So over at Gene Expression Razib Khan throws down the gauntlet, bitch slaps the Cultural Anthropologists and gets medieval on their collective ass. No he does not mention pond scum like Laden but he does a number on the yahoos currently mobbing Jared Diamond (not that he aproves too much of him either).
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/ ... pologists/
As an aside I was fairly fine with Diamond myself till he got to New Guinea and some of the spokes fell out of the wheels while he was narrating about tribal life there (Note that I say this having only actually read fragments of Mead, but a shit ton more about her, and other sources about Papua, New Guinea so take it for what it is worth, not very much).
Anyway, back to Razib and the yahoolies known as Cultural Anthropologists (think of Laden, but more incoherent, but just as spittle flecked. Remember that Laden identifies with Biocultural Anthropology which tries to pretend it is a bit more sciency and more thinky than "those" people and that is all you need to know right now). Razib is not too terribly impressed with any of that lot :
It’s happening again, another issue of Jared Diamond vs. the anthropologists. Part of this is surely personal. Diamond has been trading in glib and gloss for years, and profitably so, in both financial and fame terms. There is also a deep scholarly divide. Diamond’s way of viewing historical development is reminiscent of, if not equivalent to, materialism. That is, external material forces (geography) and broad macro-historical dynamics (the transition across modes of production) loom large in his thinking. In contrast, many cultural anthropologists disagree with this paradigm, and see it as outmoded, old fashioned, and false. Not that I can decrypt what they believe, because clarity is not something that seems to be valued by cultural anthropologists in most domains.
So far so good, but wait for it, because it starts here:
I say most, because there is one area where many of them are quite clear: they are the beacons of toleration and justice. And they get to define what toleration and justice is. For all cultural anthropology’s epistemological muddle, its political priors are crisp and dinstict, and strangely insulated from the critique and deconstruction so valued by the discipline in all matters.
And then he unloads:
Many cultural anthropologists believe that they have deep normative disagreements with Jared Diamond. In reality I think the chasm isn’t quite that large. But the repeated blows ups with Diamond gets to the reality that cultural anthropology has gone down an intellectual black hole, beyond the event horizon of comprehension, never to recover. It has embraced deconstruction, critique, complexity (or more accurately anti-reductionism) and relativism to such a great extent that whereas in many disciplines social dynamics and political power struggles are an unfortunate consequence of academic life, in cultural anthropology the fixation with power dynamics and structures has resulted in its own self-cannibalization, and overwhelming preoccupation with such issues. Everyone is vulnerable to the cannon blast of critique, and the only value left sacred are particular particular ends (social justice, defined by cultural anthropologists) and axioms (white males are oppressive patriarchs, though white male cultural anthropologists may have engaged in enough self interrogation to take upon themselves the mantle of fighting for the rights of the powerless [i.e., not white males]) which all can agree upon.
I am going to repeat the key phrase here just because:
has gone down an intellectual black hole, beyond the event horizon of comprehension, never to recover.
LMAO!
Anyway, Later on Razib does a followup:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/ ... pologists/
This misses the point. Many (most?) American cultural anthropologists do not consider themselves scientific. Cultural anthropology as it is practiced in many American universities is not a science, so the standard rules of engagement with science do not apply. Mind you, I have no idea what cultural anthropology is in terms of its systematic definition within a scholarly context. Rather, I know what cultural anthropologists do. Of course the rules of science don’t necessarily apply to history, but logic, a striving toward positivistic objectivity, and good faith must still be brought to the table in that case. I don’t use the same rules for cultural anthropology.
And here is where I thought about the baboons yet once more:
“Calm refutation†has convinced very few Creationists. Science, and scholarship in general, is exceptional in that there is a pretense, sometimes realized, often not, that logic, formal analysis, and inspection of the empirical evidence, are about uncovering the truth about the world out there, rather than personal self-validation or spears in the game of inter-personal signalling and status.
Underline is mine. If you look over at A+ and the baboon board comments, I suspect you will see examples of comments made solely for the purpose of "inter-personal signalling and status" and nothing else. Many of their comments have no intrinsic value or purpose otherwise. I bring this up because my initial and subsequent experience with the baboons was from a transaction analysis perspective, and it took me nearly a year to start seeing the status signalling. I am kind of slow in things human, so this is why it took me awhile to get familiar with baboon culture.
But a lot of you folks identified this before I did and tagged it with descriptive labels, such as "professional victim" and pointed out how the players establish relative status by acquiring negative privilege points.
So I thought some here may find it interesting to see the above quotes, and to note some of the parallels with our own situation.
Rather, I want to focus on the issue that cultural anthropologists as a cultural are a nasty lot with each other and those who tread into their territory, because they have totally erased the line between being advocates for their causes, and being observers of the world around them. Every conflict has grave consequences, with the personal, political, and scholarly are totally enmeshed.
There is more, but I really recommend reading the two articles I listed and the comments.
Anyway, I find myself musing upon the supposition that the baboons are not going to budge unless we move them. And move them we should as a public service if not for ourselves.
If the baboons want truce talks (and I am not saying that they do), my view is that they they would only do so because they are sick and tired of the impediments to their progress and this would be a stalling tactic which they could use to regroup. It is equally clear to me that to enter peace talks with the baboons would be to give ground. I believe if we give ground, this will be our epithet:
gone down an intellectual black hole, beyond the event horizon of comprehension, never to recover.
So, as far as I am concerned, no truce at all. None. Never."Carthago delenda est" indeed.
