Comments on: Around the Web

By: Teal

Teal — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 19:20:20 +0000

Hmmmmm, I was just reading about Boas and Political Correctness in Anthropology, well, he was mentioned as a champion of PC anyway. I can’t believe that the science of anthropology has become so indoctrinated by ‘PC” that there is no discussion of race, when there is obviously a ton of scientists who study culture and race. Darwin’s Natural selection book was about race, and he mentioned he thought the ‘British’ were “superior” (because of self-control etc.), a claim echoed by Steven J Gould in one of his books.

http://wsi.matriots.com/anthropology.html
Anthropology and Race

In the past, anthropologists talked and wrote about the various differences between the human races. But after World War II that became much harder to do, since after that war descriptions of racial differences came to be viewed as “Nazi-like” in much of Western society.

Sadly, in the Western countries today, the field of anthropology is filled with professors who either deny or downplay the significance of racial differences in humans. Those professors insist that race is either meaningless or nearly so, and that race is merely a social construct instead of a key physical feature. They insist that a person’s environmental surroundings, not his race, is the central factor in whether or not he is successful in life [note: there is a lot of evidence suggesting that genetics play a vital role in human intelligence and therefore human success] [1].

In other words, modern anthropology has become “politically correct,” and is therefore frequently driven by leftist political ideas and not by scientific facts.[2] Additionally, it has been noticed by more than a few experts in the field that the transformation of anthropology from science-based to politically-

By: seth edenbaum

seth edenbaum — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 04:29:38 +0000

Boas looks silly because he’s not a good performer. He’s an academic trying to be an an actor.
“anthropologists looking ridiculous and going native.”
That’s a misunderstanding, but it’s also just offensive.

By: Stephen Robertson

Stephen Robertson — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 04:25:43 +0000

For those interested, the photographic series from which that portrait of Boas comes is discussed in more context in an entry on the Material World blog from a couple years back – http://blogs.nyu.edu/projects/materialworld/2006/10/on_the_circulation_of_ethnogra.html.

By: jay sosa

jay sosa — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 13:28:56 +0000

MTBradley,

I couldn’t agree more. I think it was Baudelaire (or was it Britney Spears?) who said that laughter expresses both the arrogance that another person’s tragedy is not your own and the anxiety that it could be soon. Maybe it’s part of the social order to laugh at those who precede you and be the target of laughter by those who follow you. If I became famous enough to be the subject of jokes 100 years from now, however, I’d be very satisfied.

By: MTBradley

MTBradley — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 05:17:34 +0000

The Slate article is perhaps a textbook definition of presentism. For some reason a good number of anthropologists who otherwise espouse relativism—”I know it seems distasteful, but…”—have no trouble whatsoever totally divorcing certain persons and events from their social and historical context—”This is distasteful because…” and then beating up on a straw man way too dead to defend himself, thereby implying that anthropology today does not suffer from such unenlightened sensibilities. But as was pointed out on the Olympic thread, it took eighteen posts before anyone mentioned that there are some serious issues with the Olympics TODAY. But who needs to talk about the contemporary socially sanctioned display of Aryan brotherhood that is the Winter Olympics when we can talk about the 1904 Olympics instead?

Ditto for the comment that Boas is looking ridiculous in the posted image. To paraphrase my adviser in the course of his lecture about Morgan in my History of Anthropology seminar, “It’s easy to laugh at all of this today, but we’re all people interested in watching other people, and that is always easy to make fun of.”

I have the good sense to defer to anything Tim Pauketat has to say about Cahokia, but I visited the park there a couple of years ago and was more than pleasantly surprised by the museum. (And you can’t help but be blown away by the grounds. But beware the ticks! I kept finding them for hours after I left.) I grew up on the border of the NPS’s most visited park and Cahokia was considerably more inspired and less rundown than I am accustomed to from the federal government.