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The conclusive statements about anthropology in the Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and Humanistic Social Sciences do not fit my own wide experience of the field or its practitioners. Nor, I think, do the writers of this Report demonstrate the rigorous scholarly standards that they extoll.
From 2005 until 2019, I held the position of Program Director for Cultural Anthropology at the National Science Foundation. In each of those fourteen years, I read hundreds of research proposals submitted by anthropology faculty and graduate students from departments across the United States. I also visited many of those anthropology departments and held long conversations with anthropologists at conferences. After retiring from NSF, I was appointed a Senior Scholar at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, NM. Here, too, I have read proposals from anthropologists, not for their research, but for time to write a research-based book, complete a research-based dissertation, or hold a research seminar.
At both NSF and SAR, there were always many, many more excellent proposals than there were funds to support them. The proposals came from small colleges and large universities, from places famous for their research programs and places where externally funded research was unusual. But whether using qualitative or quantitative research methods, whether documenting new cases or testing hypotheses and theories, the authors of these proposals spoke convincingly to the stringent scholarly funding criteria at NSF and SAR, with track records to back them up.
Given this background, I was rather taken aback to read in the Report‘s Introduction that,
“In the most extreme cases (e.g., anthropology), we see a widespread deterioration in scholarly standards grounded in a pervasive repudiation of ideals of objectivity together with a toxic intellectual climate in which reasonable dissent on politically charged topics is routinely suppressed and punished” [emphasis added].
Widespread, pervasive, routinely. Those damning words, so contrary to my own experience, are also quantitative assessments. Therefore, being a scholar myself, I expected supporting evidence. What are their sources? How many publications in how many journals? How many panels at how many conferences? How many faculty in how many departments? When? Where? How do you know?
But as anyone who has read the Report has discovered, it contains no such supporting evidence. Instead, the authors hand-wave with a note that “the problems… identified” are “not yet supported by … quantitative evidence.” Which is the sort of determining-conclusions-in-advance statement (“yet”?) that gives any social scientist pause. And how did they identify problems without evidence? In the Report‘s Preface the authors thank two Princeton graduate students who, I found with an internet search, have skills in text analysis and computer programming. Unfortunately, results from their data analytic work did not make it into the Report. Which was disappointing. Mechanical analysis of the subtleties and complexities of anthropological research must be challenging. I would like to have known how they did it.
But, of course, it’s not just anthropology. Complexity is a hallmark of all sciences that deal with living beings. Evolutionary biologists write that the living world is non-ergodic, not governed by physics’ timeless laws. Or, to paraphrase biologist Stuart Kauffman, life is lived forward, into the un-pre-stateable future. Unable to define social and cultural worlds in advance, anthropologists pay close attention to the always-moving target of what is. And paying attention is what anthropologists do best, albeit in many different ways.
I once knew someone writing a textbook in applied statistics who mined social science journals for illustrative data sets. Along the way, he learned to identify each field’s characteristic ways of displaying findings. Soon, he could tell from across the room whether an article was in economics, sociology, or psychology just by looking at how results were presented graphically. Except for anthropology. Because we are so inclusive in our methods for collecting and analyzing information, he found no single dominant mode of presentation.
Our catholicity is a strength. It allows us to take on all sorts of questions. At NSF, just in cultural anthropology we funded work that ranged from extended periods of traditional face-to-face ethnographic fieldwork, to shorter visits for interviews and bio-marker collection to understand intergenerational effects of warfare, to research that involved outfitting schoolchildren with proximity sensors to map real-time disease transmission networks. Almost anything ethical was possible because there are no limits to anthropological questions or to ways of doing good research. So, the Report‘s references to “rigorous scholarly standards” gave me pause. There is no single “rigorous” standard by which we can judge all anthropological work.
The Report‘s writers did not support their generalizations about anthropology with evidence. Instead, they included what are apparently meant to be telling illustrations of the results they seem sure will come. Their examples come from three recent meditations on the state of the field published in the American Anthropologist. Akhil Gupta’s 2021 Presidential Address. A 2023 Commentary by Fernando Villanea. Jose Santos’ 2025 Vital Topics essay. All three are the sort of agonizing-aloud pieces that have always haunted the American Anthropologist because we do our research out in the world, not sitting in our offices.
But the Report‘s statements about anthropology assert something more than that anthropologists take political positions. They claim that anthropological politics have led to a “widespread deterioration in scholarly standards,” that our politics undermines our capacity for objectivity. Where are their examples of that? Certainly not in the work of these three scholars. Not in Gupta’s meticulous long-term study of agriculture in India, or in Villanea’s groundbreaking research on Neanderthal genetics, or Santos’ scholarly papers on evangelism among Hispanic immigrants. But wouldn’t you have to make that connection to prove the deterioration they claim?
I emphatically disagree that our politics has hampered our scholarship. My own experience is that anthropology is alive, well, and chock-a-block with research and writing of the highest order. And I certainly do not think this Report shows otherwise.