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In January and February, and again in June and July, I spend hours reading evaluations of the 1600 research grant applications that the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research receives every year. In March and April, and September and October, I repeat the procedure for applications who make it to the final round.
Our reviewers ask about sample size and statistical power. They challenge applicants to take into account politics, economy, geology, changes in the media, changes in the climate, and how these aspects of their site might play into what they find. They discuss gender, class, and race, and how these might affect what people say and do, and how the researcher’s own background might come into the picture. “You’re framing your research questions as if you already knew the answer,” they sometimes write. “You’re not talking to enough people, and not enough people from different groups.” “Have you considered X’s findings in city Y and how your research setting might differ?” “There’s a mismatch between your research questions and your methods.”
I also host informational webinars for prospective applicants. “The word ‘experiment’ comes from the same root as ‘experience,’” I tell them. “You’re doing empirical research if you are arranging experiences for yourselves that put your assumptions at risk.” I don’t have to explain this to our reviewers. They are based in institutions in Africa, Asia, Europe, and North and South America. They are experts in poetry and genomics, pastoralism and IT. But they share one thing in common: they understand that anthropology is an empirical pursuit.
The authors of the Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and Humanistic Social Sciences do not understand this.
I don’t need to dwell on the Report’s faulty research methods. Yes, they missed broad swathes of current research in anthropology. And I do wonder why, if they were interested in scholarly standards, they didn’t talk with some seasoned gatekeepers like me or my colleagues at National Geographic or the NSF. But the problem with the Report runs deeper than that. The argument runs as follows: the political commitments of anthropologists are leading them to 1) only accept certain findings; and 2) value advocacy over the pursuit of the truth.
Let’s take the first point. The Report describes concerns over an article on the sexual division of labor, which PLOS One supposedly only accepted because the article’s authors’ findings were of the sort that feminists would like. Now, I wouldn’t be surprised if there were issues with the article—reviewers and editors aren’t infallible; they can overlook flaws. But that’s a matter of the science, not the perspective that the authors brought to their work. In fact, when it comes to advancing anthropological knowledge, feminism has more often been the solution than the problem. Political commitments don’t necessarily limit answers in anthropology; they potentially expand the range of questions that anthropologists ask.
Consider Annette Weiner. She was a feminist, and because of this she paid heed to what women were up to in the Trobriand Islands, where she did research in the early 1970s. As a result, Women of Value, Men of Renown offers a picture of this society that is arguably more accurate than those that came before it, including Bronislaw Malinowski’s more famous account. Marcel Mauss was a socialist, and because of this he didn’t assume that the pursuit of profit was the only thing that mattered to people, when it came to their relationships with the objects they exchange. The Gift not only sheds light on the workings of small-scale societies, but also on the desires and values at work in France, where Mauss lived.
Epistemologists speak of the difference between statistical validity and construct validity. Some fields might be better at generating big data sets and arriving at statistically significant findings. There’s certainly a role for quantitative research in anthropology, and plenty of us care about whether the “N” is big enough to support a scholar’s claims. But what holds for all of us is our commitment to construct validity—we want to know that we’re paying attention to the right variables. We’re deeply contextualizing. Whether we’re archaeologists sifting sediment for grain fragments, or cultural anthropologists mapping grocery stories in a neighborhood, we are alert to the factors that shape the lives, thoughts, bodies, and behavior of the humans and non-human primates we’re studying. One of the contexts we care about is the pathway through the world that has shaped the concerns that a researcher brings to their work. I’m not talking about political litmus tests. I’m talking about the equivalent of a cart horse’s blinders—presumptions that can limit what a researcher can perceive.
My point is not simply that sexist science is bad because it does harm to women. Sexist science is bad because it is bad science. It’s bad because it’s not empirically rich in the way the best anthropology is. Scientists worth their salt approach their research with humility. They know that science is not about truth; it’s about facts: findings that hold for the moment but may not hold for good.
This takes me to the second point, on the valuing of advocacy. Anthropologists across the subfields are increasingly coming to recognize that they themselves are a factor in the situations they study. The assumptions they bring to their research don’t just shape what they make of it; their presence has an impact on the situation they describe. Call it the anthropological version of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. (The headier among us might turn to Karen Barad’s riff on Niels Bohr.) I’m not talking about “social construction,” which the Report translates as “making stuff up.” I’m talking about how the universe works.
Research has consequences. In 1952, the Wenner-Gren Foundation gave the Viking Medal to Carleton Coon, a notorious race scientist, and funded the research that went into his 1962 book, The Origin of Races. Coon was writing to fellow scientists; he and they felt they were engaged in a scholarly pursuit. But his ideas were popularized in a best-selling pamphlet, Race and Reason, published around the same time by Carleton Putnam, a white supremacist and anti-integration activist.
The pamphlet sold 150,000 copies, was taught in Louisiana schools, and inspired the governor of Mississippi to declare “Race and Reason Day.” The contemporary neo-Nazi and white supremacist, David Duke, who is still alive, has claimed that Race and Reason changed his life. Once our findings are out there, they are available to do work. It’s both clear-eyed and ethical for anthropologists to take into account the kind of work that their research is likely to do.
Taking this work into account requires paying heed to the impact of research on the people being studied. When behavioral ecologists ask for funding for fieldwork among the Hadza, our reviewers make sure they are aware of how colonialism and the state, among other factors, have shaped the lifeways of this contemporary population. But they also make sure that the research participants have a stake in the research —that they benefit from it, and participate in it as thought partners, rather than simply being treated like survivals from the distant past.
There’s nothing weird about any of this. We’re not the only discipline that’s committed to the principle “Do no harm.” We’re not the only discipline that understands its mission in relation to a higher cause. Researchers at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center do basic research. The reference to cancer doesn’t limit the questions they ask; it gestures towards the utopian horizon of their science. It’s only fitting that the President of the American Anthropological Association should speak to the discipline’s impact and purpose; listen for a moment, and you will hear presidents of other scholarly associations singing the same tune. It’s what presidents are elected to do.
I just returned from a conference in Kenya, where I spent time with African paleoanthropologists, along with a smattering of scholars from the US and Europe. I was excited to explore the nitty gritty of their research. Fossils only form under certain conditions. It’s hard to overstate how rare and precious these discoveries are. Paleoanthropology has progressed in leaps and bounds in recent years. This is not just because new technologies and methods, drawn from adjacent disciplines, have expanded the toolkit for analyzing these materials. Researchers have also discovered new sources of inspiration—they have come to ask new questions and developed new techniques for addressing them.
Increasingly, inspiration is coming from colleagues whose approaches and methods differ significantly from theirs. It’s exciting when anthropologists from different subfields get together. At Wenner-Gren, I’ve had the good fortune of discovering that it isn’t all that difficult to get them into the same room. How anthropologists think about evidence varies. But that difference is a strength, and it’s increasingly recognized as such. Given the conversations that anthropologists are having, reading the Report is like entering an alien world.
Mostly, it’s a world whose time is past. I found my way to anthropology in the late 1980s. I know who Alan Sokal was and why the Report mentions his name. Those debates were raging when I started graduate school—we called them “the science wars”—and anthropology staged its own skirmishes, mostly over James Clifford and George Marcus’s landmark volume, Writing Culture.
But the Writing Culture moment didn’t lead to the victory of “me-search.” It led to an expansion of the topics studied by ethnographers and greater rigor in their work. Why are the old weapons being dragged out now? I wish the answer weren’t so obvious. The ascendance of MAGA is allowing for the airing of old grievances. The Report is an example of the very thing that its authors claim to critique.
Back to my day job. It’s been depressing to waste my time on this. Reading about the research that anthropologists are actually doing will cheer me up.