“You can go to Guatemala and hang out with terrorists…”

I’d like to congratulate Diane Nelson of Duke University for being one of the select one hundred and one professors singled out in David Horowitz’ new book: The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America!

She gets special mention because she is not only in women’s studies, but is also … gasp … a … cultural anthropologist!

Usually the fields end in “studies”: women’s studies, black studies, religious studies — one of the worst fields in the country — whiteness studies, queer studies, peace studies, global studies, cultural studies, all different forms of Marxism and various derivative radical doctrines.

They’ve destroyed the field of cultural anthropology (the study of other cultures). What they’ve turned it into is, well, Marxism again. You can go to Guatemala and hang out with terrorists and other quote “progressive” unquote groups, write up your experiences and publish them as a book, throw in a few Frenchified words like “imbrication” and invent some other nonwords like “fluidarity” — which is kind of solidarity but across borders — refer to yourself as a “gringa,” and you’ll become a tenured professor at Duke, like Diane Nelson, who is a director of undergraduate studies in the cultural anthropology department with a degree from Stanford.

Horowitz considers nearly all of contemporary social theory to be “some version of Marxism,” including “feminism, post-structuralism, post-modernism.” Presumably there was a pre-Marxist golden age of cultural anthropology before it was “destroyed” by such theories. Since he hates post-structuralism I suppose that the structuralists were OK. But many of the early Marxist anthropologists structuralists, so presumably even structuralism is tainted and we need to go back even earlier … I wish Horowitz would write another book telling us which social theories are acceptable so that we all know what to teach!

P. Kerim Friedman is an assistant professor in the Department of Ethnic Relations and Cultures at National Dong Hwa University, in Taiwan, where he teaches linguistic and visual anthropology. He is co-director of the film Please Don't Beat Me, Sir!, winner of the 2011 Jean Rouch Award from the Society of Visual Anthropology. Follow Kerim on Twitter.