Is Anthropology Hopelessly Politicized?
A month ago, 10 high-profile scholars released a document — titled “Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences” — that lit up a million scholarly group chats. The chancellors of Vanderbilt University and Washington University in St. Louis, vocal critics of the purported politicization of higher education, charged the group with evaluating a number of disciplines for signs of political skew. The conclusion: All the fields showed “a deterioration in scholarly standards fueled by the substitution of political criteria for properly scholarly criteria in the assessment of research and a more general repudiation of longstanding ideals of rigor and objectivity.”
But one field was singled out as “the most extreme case” — anthropology. Compared to philosophy, sociology, history, literary studies, and music studies, the discipline showed “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.” The authors cited writings from several anthropologists, a speech by a recent president of the American Anthropological Association, and an AAA panel about biological sex that was canceled in 2023, among other things. The report described itself as a summary of reports, specific to each field. (Only one, on literary studies, has been released; it was posted after this interview was conducted.)
