred years ago. According to Sandall, it was perhaps the fastest megafaunal extinction ever recorded. Not that the Maori were particular about where they got their protein. Divided into numerous tribes, they were incessantly at war. Prisoners were routinely baked and eaten. But all of this is papered over. And even as the Maori past is systematically distorted and rewritten, so their future is jeopardized by government policies that, in the name of “bi-culturalism” and preserving tribal customs, dooms its beneficiaries to a life of second-class citizenship.

Sandall is at his best when puncturing over-inflated reputations. Many of his subjects, it is true, have been repeatedly punctured before. Somehow, though, the gas keeps seeping back in, so new puncturings are always in order. For example, it is pretty well known today that Margaret Mead’s book Coming of Age in Samoa (1928) should be filed under fiction, not anthropology. Mead herself acknowledged that in populating the South Seas with sexual libertines she was pushing speculation “to the limit of acceptability.” But Mead’s book, along with Ruth Benedict’s investigation of the pueblo life of the Zuni in Patterns of Culture (1934, another work of what Sandall calls “didactic semifiction”), was immensely influential. Both were part of the tsunami that legitimized “the bohemian counterculture of Greenwich Village,” first in the universities and then in the 1960s in the culture at large. We cannot be too frequently reminded that what was presented as anthropology is really a species of fantasy. [End Excerpt] The perils of designer tribalism

This fight has been going on in anthropology for at least a century, and has lots of colorful permutations.

Two of my favorites are first, when Margaret Mead was totally suckered by the Samoans. It has long been a socialist wet dream to find people living “in the state of nature”, ever since the idea was thought up by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Such people would be happy, healthy, and very slutty, having no sexual inhibitions at all. The trouble is that such people do not exist, and have never existed.

Well, MM decided she could “objectively”, white coat and clipboard interview the Samoans about their sexuality, to see how inhibited they were. Yet the smiling, giggling Samoans confessed to such a totally uninhibited lifestyle, that MM finally thought she had discovered “the tribe in nature”. And of course, other socialists were thrilled to death.

In truth, the Samoans are just slightly more prudish than are most people, but they have a refined sense of humor, something also not found in “the state of nature.” In other words, they played her like a banjo. Only years later when some real anthropologist went to confirm her “research”, was it discovered that the Samoans had made a fool out of her.

The other case was the flip side to this, a man by the name of Carlos Castaneda, whose very name still elicits angry derision and contempt from some, but not all, anthropologists even today.

He began his career in earnest by trying to write his PhD thesis before it had been assigned to him, on the study of the use of hallucinogens by the Indians of the American southwest. This was quickly derailed when he found, or said he’d found, a much more interesting subject: a Yaqui-Yuma Indian man alleged to be a sorcerer and seer. A shaman, of which nothing was known of either him or his world.

His extensive writings about his encounter with this individual and his unheard of reality were huge popular bestselling books. They also generated enormous acrimony in the anthropological community.

This is because, if you look through the content, the books offer a devastating critique of the Margaret Mead school of anthropology. They assert that it is impossible for an anthropologist to objectively view others and to accurately interpret what they are doing, because they lack the inner knowledge, the world view, of their subjects.

This created a schism as profound as that between Newtonian and Quantum physicists.

Inside and outside of anthropology this caused an explosion of people wanting to learn the “hidden knowledge” of any number of cultures and peoples, in some cases before those people went extinct.

Castaneda also became a driving force behind the New Age movement, though he openly derided it, and wanted nothing to do with such people, because he provided a recipe, of sorts, of how an ordinary person could become superhuman.

At his peak, anthropologists were having fistfights over it all, creating mountains of bitter personal acrimony in their emotionally invested schools of thought.

Again, these are just two of the stories from the last 100 years or so.

$10K spiritual warrior experience in Sedona, AZ.....follow the money.

[Excerpt] Ray’s attorneys have said the deaths are tragic accidents, not criminal acts.

The hearing continued Wednesday with testimony from Mercer’s wife, two sweat lodge participants and a sheriff’s detective.

The Mercers were stationed outside sweat lodges that Ray led from 2007-2009, tending to heated rocks and sending them through a flap and into the center of the sweat lodge. Ray then would pour water of the rocks, sending steam rushing through the structure in a ceremony typically used by American Indians to cleanse the body.

Ted Mercer said he saw more and more people in distress over the years, including a man who thought he was having a heart attack, people whose eyes were rolled back, a woman who went into convulsions and others who couldn’t say who or where they were after exiting the sweat lodge.

“It always concerned me when people were coming out landing in the dirt face first and you would have to drag them away from the door,” he said.

Defense attorney Luis Li repeatedly flashed pictures on an overhead projector of participants smiling, being hosed off with water and flashing their biceps, asking if those were some of the same people that Mercer said were distressed.

“When they were in distress, we weren’t taking pictures, we were helping them,” Mercer said. “A lot of these people come around.”

Amayra Hamilton, the co-owner of the retreat where Ray held the sweat lodge ceremonies, testified that Ray wanted the lodges increasingly bigger and hotter over the years and shot down suggestions that separate ceremonies be conducted for larger groups. State lines up witnesses in sweat lodge deaths hearing

"Not that the Maori were particular about where they got their protein. Divided into numerous tribes, they were incessantly at war. Prisoners were routinely baked and eaten. But all of this is papered over. And even as the Maori past is systematically distorted and rewritten, so their future is jeopardized by government policies that, in the name of “bi-culturalism” and preserving tribal customs, dooms its beneficiaries to a life of second-class citizenship."

My neighbor is from New Zealand and he says that the Maori ARE different.

Maori Men And Women From Different Homelands

Violence Is Blamed On 'Warrior Gene' In The Maoris

BTW, my neighbors favorite sports team is the All Blacks which have many Maoris as players.

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