On Marxism, the history of anthropology, and its function, or lack thereof, as a scientific theory. A really long post and call to arms for a renewed honesty in cultural anthropology. Reading about the Yanomamö and how many anthropologists incorrectly and naively describe them as egalitarian pacifists who might only go to war over the allocation of scarce resources. For the time period Im reading on, which is the late 60s, war is not rare at all. Still, the author Im reading has been taken to task by his colleagues and activists since returning from his initial field trip for promoting an unethical, and immoral position. The book I am reading is his first ethnography and memoir written for a general audience. It is also his stand against political anthropology. I see it also as a critique of what some, but not him, call cultural Marxism and its role in anthropology as an inductive heuristic that is as unscientific, as it is purely political, leading the discipline into unsustainable corruption and stagnation. Instead, the primary motivations for war among the Yanomamö is women, as evidenced by their words, as well as their behaviour both ritualistic and profane. This infers a biological rather than cultural impetus for war and self preservation, and underscores the evolution of the political state as a biological fact, rather than a social construct. Obviously, evolution is not linear, but it is predictable nonetheless. The anthropological community has shunted its resources towards untenable findings (e.g. war is an artifact of settled, agricultural Civilization) when it could have studied evolution. For all the talk about human evolution since the 60s, we sure dont know a lot about it, and anthropologists are supposed to be the experts. We have wasted almost half the disciplines lifetime that might have been spent studying humanity as it really is and collecting data in multidisciplinary areas in which it could specialize like genealogy, heritable disease, ethnobotany. Thankfully those areas are opened up and are quite popular. And thats why many anthropologists dont like Napoleon A. Chagnon. I should have read this stuff when I was actually in Uni. --- Its refreshing and heartwarming to read an ethnography from an honest scientist whose interest is in documenting and evaluating what he witnesses, rather than what he wishes he saw. Its nice to see an ethnographer who is sceptical of his Marxist education and its dominance of anthropology for the last 50 years. I find that critical theory, or Marxism, as a scientific tool is unsuitable for the study of mankind. Its proponents showcase an inherent reluctance and unwillingness to deal with matters outside material culture because Marxism is unable to describe or explain phenomena outside that scope. More importantly, and troublingly Marxism also promotes and preserves a corrupt teaching and research institution based on falsifying data, conclusions and ultimately the human condition. Its proponents tend to cling to Marxism as a political tool for both activism and job security and rarely conduct field work. They have lost their zest for scientific inquiry and have become cynical, stubborn and often belligerent bullies. I have found that Marxism is incompatible with science in general, even though both are materialistic philosophies. Too many social scientists of Marxist training underestimate the validity of their data and tend towards laziness in both data collection and analysis. Critical theory anthropologists also tend to lie and obfuscate the truth when evaluating their findings because their data is either incomplete, invalid, or unreliable, and their faculty politics and academic standing are taken more seriously than their job performance. These corrupt anthropologists too often engage in pushing forward an agenda at the expense of collaborating with colleagues and teaching students the scientific method and the anthropologists role as impartial and dispassionate observer. Its time that anthropologists in general discard the scrutiny and bald faced contempt they hold for non-conforming colleagues and disciplines that put a primacy on the compatibility of the humanities with biology in the areas of evolution of social groups as a biological fact, and lay waste to the glut of politically driven and unscientific material theyve been producing for more than 50 years. I am glad for anthropologists like Chagnon and similar anthropologists who advocate a rigorous, deductive and dispassionate study of humanity.
Posted on: Mon, 17 Mar 2014 05:15:00 +0000
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