Since my own discipline of anthropology was featured in the controversial Vanderbilt-WashU report, and not in a good way, it’s time to add some backstory, especially since it took a turn for the worse with the recent Chronicle of Higher Ed interview with American Anthropology Association (AAA) President Carolyn Rouse. Disastrous is one way to describe it.
The Vanderbilt report put more than a few anthropologists into a defensive panic. It accused the discipline of abandoning objectivity, becoming overly politicized, and censoring dissenting voices. I didn’t have a role in the report, but I was part of an effort by a group of anthropologist four year ago that issued a “letter of concern” about the discipline, with many of the same complaints. The report used as evidence a quote from Fernando Villanea, published in the American Anthropologist, which has become a point of contention:
the value of anthropology is not the pursuit of truth, because all truth is subjective”, but rather to “serve the interests” of people who have been harmed by anthropologists in the past.
I only realized recently that this crucial quote was actually a response to our 2022 letter of concern.
This abandonment of science in favor of activism is one of the things we were concerned about. The authors of the Vanderbilt report rightfully pointed out the major problems with this abandonment.
We’ve seen this happen over the last decades in anthropology. I recall a AAA session in the late 1990s, when I was in graduate school. It was a panel on the 1996 welfare reform law, signed by Bill Clinton. I was hoping to see a good discussion about the law, which was generally seen by the public as a good, but certainly debatable move. Every single panelist, however, decried the law and its supposedly horrific effects. The debate over this law persists to this day among academics (not the public), but it’s clear that people across the political spectrum were not happy with large numbers of people staying on AFDC (welfare) for long periods of time without any conditions.
This is just one example of many. The issue of biological sex (binary or not?) is another one that “right-thinking” anthropologists have attempted to shut down. Anthropologists have also been resolutely anti-American, when a good debate should have a mix of the positive and negative.
Anthropology needs a self-reckoning, but I am not optimistic this will happen. Other disciplines are troubled, like sociology, which I have also taught and published in. The American Sociology Association (ASA) recently had a presidential election where a reform candidate, opposing the politicization of that discipline, lost 37% to 51% to the winner. I can’t imagine a reform candidate in AAA getting anywhere close to that percent. That is partly because many people (like myself) have left the AAA out of frustration with the association.
Anthropology is often left out of important public debates because anthropologists are predictably one-sided, and often extreme. Their attempt to be moral purists means that they can’t deal with the trade-offs or compromises involved in any public policy. Few people think they can offer anything worthwhile to the public debate, with a few exceptions like Joseph Henrich, the anthropologist on the Vanderbilt committee that wrote the report.
Anthropology is a special discipline, and it doesn’t deserve this fate. It is a unique mix of scientific and humanistic approaches, ranging from biological anthropology and archaeology to important issues like cultural relativism (which is not an either/or but a question of degree) and the symbols and meaning of life that people express around the world. We need to understand cultural differences, but most anthropologists seem to have dropped the ball on this one, in favor of simplistic narratives that pit oppressor vs oppressed. Disparities in wealth, health or other factors are seen through a lens of discrimination or oppression, when evidence shows it is much more complex and includes cultural differences. Anthropologists could do a good job of combining analyses of structural, cultural and individual factors, but this would complicate their simplistic political narratives.
Will our discipline reform? Or will it take on another form, either being split up between the scientific or humanistic approaches (as has happened in some places), or redefined as something like global studies. But anthropology, by definition, studies “the human.” It’s too bad that it is falling down on the job.
Our proposal to reform higher ed, with specific steps, is a long term approach that would help right the situation, while also resisting interference in higher ed by politicians, often from the political right. It would not only help anthropology, but higher ed as a whole.
"A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ‘merely relative,’ is asking you not to believe him. So don’t."
-- Sir Roger Scruton in his Modern Philosophy: An Introduction and Survey
What saddened me about the presidents response (as well as the recent interview about the rebuttal: https://www.chronicle.com/article/is-anthropology-hopelessly-politicized), is that the Vanderbilt report didn't initiate any sort of reflection or introspection about the future of our discipline. I like to think that anthropologists have a particular penchant for that introspection, as it's been cultivated with care over the whole of its existence. Instead of that introspection, however, we get a growingly typical defense mechanism: the report served as a derogatory symbol around which solidarity is gathered ...