Special Commission Report Anthropology
The Task
This document represents a supporting chapter in our Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences. Our interdisciplinary panel was charged with assessing the epistemological health of several disciplines on the more humanistic side of the university. The Chancellors of Vanderbilt University and Washington University in St. Louis, Daniel Diermeier and Andrew D. Martin, tasked our panel as follows:
- As chancellors and presidents working to restore trust in higher education, we are concerned about the dramatic erosion of support for the humanities and humanistic social sciences amongst students, parents and government officials, as well as by the steady drumbeat of complaints about the deterioration of scholarly standards within those disciplines.
- The complaints have been various in nature. Several scientists have alleged over the years that there is widespread misunderstanding and misuse of natural science in the work of prominent humanists. Philosophers have worried about the unquestioning embrace of problematic philosophical views, especially those concerning truth, evidence and knowledge. More recently, many different voices have suggested that humanistic disciplines have allowed background ideological values to distort the objective pursuit of knowledge in those fields.
- To help us assess whether, and to what extent, there is a problem here, we charge a commission of eminent scholars from these disciplines to examine the state of scholarly work in their respective areas and to evaluate whether these allegations are justified. We are concerned that, without such an examination, the well-documented erosion of support for the humanities will continue unabated.
My role was to assess my own field, Anthropology, with a focus on scholarship within U.S. institutions. I accepted this charge out of a love for my field and a belief that anthropological insights, approaches and methods can and should play a central role in developing ideas that will help improve the lives of individuals and communities around the world. I’ve been thinking about anthropological epistemology for many years. In 1993, when I arrived at UCLA to pursue my graduate studies in cultural anthropology, I found a field already sinking into a quagmire of epistemological conflict (D’Andrade 1995; Scheper-Hughes 1995) and drifting in a direction that would make it increasingly difficult to develop theories capable of addressing social and economic problems. Nevertheless, I committed to continuing because I saw profound value in anthropological perspectives. To develop my own approach, I began engaging with ideas and methods from economics (Kagel & Roth 1995), political science (Ostrom 1990) and psychology (Kahneman et al. 1982). UCLA’s 4-field breadth requirements meant I had to take a course in biological anthropology. This course showed me how ideas from evolutionary biology could help us think more clearly about culture, cultural change, and the emergence of phenomena such as social norms, institutions, rituals and cooperation (Boyd & Richerson 1985). Much of my career has focused on bringing the richness of anthropology to other parts of the social and biological sciences (Bergeron et al. forthcoming; Blasi et al. 2022; Henrich 2000; Henrich et al. 2010b; Henrich & Henrich 2010; Henrich & Muthukrishna 2021), while learning how these other fields generate knowledge — harvesting insights and techniques to integrate into our work. The framework that emerged from the efforts of many people in several disciplines is now a major enterprise, the field of ‘cultural evolution,’ which has its own society and biennial meetings. My immersion in these other disciplines, which includes earning tenure and promotion to full professor, gives me a unique perspective on Anthropology.
