My good friend Peter Wood earned his Ph.D. in anthropology, a discipline that studies “how we emerged as a species and how we have diversified into thousands of languages, tribes, and civilizations.” Sadly, he writes in this Minding the Campus essay, his field has fallen under the spell of political hucksters who use anthropology to spread notions that are useful to their agenda.
A strong piece of evidence in that regard is the current issue of Anthropology News, which features four predictable pieces about the Ferguson shooting. They’re all just about the leftist trope that America is awash in racism. The four pieces are highly tendentious and ignore facts that aren’t consistent with the line the authors are pushing. As Wood writes, “The ‘anthropology’ on display in these articles and in a great many more such declarations is a profound misappropriation of an intellectual discipline.”
What this makes me think about is how much anthropology could use the kind of daring article that Professor Richard Redding highlighted for the Pope Center in this piece. Redding extolled an article written by six scholars in social psychology who lament the increasing intellectual conformity they see in their field, with a narrow range of leftist ideas now acceptable and all others beyond the pale. Anthropology clearly needs the same thing.