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Dear Reader,
The public release of the Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences on June 5, 2026, sent shockwaves through the academy, sparking immediate headlines and intense debate. At its core is a provocative charge: that the humanities and humanistic social sciences face a crisis of their own making, driven by scholars trading objective truth for activist agendas—with anthropology cast as the prime culprit. Powerful initial defenses came fast, with ACLS President Joy Connelly validating humanistic lines of inquiry that are linked to the fight for rights, justice, and equality and AAA President Carolyn Rouse defending anthropology as a diverse and rigorous discipline grounded in proper methodological consultation and robust internal debate. Now, a comprehensive, multi-vocal response is called for. This collection, “Anthropology Defended,” gathers urgent, nuanced perspectives from colleagues across the discipline, offering a diverse mix of critical counterarguments.
Together, the essays in this special issue of Anthropology News offer far more than a routine rebuttal to the Report; they deliver an incisive defense of anthropology as an ethical project capable, at its best, of producing indispensable knowledge. Rather than engaging the Report as a “scientific, systematic study of the politicization of academic research,” as the Report claims, the contributors collectively unmask it as a tactical, politically motivated attack led by philosopher Paul Boghossian that recycles decades-old anti-relativist polemics to offer university administrators a ready-made alibi for shuttering progressive departments and dismantling critical fields of study. To counter this, the authors of this collection offer us much more than mere defense of the discipline. The collection is grounded in three interconnected arguments that reclaim the terms of academic rigor and political engagement.
First, the collection establishes anthropology’s unyielding commitment to empirical research, proving that critical analyses of, say, race, gender, empire, or power represent some of the discipline’s oldest and most methodologically sound traditions. As Lee Baker points out, anthropologists arrive at “relativism” through empirical, evidence-based study of the objective diversity of humanity. It is a basic truth of anthropological knowledge that different human communities hold different truths to be self-evident. Anyone taking an Introduction to Anthropology class would learn this. Far from abandoning rigor for ideology, the authors trace a direct line from Franz Boas’s foundational dismantling of scientific racism and Ruth Benedict’s anti-fascist scholarship to Conrad Kottak and Marvin Harris’s field studies of racial fluidity, demonstrating that empirical precision has always depended on deep, field-based methods rather than political dogmas. It is anthropology’s methodological rigor, which drives collective knowledge to question and surpass ideological hangups and dogmas, that drew scholars like Jafari S. Allen, and many of us, to the field. Crucially, the essays show how the Report’s obsession with a narrow, outdated model of scientific positivism ignores the foundational role of qualitative, ethnographic fieldwork in building valid social knowledge, exposing how the Report’s architects fail to grasp the basic empirical mechanisms that make anthropological work so robust and important. Grounding this from an institutional perspective, former NSF Program Director Deborah Winslow draws on decades of reviewing thousands of grant proposals to demonstrate that anthropological research across all methodologies consistently meets the most stringent empirical funding criteria, utterly refuting the Report‘s unsubstantiated claims of widespread scholarly deterioration. Wenner-Gren Foundation President Danilyn Rutherford extends this point to show how politically committed inquiry, by expanding the range of questions that anthropologists ask, makes our research more empirically rich.
Second, the essays offer a compelling defense of engaged, invested, and “interested” scholarship, directly dismantling the Report’s core fantasy of “disinterested” inquiry. By documenting how historical claims to neutral objectivity routinely masked scientific racism, colonial violence, and institutional dispossession, contributors like cultural anthropologist Danilyn Rutherford, linguistic anthropologist Jillian Cavanaugh, biological anthropologist Agustín Fuentes, and archaeologists Matthew Reilly and Uzma Rizvi show that all research is conducted by positioned human subjects. They demonstrate that explicitly engaged, ethically committed, and self-reflexive scholarship actually expands our capacity to make deeper, truer insights than a false posture of neutrality. As Reilly and Rizvi note, the discipline of anthropology, in its four-field approach, has not compromised its scholarly standards in revising its ethical standards. Stronger and more rigorous scholarship emerges from our ethical commitments to the communities with whom we work and study. Matthew Engelke reinforces this by drawing on Saba Mahmood’s work to illustrate how provisional suspension of judgment (“relativism”) and self-reflexivity allow ethnographers to challenge their own certitudes and generate rigorous insights, while Winslow highlights how anthropology’s catholicity of methods enables researchers to tackle complex social realities without forcing data into rigid, pre-determined formulas. Baker notes the “epistemological hubris” that would lead the Report’s authors to selectively criticize empirical studies of race to combat racism as political when the political commitments of empirical scholarship on other topics are left unassailed. Or similarly, as in Rutherford’s piece, noting the tremendous scientific insights yielded through empirical studies by feminist anthropologists seeking to better understand gender, the hubris of representing the ways of an entire people after talking only to men. Or, the hubris of representing an entire discipline after only talking to one anthropologist (ahem). Indeed, as Cavanaugh’s contribution makes clear, there is no view from nowhere—even a “disinterested” position is a position from which one then undertakes research. Cavanaugh further notes that our research interests, our questions, drive us to do the deeply engaged, long-term, data-rich fieldwork that is the hallmark of our discipline—where we flourish. As Allen notes, anthropological fieldwork is “disciplined by long and deep systematic attention to actual people in actual places.” What scholar could truly embark on such a committed endeavor—in any field—in a disinterested fashion?
Third, the volume highlights the urgent need for solidarity in response to this attack and its broader implications for humanistic research, the university, and wider societal struggles. Agustín Fuentes demonstrates the extent to which the Report’s arguments resonate with the anti-intellectualism of JD Vance and the political priorities of the Heritage Foundation. Svati Shah unmasks the Report‘s weaponized anti-trans tropes, showing how they work to fuel broader attacks on academic freedom. Akhil Gupta shows how the report’s willful misquoting of his work changed its meaning as part of a broader effort to misrepresent anthropological scholarship and launch a politically motivated attack on humanistic lines of inquiry. He also contrasts the report with more balanced studies of the humanities and calls on its authors to focus on producing stronger scholarship in their own disciplines. Jeff Maskovsky and Ajantha Subramanian reject quiet compliance, arguing that the scholars who wrote the Report misunderstand the seriousness of the Trump administration’s attack on higher education and miss out on an important opportunity to build alliances in defense of higher education and other institutions under fire. Allen urges anthropologists to build a broad collective front to defend the discipline’s capacity to challenge power and preserve “what is utterly precious” about our field, while Maskovsky and Subramanian urge anthropologists to help to build a popular front with beyond-the-university partners. Conrad Kottak delivers a rallying cry for us to carry on with our rigorously produced studies, but to write about them for public audiences as Margaret Mead did, so that our data-driven, evidenced-based work, for instance on race and gender, can enrich the public discourse in grade schools and courtrooms and even the halls of congress and other such political places that should unquestionably be informed by the best contemporary scholarship.
Together, these contributors argue that defending higher education requires broad solidarity across subfields, departments, and off-campus social movements to resist administrative austerity, labor precarity, and program liquidations. They reclaim anthropology and other imperiled fields as living infrastructures for producing knowledge and building a more just, democratic, and egalitarian world.
Yet, vital as this defense is, our response cannot stop at taking down this Report or playing defense against its bad-faith arguments. These pieces also make clear that we must not allow these manufactured diversions to distract us from the far more important work of doing what is necessary to help anthropology to flourish. Flourishing demands that we double down on the lively, urgent debates currently animating the most creative scholarship in our discipline. It requires unapologetic engagement with other fields that are under attack, such as Black, ethnic, Native, gender, and queer studies. It requires an earnest and unwavering reckoning with the real limits of our fieldwork practice—confronting ethical quandaries, epistemological impasses, and methodological weak points directly as the only viable path forward. It also demands an equally candidassessment of the university itself: confronting its current corporate organization and structural constraints, and committing to the radical restructuring necessary to fulfill our educational and scholarly missions far better than we do today.
Ultimately, we must understand the threat posed by this Report not as an isolated incident but as one piece of a much larger, coordinated right-wing assault on higher education, epitomized by the Trump administration’s ongoing attacks on critical thought, institutional autonomy, and academic freedom. We must position ourselves steadfastly, openly, and without apology against these attacks. This means refusing to back down from the theoretical, political, and empirical stances many of us take to advance knowledge within our discipline and across allied fields. By working collectively to remake educational spheres both inside and outside the university walls, we clear the ground for anthropology—in alliance with other kinds of humanistic inquiry—to flourish on our own terms.
More essays are on the way. Bookmark this page and check back soon!
Sincerely,
Jeff Maskovsky and Emily Metzner
Co-chairs, Anthropological Advocacy Committee of the American Anthropological Association