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One of the first things we purportedly unrigorous humanistic scholars teach our students is that it is an elementary scholarly duty to quote authors correctly. If you edit a quote, you risk changing its meaning and you can misrepresent someone by taking quotes out of context. Unfortunately, the person (or AI agent) who was responsible for the anthropology section of the Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and Humanistic Social Sciences failed in this elementary task. They cut a few words from the middle of my quoted sentence and a few at the end. Since the number of words they cut was so small (23 words), it could not have been because they were short of space. Leaving the quote as is would have added less than 0.2% to the total length of the Report. (If space was an issue, why were many other scholars cited at much greater length?) Thus, it is not unreasonable to infer that the cuts were made deliberately, perhaps with malicious intent.
The original quote (with deletions in the report in bold) was: “Even today, anthropology is an outlier among the social sciences (economics, political science, sociology, psychology) because its political project is to challenge the culturally dominant commonsense of capitalist consumerism, and that is one reason among many for why it struggles to gain traction in the public sphere.”
I was speaking to other anthropologists and was trying to explain why anthropology and anthropologists get less media attention than our sister disciplines. My point was that all social-science disciplines have at any given historical period a stated or unstated political project, and anthropology’s political project differed from those other disciplines whose center lay within hegemonic, taken-for-granted ideas about humans, societies, and economies. I was NOT saying that only anthropology has a political project whereas other disciplines are devoted to non-political understandings of the social world. Dropping those words changed the meaning of that sentence entirely. That is just poor scholarship, and veers into being dishonest as well.
For a group of people purportedly devoted to positivist methods, the authors of the Report fail completely to practice what they preach, creating what reads suspiciously like AI slop that serves as a poster child of poor scholarship. Here’s a partial list of where this Report fails by its own standards:
- The charge to the committee assumes that the decline in support for the humanities has to do with the lack of scholarly rigor in the humanistic disciplines without asking if there might be other possible reasons for declining enrollments.
- Why was anthropology singled out among the social sciences when similar views can be found in journals in sociology, public policy, philosophy, political science, psychology, geography, gender studies, etc.?
- What was the sampling method by which those particular quotes from different anthropologists were chosen? All the people who were quoted have made it clear that those quotes were taken out of context. But, more broadly, what were those quotes and authors representative of, and how can we be sure whether they were in fact representative of the literature in all of anthropology?
This third point is particularly important. The one thing I learned as a former President of the American Anthropological Association is that we are a highly argumentative lot, and if you sampled only the roughly ten thousand academic anthropologists, you would get at least eleven thousand different opinions! In other words, there does not appear to be any systematic sampling, correction for (inadvertent) biases, inclusion of subject matter experts (if you are going to render a cartoonish version of sociocultural anthropology, at least consult some sociocultural anthropologists), checks for omissions of relevant literature, etc. In other words, this exercise fails as rigorous scholarship by its own standards of rigor.
It did not appear that any of the authors actually knew the literature in sociocultural anthropology, otherwise they would not have missed the most important writings on relativism as well as the wide range of positions that anthropologists have taken on that question. In an influential article written in the mid-1980s, Clifford Geertz wrote that anthropologists were not relativists but anti-antirelativists; that is, they were not arguing for relativism so much as arguing against an often-unacknowledged ethnocentrism. This and the many important writings of anthropologists struggling with the question of ethnocentrism and relativism are happily ignored in the Report. Ignorance of what you are criticizing is even worse than constructing a strawman.
Finally, the charge given to the commission was an invitation to bash interpretive disciplines, and no scientist who believed in objectivity would have constructed such a mission. This is not surprising. The first “culture wars” over the Western canon were fought during the Reagan years, and we can expect attacks on scholars of color and disciplines that are critical of current configurations of power in the Trump years. As far as I know, the Chancellors who convened this committee were not invested by any scholarly body to commission such a study. They picked a scholar to head the committee who has invested most of his career to attacking viewpoints opposed to his own, and he delivered by rehearsing arguments that he had already made 20 years ago.
Finally, we have to ask: what is this Report good for? The sole purpose seems to be to stir up controversy and to justify budget cuts to the humanities. For a contrast, read the much better report prepared under the leadership of Richard Brodhead, the former President of Duke University called The Heart of the Matter. This was a report prepared by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2013 in response to a charge given by Congress. Professor Brodhead wrote a short essay on the tenth anniversary of the report that stands as a contrast to this work. If you really want to understand the challenges to the Humanities, that is a much better statement. You can argue with it, but it is at least open-minded, well-informed, and written in elegant prose.
I truly wish people would not waste their time on producing these ill-conceived attacks on areas of scholarship that they know little about. Instead of laughing all the way to the bank, Professor Boghossian and his fellow authors would do much better to devote their time to producing work that will redefine their own discipline. If, for example, the philosophers could produce a new version of the Critique of Pure Reason, they would do a service to their profession and the world of ideas. First produce rigorous scholarship in your own fields and then we can meet as equals in the marketplace of ideas.