Category: Anthropology

In my brief research for the previous post, I happened upon the Wikipedia page for the American Anthropological Association and its list of presidents, and was shocked to see the number and importance of individuals who were ‘red-linked’ (i.e. had no page of their own).  Irving Rouse basically built Caribbean archaeology.   There’s a page for the Goldschmidt Thesis but not for Walter freakin’ Goldschmidt himself?  I bet that Francis Hsu was the first Asian American to chair an American academic department.   Yolanda Moses has been president of basically … everything.     So step up, people!  Somebody’s got to be running a history of anthropology course where they can get their students to write up basic biographies.

Every once in a while, I read something serendipitously that I have no idea why I’m reading.  The proximate cause of my reading Ruth Benedict’s 1948 article, “Anthropology and the Humanities” was that it was in my electronic pile of PDFs to read this summer, and it was next on the list.   But why was it there?  The file’s creation/download date was 02/27/13, which was right after I got back from the Society for Anthropological Sciences meeting in Mobile, which suggests that someone there mentioned it in a talk, but I can’t for the life of me remember who or in what context.  Ah well, that’s the great thing about serendipity: ultimate causes are irrelevant.

The article is a revised version of the Address of the Retiring President that Benedict gave in December 1947 to the AAA, and which was published in late 1948 shortly after her death.  The article is available as a free PDF download along with a large number of other older AAA journals, so you can go download it and read it right now.  Go on, I’ll wait.  It’s only nine pages.  …   All right then.

The first thing that struck me is that in 1947, in stark contrast to today, Benedict needed to make the case for anthropology’s alliance  with the humanities – so obvious, she felt it to be, that anthropology was scientific that it was the opposite proposal that needed to be defended.    She suggests, interestingly, however, that the scientific ascendancy of anthropology was a historical contingency – because, in the late nineteenth century when the discipline was founded, Science was ascendant, anthropology’s allegiances became fossilized.     She invites us to imagine an alternate history where anthropology was founded a century earlier and had become profoundly humanistic.   (For instance, we could have looked to classics as such a field.)

But also note that the sort of humanism she is talking about, and to which she appeals, is not a sort of hopeless particularism or methodologically sterile navel-gazing, but a rigorous, thoughtful humanism that is no less empirical than social or natural science.  Everyone will have their own figures they think of at this juncture in their own field – for me, I suppose I would look to Walter Ong or G.E.R. Lloyd or Alexander Goldenweiser.  Benedict was no dogmatist and was not trying to fight the sorts of battles one would have seen fifty years later.   This isn’t about science vs. anti-science, or a crude critique of ‘scientism’.  To wit:

“My point is that, once anthropologists include the mind of man in their subject matter, the methods of science and the methods of the humanities complement each other. Any commitment to methods which exclude either approach is self-defeating. The humanists criticize the social sciences because they belabor the obvious and are arid; the social scientists criticize the humanities because they are subjective. It is not necessary for the anthropologist to be afraid of either criticism, neither of belaboring the obvious, nor of being subjective. The anthropologist can use both approaches. The adequate study of culture, our own and those on the opposite side of the globe, can press on to fulfillment only as we learn today from the humanities as well as from the sciences.” (Benedict 1948: 593)

And this is really the question, isn’t it, that Benedict leaves for us in some of her last scholarly words: how do we make this work?  What does it mean, other than platitudes and an occasional nod in the hallway, to be a scientifically informed humanist (or vice versa)?  Granted that there are epistemological gaps, how can they be fruitfully and productively resolved and integrated?

Over at Anthropology Now, Elizabeth Chin has written a devastating essay, “What Jason Richwine Should Have Heard from His PhD Committee” that utterly demolishes the scholarly pretentions of Jason Richwine on the basis of his poorly researched and conceptually incoherent doctoral dissertation.  For those who may not have followed the story, Richwine was a fellow of the conservative think tank, The Heritage Foundation who recently co-authored (with Robert Rector) a paper entitled “The Fiscal Cost of Unlawful Immigrants and Amnesty to the U.S. Taxpayer” arguing for an IQ-based selection system for immigration to the US, and arguing emphatically that there are substantial inter-group differences in intelligence that have public policy implications.  At which point, Garance Franke-Ruta investigated Dr. Richwine’s earlier work and found his 2009 doctoral dissertation, “IQ and Immigration Policy” which makes many of the same claims, and some that are substantially more egregious.  This has led to a serious look at the Harvard Kennedy School’s policies for approval of doctoral dissertations and forced a variety of parties to defend (or not) Richwine’s work.    Dr. Richwine resigned from the Heritage Foundation shortly thereafter.

Chin points out things that should be apparent to anyone with even the remotest familiarity with human genetics or biological anthropology: that this work systematically ignores decades of scholarship, makes spurious conceptual claims, engages in ad hominem reasoning, relies over-heavily on eugenicists and so-called ‘racial science’ as evidence.  She ultimately does what someone (anyone) should have done years ago on Dr. Richwine’s committee, noting simply that, “I am forced to conclude that your work is bad science.  Your conclusions are not objective but ideologically driven.   Your research is narrow and selective in the extreme and aligns rather dramatically with racist attempts to justify white superiority.”

What astonishes me most is not that such scholars exist, but rather, that a department or school would permit a student to form a committee where no member has expertise in the area of study. Richwine’s doctoral supervisor, George Borjas, has said explicitly that “I have never worked on anything even remotely related to IQ, so don’t really know what to think about the relation between IQ, immigration, etc. In fact, as I know I told Jason early on since I’ve long believed this, I don’t find the IQ academic work all that interesting. Economic outcomes and IQ are only weakly related, and IQ only measures one kind of ability. I’ve been lucky to have met many high-IQ people in academia who are total losers, and many smart, but not super-smart people, who are incredibly successful because of persistence, motivation, etc. So I just think that, on the whole, the focus on IQ is a bit misguided.”  All of this is completely correct.   George Borjas is a smart man.   So why did no one, not his advisor, nor any commitee member or department chair, insist that someone on the committee should have some real expertise in the causes of human biological variation, genetic and otherwise, and that the dissertation ought to be vetted by someone with such expertise before it could be approved?   (I note that one of Richwine’s committee members is the sociologist Christopher Jencks, whose edited volume The Black-White Test Score Gap makes a profound, statistically rigorous case for environmental rather than genetic causes of known disparities in such tests.  What was going through Jencks’ mind when he approved Richwine’s dissertation?

None of this is to diminish Richwine’s responsibility for his own work, which is, after all, the point of writing a doctoral dissertation.  But departments and doctoral committees have a key role to play in vetting, and ultimately in improving, sub-par scholarship.  Ultimately I think this fiasco points to the ongoing importance of interdisciplinary social science including biological anthropology if public policy (and related disciplines) hope to have anything to say on what are obviously some key issues in contemporary policy debates.