“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!

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

  1. Yeah. We need to go back to the golden age of anthropology, back when it was untainted by Marxism. Oh, the days of Childe and Wolff, who had nothing to do with Marxism.

    Marxism and anthropology have been linked since Marx–look at Marx’ stuff on the state and the family–it’s notes he took on Morgan, for god’s sake!

  2. If anyone’s as interested as I was, the full list can be found here . I wish I knew more (any?) of these professors/their works, but alas I am a young one, and my university isn’t listed (obviously I chose the wrong school, we just aren’t living up to our subversive potential).

    Whatever happened to the good old days of critical thinking in students, the kind that automatically undermines any “indoctrination” in the wake of actual thought?

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