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Anthropology, Objectivity, and the Politics of Knowledge
A recent Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences, commissioned at the request of the chancellors of Vanderbilt University and Washington University, does not have particularly nice things to say about anthropology. It describes anthropology as one of the “most extreme cases” of a broader deterioration in scholarly standards. According to the Report, anthropologists have rejected objectivity, allowed political commitments to substitute for evidence, and created an intellectual climate in which dissent on politically charged questions can be difficult.
Many anthropologists were outraged by this characterization; others dismissed it as a sign of the times. As a historian of anthropology, however, I want to look more carefully at objectivity, its relationship to truth and evidence, and why some applications of knowledge are considered scholarly while others are dismissed as political.
The Report begins by describing that the value of the humanities and the humanistic social sciences lies in the way these disciplines help us understand “the human world,” “participate in society intelligently,” “appreciate the great works of imagination, and also to identify the most significant defects in human life and their sustaining causes” (page 4).
The Report suggests, however, that much of humanities scholarship has been “subordinated to, or even displaced by, a ‘political’ goal” of social justice, replacing scholarly standards with “political standards” and encouraging a “repudiation” of objectivity. Although the authors reject this complaint “in this bald form,” they ultimately conclude that versions of these problems exist across the disciplines they examine (page 4).
The authors of the Report believe that at the core of this problem “is the long-standing and deeply rooted current in humanistic scholarship that regards the idea of scholarly objectivity with profound suspicion.” They explain how scholars who don’t believe in the objective analysis of evidence are motivated by “the abuses of the rhetoric of objectivity in the past.” Because the “authority of science and its objective standards have been wielded to support slavery and white supremacy, the subordination of women, the sterilization of the mentally disabled, the persecution of sexual minorities and the extermination of the Jews.” The authors suggest that those of us who are skeptical of claims of scientific objectivity and its relationship to power are simply opposed to it “wherever it appears” (page 15).
So, let me get this straight: scientists who were objectively analyzing evidence and drawing conclusions that directly contributed to sexism, racism, and colonialism in the past were abusing notions of objectivity, but scholars who do that now do not abuse notions of objectivity, nor contribute to invidious distinctions?
That level of epistemological hubris is laughable.
Anthropologists have argued over objectivity for more than a century and a half, and just about every Anthro 101 class shows how facts and evidence are interpreted and made meaningful in very different ways around the world and through time. The authors scoffed when Fernando Villanea remarked that “all truth is subjective,” and Akhil Gupta highlighted anthropology’s political project (page 11).
The fact that one has a mother’s brother may be straightforward enough, but what that relationship means, what obligations come with it, varies enormously across cultures. The same is true of marriage, kinship, gender expression, or what happens to your soul upon death. Anthropologists do not have to determine which community is telling the truth about the afterlife to understand that these truth claims organize people’s lives in very real ways. Even like-minded Christians in the US feel strongly that their interpretation of the Bible is the true word of God.
Simple or complex, what people understand as truth and what facts and evidence mean are just not the same for different communities. Who is right and who is wrong in the eyes of God, the king, or whoever has been the source of many violent conflicts.
Anthropologists, among others, have identified that the group with the most power gets to be right most of the time. And, as a discipline, many anthropologists are motivated to apply our knowledge to resist powerful and pernicious social structures with specific goals of articulating “anti-racism (the eradication of racial hierarchy), feminism (the rejection of patriarchy), [and] “decolonization” of the academy and of society more generally (undoing the legacy of imperialism)” (page 11).
They note that using empirical scholarship on crime to reduce crime is OK, but using empirical scholarship on race to reduce racism becomes “political” and activism. In their own words, being an “activist” scholar is acceptable when “the relevant expertise is technical and the political goal relatively uncontroversial” (page 11). Who gets to draw that line?
“Relatively uncontroversial” is hardly an objective category. Reducing crime may sound like a neutral goal because most of us agree with it. But who is considered criminal, what constitutes crime, and whose safety and security matter have always been questions of politics and power.
Many anthropologists study communities and their relationships, and many human relationships are governed by power in many guises. Anthropologists study how people wield and resist power, and often they want to use their knowledge in the service of society, and yes, sometimes to mitigate racism, sexism, and imperialism. To me, this is an ethical application of knowledge, not necessarily political activism. If Professor Gupta said anthropology had an ethical project that applies our knowledge in the service of society, would the authors have viewed his address as political activism? Applying knowledge toward an ethical end does not necessarily turn scholarship into activism.
The authors are also very concerned when “whole disciplines or subdisciplines prejudge substantive questions on political grounds,” which they suggest is a “serious distortion of the scholarly enterprise” (page 13).
The authors fully understand how paradigms form, and how consensus forms around settled matters. They argue that around some issues there is an artificial consensus that is “maintained by distorting the scholarly ecosystem in ways that are profoundly damaging.”
They provide examples where the peer review process “punished” heterodox views of race and gender expression, which they describe as activist scholarship. If a journal rejects a careful argument backed by rigorous research because its conclusions are politically suspect, that is a problem, for sure.
However, they shared many more examples of letter-writing campaigns, online petitions, and protests over certain authors publishing in prestigious journals, presses, and edited volumes. These are not necessarily cases of activist scholarship, but scholars engaging in nonviolent protest. Scholars can act like traditional activists, motivated by sincere ethical and emotional concerns. Their protests may influence where heterodox scholarship gets published or presented, and that pressure is particularly acute in this age of rapid cancel culture, doxing culture, and social media’s larger “gotcha” culture.
Well before the internet, heterodox scholarship often found alternative places to be published. Now, with the internet and social media, the barrier to entry is very low for publishing just about anything and cultivating an audience. From rigorous scholarship to wacky conspiracy theories, the marketplace of ideas is as free and open as it has ever been.
When print was the dominant medium of scholarship, heterodox discourse often found a home in organizations that used it to bolster their political agenda. For example, the NAACP often published Franz Boas’ heterodox claims debunking Negro inferiority in their journal The Crisis in the 1910s. Fifty years later, the American Nazi Party often published George Lincoln Rockwell’s heterodox claims of white supremacy in their journal The National Socialist World in the 1960s.
Now, with AI deepfakes, lax journalistic standards, rampant plagiarism, research article mills, rabid polarization, and malicious misinformation campaigns, the humanities alone are not at risk; the entire scholarly community should be worried. I am a little.
In this era of distorted information, I am confident—well, maybe optimistic and hopeful—that academic disciplines and newer fields like African American and Gender Studies are resilient enough to uphold rigorous scholarship while recognizing diverse cultural truths, worldviews, and epistemologies. Now more than ever, anthropologists recognize that describing difference does not mean “anything goes.”
Now more than ever, we value systematic analysis, evidence, developed arguments, and sound theory. The Report‘s authors should not be overly concerned when scholars act as activists to police an orthodoxy grounded in sincere ethical commitments. We should be particularly concerned when activism substitutes for scholarly judgment or when political commitments overdetermine scholarly conclusions.
Power shifts and pendulums swing. Academic institutions endure because they are robust enough to produce useful knowledge and contribute to a more just and verdant world. Ultimately, I remain optimistic about anthropology. Our discipline has never stopped debating what counts as knowledge, evidence, and truth. We do not always get it right, but we possess the tools to challenge, correct, and refine how we understand people. And, at our best, we apply that knowledge in the service of society.