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I wasn’t trying to say that there aren’t struggles over epistemological authority in other fields, but rather that anthropology occupies a somewhat tenuous position between science (hard or soft) and the humanities and that this position makes questions of authenticity a little more difficult to work out. Beyond official academic credentials the question quickly moves from “who is an anthropologist?” to “what is anthropology?”

In the case of Diamond’s piece, it is both “bad” anthropology and “unethical” anthropology. Even if Diamond had changed the names of Wemp and others, and collected the information under informed consent, his article would still be vulgar and reductionist. At least Levi-Strauss disguised his Rousseauian tendencies with interesting analyses.

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First, as I obliquely was suggesting in my random stats above, it seems to me clear that “hard” scientists are just as concerned about who is or is not a scientist as anthropologists are—perhaps more so. Global warming, teaching of evolution, pharmaceuticals: these issues spark constant discussions in civil society and bear heavily on the rhetoric of who and who is not a qualified scientist. The issue, I think, has not much to do with experiments or quantification at all, because often the audience is neither competent nor willing to deeply investigate the methodology used. That’s kind of the point of having public scientists/intellectuals to explain, discuss, and debate these things. So boundary making is not necessarily bad (though it can be). There is a Wayne Booth article online somewhere which, while not about this exactly, is sort of related.

Second, to really push this analogy with ecology, it has to be in some sense comparable. The debate is not only about “bad” anthropology but about “unethical” anthropology. Therefore an adequate comparison would be more than just “bad” ecology, it would be “unethical” ecology. I don’t exactly know what ethical guidelines ecologists work by, but I imagine they must exist. For example, if someone needlessly burned a large tract of old growth forest just so they could write an interesting “ecology” article on forest fires in the New Yorker, ecologists might not much like that either (at least among the ecologists I know). Especially if it gave the impression that this is standard practice among ecologists. Every field has some kind of ethics and most take them seriously, as far as I know. I’m not sure that the results of bad anthropology are more serious than in other field, but rather that those outside of anthropology usually fail to realize that they are important at all (doesn’t help that anthropologists sometimes muddy the water on this front…)

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I will concede that some anthropologists may be experiencing sour grapes about Diamond’s popularity, but there is a serious and legitimate difference between ecology and anthropology. Anthropology for decades now has moved far away from positivist analyses of human societies, although the journals are peer-reviewed, there is no ideal of experimental method that allows for the evaluation of what is “good” anthropology and what is “bad” anthropology. Instead we have a rough, heterogeneous set of methodologies, generalized as “participant observation,” a collection of operating procedures (such as redacting the names of informants, as under discussion here) and a standard of ethics. Anthropologists respond so vociferously when the discipline’s stamp of authenticity is abused because the standards are maintained with the hermeneutic and discursive, instead of the quantifiable and experimental.

Besides, lest we forget, anthropology is the study of people. While I have my own non-anthropocentric tendencies, there are (arguably) more severe consequences when bad anthropology is published (or faux-anthropology in this case) than there ever could be with bad ecology. Wemp and Isum are real people.

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Results 1 – 10 of about 331,000 for “is not a doctor”. (0.23 seconds)
Results 1 – 10 of about 71,200 for “is not a scientist”. (0.09 seconds)
Results 1 – 10 of about 21,600 for “is not an economist”. (0.32 seconds)
Results 1 – 10 of about 19,000 for “is not a biologist”. (0.08 seconds)
Results 1 – 10 of about 13,200 for “is not a physicist”. (0.20 seconds)
Results 1 – 10 of about 12,900 for “is not a psychologist”. (0.25 seconds)
Results 1 – 10 of about 9,030 for “is not a chemist”. (0.22 seconds)
Results 1 – 10 of about 4,670 for “is not an archaeologist”. (0.22 seconds)
Results 1 – 10 of about 4,420 for “is not an anthropologist”. (0.08 seconds)
Results 1 – 10 of about 2,000 for “is not a sociologist”. (0.30 seconds)
Results 1 – 10 of about 1,480 for “is not an ecologist”. (0.12 seconds)
Results 1 – 8 of 8 for “is not an otolaryngologist”. (0.23 seconds)

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It is striking how much importance is attached in this and other posts on this blog to whether Diamond is or is not an anthropologist, and whether an article in New Yorker from an Annals of Anthropology section is or is not giving anthropology a bad name.

It gives an impression that anthropology is not a very confident discipline if its practicioners are so easily thrown off balance by an article in New Yorker. I am a biologist active in ecology and you would not believe what is being published as “ecology” all the time in all kinds of places, but we ecologists have just learned not even notice. I cannot imagine any article published in Annals of Ecology in New Yorker (if there is indeed such a thing) upsetting professional ecologists.

Interesting fields, such as anthropology or ecology, attract a diversity of practicioners. This is ultimately to their benefit, even if it means that the purity of the brand is hard to control. Consider for instance the Indiana Jones phenomenon – many archeologists are upset about this somewhat imprecise portrayal of archeological research protocols, others love the contribution to the popularity of archeology (to the point of making Harrison Ford a member of the American Archaeological Society), attracting enthusiastic students to the field. If you want to control the purity of your field, work in otholaryngology or other boring specialty and it will not be a problem.

I would say Diamond made huge service to anthropology by his books (leaving the present case aside) as he popularized it probably more than any professional anthropologist alive. This is not to say he is a star anthropologist – in fact, he is a star biologist who expanded his interest into anthropology. This is the secret of his writing – human societies are a product of both biology and culture so a good synthesis needs to take into account both. Diamond is certainly a better biologist than anthropologist, but the point is that he is probably better at anthropology than most anthropologists are at biology, and that is why they have hard time competing with Diamond for public attention when it comes to the analysis of human societies.

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But like Maniaku too I’m really uneasy about big, categorical statements like “Revenge in the Western sense simply does not exist in the highlands of New Guinea” – both because it would take a lot to show that one or another type of revenge does not exist at all in a complex, living culture like PNG’s and because, reciprocally, as far as I know there’s no single, coherent entity we can call ‘revenge in the Western sense’.

I mean, I get it that the stereotypes that need the most scrutiny are the colonialist ones, but I don’t see much illumination in flipping the telescope and looking out the narrow end in the other direction. Just off the top of my head, ‘Western’ responses to revengeable situations range from Germanic restitutive Weregild to the general practice of gift, land and bride exchange in the conclusion of peace treaties at the family and state levels, to really elaborate multi-generational clan and client-network blood-feuds in Sicily, Calabria, Sardinia, etc.. Formally, most instances of Western law include both a punitive criminal law and a restitutive civil law, not to mention more or less formal arbitration and mediation systems, and the situations that engage one, the other or a combination vary quite widely.

In private practice there are/were also a wide range of accepted strategies for dealing with offense, directly or by proxy, more or less ritualized, from personal duels (with weapons and rules varying quite a bit by class, gender, region, scale of offense, etc.) to gang wars, to carnivals, cockfights and horse races.

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bq. As someone whose undergraduate education was very strongly in the British tradition and who still focuses on things political and sociological, I would actually be hard-pressed to provide you an account of the newest, latest work in psychological anthropology which described how, exactly, culture is the eggs when it comes to emotion—if there is someone who specializes in that topic who wants to post about it here, I’d appreciate them doing so.

I would also appreciate an update from anyone in touch with what is going on in psychological anthropology these days.

Even without it, though, it seems to me that there is plenty of ethnography demonstrating that vendetta and feud are common around the world. There are places where a man would be called a coward for failing to take appropriate vengeance and others where private vengeance is outlawed or considered a sin. There are even places where it has been both at once. Doesn’t anyone read Mark Twain anymore or remember the Hatfields and McCoys? Or remember Hamilton and Burr or U.S. President Andrew Jackson, whose mother taught him that a man unwilling to kill in defense of his honor was no man at all?

I have no desire whatsoever to defend Jared Diamond. But why, oh why, I wonder do so many anthropologists these days sound like the social scientists lampooned in _West Side Story_. Remember “Officer Krupsky…”?

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All sorts of emotions swirl around the notion ‘vengeance,’ of course. I suppose a thorough study of them would presuppose an inventory of local emotions. Has any such studies been done in PNG?

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Sorry for the cheek.

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Anyway, I’ve now read the New Yorker article and not quite sure that my original points were right. Perhaps the thing that startled me the most was that he claims anthropology has found that interpersonal violence was much greater in non-states than it is in states. It seems pretty important since the entire piece rests on this assertion. My impulse is that this is not true, but then I guess it’s an empirical question of which I am not completely up-to-date on the research. But even more, its just stated as if its a given, when in fact I doubt its the kind of thing that people who actually researched such a thing could settle beyond any doubt. If I was going to say why this article isn’t “anthropological” it would be because it seems to have a sort of cavalier attitude towards actual social/historical facts and data, and what controversies might surround them. For me, it reads like the frustrating conversations you have with non-anthropologist relatives over the holidays, a sort of “Well, it seems to me like states are a pretty good idea, otherwise everyone would go around just killing each other… I had this uncle…” Some might call this a colonialist approach; to me, it seems just unscientific (I wish for a better word so as not to turn this into a discussion about capital-S Science, but alas, a better alternative is not coming to me right now).

Further, it seems, not incidentally, to be the same sort of cavalier attitude he has towards Daniel Wemp, at least in the article.

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Although Maniaku’s comments seem to indicate that I invoke the notion of “different worldviews” or “incommensurability” or the idea that “Revenge in the Western sense simply does not exist in the highlands of New Guinea” I think if you reread my piece I say nothing of the sort. Perhaps if one is expecting a dust-up between American and British impulses then it would be easy to read these into my comments.

I can go into why I think social institutions are also cultural institutions if you like.

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