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The Boghossian Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and Humanistic Social Sciences, which singles out anthropology as overly politicized, treats its attention to race, gender, and colonialism as a recent departure from a purer, more objective tradition of disinterested inquiry. That history does not hold up.
Franz Boas spent much of his career dismantling scientific racism at a time when race science enjoyed significant academic prestige. His student Ruth Benedict published Race: Science and Politics in 1940, writing for a general audience to show that racist beliefs were objectively groundless, a direct challenge to the pseudoscientific rationales of fascism. Melville Herskovits, another Boas student, spent decades doing fieldwork in West Africa, Haiti, Trinidad, Suriname, and Brazil, documenting African cultural continuities in the Americas. Anthropology has been producing rigorous, empirical knowledge about race and inequality since before most of today’s critics were born.
I can speak about how that knowledge gets produced, because I have spent sixty years doing it. In 1963 Marvin Harris and I co-authored a paper in Sociología based on fieldwork we conducted together in the fishing village of Arembepe in Bahia, Brazil. We elicited more than forty distinct color/phenotype terms from a sample of one hundred villagers, showing that race operates as a fluid, culturally constructed system of classification rather than one that offers a narrow and rigid set of choices. That paper proposed a term still in use today, hypodescent, for the American system, in which any child of one Black and one White parent is classified as Black, the so-called one-drop rule. Our research and paper were based on observation, comparison across societies, and data collected in the field, the same methods anthropology has used for a hundred years.
What has changed is not so much how anthropological knowledge gets made as how that knowledge gets received. Year after year in Anthropology 101, from 1968 until my retirement, I taught undergraduates that race is culturally constructed, using Brazil and the United States as a contrast. For three decades, students found it fascinating, a fact about the arbitrariness of racial classification they had never considered. Sometime around 2000, the reception of that same, unchanged lecture began to shift. Students and occasionally colleagues began to hear it as politically motivated, an attempt to impose a conclusion for ideological reasons rather than to report a documented cross-cultural finding. The lecture had not changed, but the politics around hearing it had.
The same is true of gender. Margaret Mead wrote about the variability of sex/gender roles cross-culturally, and specifically in New Guinea, decades before political correctness existed as a phrase. Yet similar conclusions today may be perceived as partisan political statements rather than findings based on ethnographic fieldwork. Anthropology did not politicize the study of gender. The world around anthropology started hearing rigorous cross-cultural findings as “woke” political statements.
But there has been a change in how anthropological knowledge circulates and gets applied. Mead is a model worth returning to here. Her most sustained public platform was a monthly column she wrote for Redbook magazine, beginning in 1962 and continuing until her death in 1978, co-authored with Rhoda Métraux, with whom she shared a home in Greenwich Village. Redbook‘s readership ran to more than three million women, and the column addressed nearly everything: child-rearing, marriage, abortion, genetic engineering, race relations, the future of the family. By 1970 she was receiving fifteen pounds of mail every day. People trusted her enough to ask about almost anything, and she seems to have been conscientious about answering her readers. That tradition of clear public writing is precisely how empirical findings about race and gender were meant to circulate, and precisely what much of the discipline has since abandoned in favor of a vocabulary borrowed from adjacent fields, more suited to signaling theoretical sophistication than to being understood. The retreat from plain English, not the underlying findings, is what has made anthropology’s knowledge easy for critics to caricature as ideology rather than evidence.
None of this excuses the Report‘s own failures. It cherry-picked, focusing almost entirely on one corner of cultural anthropology, and ignoring the subfields that operate by different, and largely empirical, standards. Anthropology’s defenders do the discipline no favors by accepting that attention to race and gender is a recent politicization requiring an apology, rather than what it actually is: one of the field’s oldest, best-documented, most rigorously produced bodies of knowledge, badly served in recent decades by writing that no longer explains itself to a public that once found anthropological findings revelatory.
Applied knowledge depends on circulated knowledge, and circulated knowledge depends on being written so that people outside the discipline can use it. When a school board debates how to talk about race in a classroom, or a court weighs expert testimony on kinship and custody, the anthropology that actually gets applied is the anthropology that was written clearly enough to be read by the people making those decisions. Findings buried in a vocabulary built for other academics go unheeded. They are stuck within disciplinary boundaries, good mainly for tenure and citation. Important findings are barred from reaching a public that might find them useful. A finding that doesn’t circulate cannot be applied, no matter how meritorious it may be.
The fix is not to abandon what anthropology is studying now. It is to return to how anthropology used to write about what it found, plainly, with evidence, the way Boas and Benedict and Mead did, so that produced knowledge can circulate the way it should and then be applied by people who now recognize its value.
I have written more extensively about the Boghossian Report and the discipline’s response to it on my weekly Substack (conradkottak.substack.com) where a running series of posts takes up these questions in greater depth.