Anthropology On The Down Escalator

Targeting the Israeli Academy: Will Anthropologists Have the Courage to Just Say “No”?

If the proposal to shun and stigmatize Israeli academic institutions becomes official policy they, like the Jews of Germany in the 1930s, will not feel at home in their own society. Some will resign from the AAA, pack up and leave. Some already have. Others will just resign themselves to melancholy reflection on the late great discipline of cultural anthropology, recalling how their profession first gave up on positive science and then exchanged its humanistic soul for the soft porn of partisan identity politics.

The pro-boycott activists are galvanized. They have the courage of their conviction that Israel is a neo-colonial apartheid regime and its academic institutions complicit in the activities of the State. They view anthropology as a platform for political engagement and postcolonial social critique. They argue that Israel is a predacious Goliath undeserving of international support. They are energized by the prospect of receiving a corporate branding and seal of approval for their political judgments from a large academic association. Faced with the reality of Israeli scholars who are members of the AAA, boycott supporters sustain their sense of moral purpose by trying to convince others (and themselves) that their resolution merely discriminates against Israeli academic institutions but will not target individuals. They feel good, even righteous, about the many petty but highly provocative prohibitions in the boycott resolution, for example, the injunction against “granting permission to copy and reprint articles from AAA publications to journals and publications based at Israeli institutions.” There are no tears in their eyes when they advocate a censor’s restriction on the free flow of ideas as just collective punishment.

Those opposing the boycott resolution have the courage of a different set of convictions. They view the call to avoid contact with Israeli academic institutions as an outrageous violation of academic freedom norms, including the principle that participation in the world-wide academy is open to all regardless of nationality, race or creed. They believe the voting process itself is corrosive of academic values, that a professional scholarly association does not need a foreign policy for the Holy Land or anywhere else and should be committed to free thought and disciplined inquiry, not collective political action. When it comes to contestable political and social issues they do not cede authority to the AAA to make corporate declarations about what is right-minded and true. They prefer to speak for themselves, especially since the AAA is not a homogeneous political bloc. It is a disputatious community of scholars who differ in their causal analyses, assignments of blame, and proposed solutions to any political conflict. Collective political branding is viewed by many boycott opponents as an act of institutional violence committed against the intellectual autonomy of those members of the guild who disagree with the proposed party line. They believe that institutional neutrality on hot button social and political issues enables free thought.

The charge of apartheid against Israel is laughable, especially considering both Israel's multicutural democracy, and considering the elitist attempt to exclude Israel from their own "scholarly" enterprise. It would seem that actual Anthropologists would be aware of the reality of the Palestinian promise to wipe Israel off the map and to claim all the region under Islamic Palestine. Given that they cannot understand even that most basic issue, then it is the BDS Leftist faux anthropologists who should be run out of the organization. Hopefully, that is what will happen.

Anthropology Drops Its Claim to Science

According to the NY Times,

"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 change acknowledges that there are factions within Anthropology which are not scientific.

This now leads to internal turmoil even greater than before:

"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."

In recent times even the science aspect of Anthropology has again come under attack in a manner similar to those attacks on Margaret Mead's ideological interpretations of Samoa. The problem arises with three considerations. First, truly objective science does not change the characteristics of the object being studied. Second, human-derived structures are not the same as naturally occurring, elemental structures, especially in terms of consistency and adherence to deterministic cause and effect. Third, human subjects deserve respect. Anthropology tends to run afoul of all of these considerations, with some participants more egregious than others.

The Times mentions the issue of Napoleon Chagnon's studies of the Yanomamis, a primitive tribe of tens of thousands living in villages spread across the borders of Brazil and Venezuela. Chagnon portrayed the Yanomami as being a "fierce" and violent culture, fighting each other for possession of the best women (an evolutionary precept). Others, including students of the Yanomami, claim that this is not the case, and in fact, such a characterization damages the Yanomami people:

"The ways in which anthropologists portray the societies they study have consequences, sometimes serious consequences in the real world. Indigenous societies have all too often been maligned in the past, denigrated as savages and marginalized at the edges of the modern world and the modern societies in it. It is not therefore a trivial matter to insist on the fierceness of a people or to maintain that they represent an especially primitive stage in human evolution. Chagnon has not done this inadvertently to the Yanomami. On the contrary, he has done so deliberately, systematically, and over a long period of time, in spite of the remonstrances of his fellow anthropologists."

The study of humans is unlike the study of mass-energy. Intrusions into a primitive society are not without producing secondary effects which are hardly quantifiable, yet can be significant.

Science is a self-limited endeavor. Maybe it has too much influence given its limitations. And maybe that influence has been envied by those engaging in other study methods, including the forensic and historical methods of investigation, which have their intellectual place but are not empirical in the experimental sense.

The "social studies" of my youth somehow morphed into the "social sciences". Perhaps that error is now being corrected.