Right Wing Nation

Back in the … er, let’s just say several decades ago and leave it at that, when I chose my undergraduate major, I was interested in cultures, and therefore, chose anthropology. The department at my university had no undergraduate courses for majors; we took the same courses as the grad students, with different course numbers.

In my department, there were four concentrations: cultural anthropology, anthropological linguistics, archaeology, and bioanthropology. I initially wanted to concentrate in either cultural anthropology or anthropological linguistics.

Departmental politics were nasty in the department (and what undergrad even realizes that there are departmental politics?) and we were pulled into the politics more than undergrads usually are, because we were taking graduate courses. The one anthropological linguist aligned herself with the cultural anthropologists, who at the time held all the power in the department. The bioanthropologists and the archaeologists were banished to the top floor of the building, so the “real” anthropologists didn’t have to deal with them.

If you know anything about anthropology, particularly cultural anthropology, yes, I know what you’re thinking: That’s just about as moonbatty and peace-corps-y as it gets. All of that anti-Western bias that now pervades the university campus was then the primary realm of anthropology. To say the least, you needed to wear high boots in class.

At the time, sociobiology was the up and coming academic war in the field. Accepted as fact, with not a shred of evidence, was the “matriarchal” period of human development, fueled by Robert Graves (note that proposing a universal matriarchy is distinct from identifying matriarchal cultures, which do exist).

The intellectual dishonesty of the cultural anthropologists, and students, in the department was striking. They would deny any evidence that did not support their twin worldview of nurture-not-nature and the Romantic noble savage, in touch with nature (whatever that means). I took a seminar on sociobiology that opened my eyes to the utter disingenuousness and agenda-driven mindset of cultural anthropology, and ended up being a bioanthropology major. In a nutshell, the bioanthropologists in the sociobiology seminar argued the data; the cultural anthropologists ignored the data and attacked the personalities. You can see this in the charges trumped up against Napolen Chagnon, a sociobiologist and anthropologist, by Patrick Tierney, who made up serious charges and nearly ruined Chagnon’s career, and the bloodthirstiness with which so many anthropologists jumped in to ruin Chagnon.

Why am I dragging all this up, from years ago? Because I read this essay by Mark Steyn, in which he discusses the intellectual dishonesty of anthropologists as brought up in Nicholas Wade’s Before the Dawn. Steyn says:

But the passage that really stopped me short was this:

“Both Keeley and LeBlanc believe that for a variety of reasons anthropologists and their fellow archaeologists have seriously underreported the prevalence of warfare among primitive societies. . . . ‘I realized that archaeologists of the postwar period had artificially “pacified the past” and shared a pervasive bias against the possibility of prehistoric warfare,’ says Keeley.”

Ah yes, how familiar. As I was primarily interested in Mesoamerica, I had endless arguments with other majors about the “in tune with nature-ness” of the Maya. Never mind the stelae with pictures of beheaded captives, or rulers wearing human hearts around their necks, or the fortifications. The Maya were a “peaceful, nature loving” race, who spent all their time sitting in lotus positions, looking at the planet Venus, and meditating on the role of their navels in the Greater Universal Allness of the Oneness. Evidence didn’t matter. Nothing mattered but their counter-factual, outdated, notions of Romanticism, and their pathological hatred of all things Western.

We had the same arguments about cannibalism. The PC line was that cannibalism had rarely, if ever, existed, and was a lie cooked up by evil, imperialist, Europeans to demonize native populations. The facts are rather different. There is some evidence for cannibalism from some period of nearly every human society. And archaeologists were as blind to the evidence as were cultural anthropologists: The same archaeologists who, upon finding cut marks on animal bone, would conclude (rightly) that the animal had been butchered and most likely eaten (else, why butcher them?) would deny that the same cut marks on human bones indicated anything of the sort. (As a point of clarification, last I was keeping up with the literature, there is no evidence for subsistence cannibalism, that is, raising humans for food, because it is economically prohibitive. But I haven’t kept up, so that may be out of date information.)

We see the same lack of interest in physical evidence on all those Discovery Channel specials on Neanderthals. The claim is always that because the Neanderthals did not paint on cave walls or make jewelry that therefore their language was more primitive. That’s pure speculation. The physical evidence says otherwise. We have found at least one Neanderthal hyoid, and therefore know that they were as physically capable of speech as Homo Sapiens. We also know from casting skulls that both Broca’s and Wernicke’s Areas, the speech centers, were fully developed in Neanderthals. Therefore, this speculation about their speech being more primitive is not only unsupported by the evidence, but contradicted by the evidence.

But professor Keeley and Steven LeBlanc of Harvard disclose almost as an aside that, in fact, their scientific colleagues were equally invested in the notion of the noble primitive living in peace with nature and his fellow man, even though no such creature appears to have existed. “Most archaeologists,” says LeBlanc, “ignored the fortifications around Mayan cities and viewed the Mayan elite as peaceful priests. But over the last 20 years Mayan records have been deciphered. Contrary to archaeologists’ wishful thinking, they show the allegedly peaceful elite was heavily into war, conquest and the sanguinary sacrifice of beaten opponents…. The large number of copper and bronze axes found in Late Neolithic and Bronze Age burials were held to be not battle axes but a form of money.”

And on, and on. Do you remember that fabulously preserved 5,000-year-old man they found in a glacier in 1991? He had one of those copper axes the experts assured us were an early unit of currency. Unfortunately for this theory, he had it hafted in a manner that suggested he wasn’t asking, “Can you break a twenty?” “He also had with him,” notes professor Keeley, “a dagger, a bow, and some arrows; presumably these were his small change.” Nonetheless, anthropologists concluded that he was a shepherd who had fallen asleep and frozen peacefully to death in a snowstorm. Then the X-ray results came back and showed he had an arrowhead in him.

Exactly so. The utter intellectual dishonesty of anthropologists.

So yes, I’m afraid that even when I first went into grad school, I was cynical about academics and academic research. The mystery is why I went to grad school at all … but that’s for another time.

Hat tip to Ace for the Steyn article.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 19th, 2006 at 3:14 pm and is filed under Education.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.