One response from an AAA member on the "science" issue

Tue Jan 11 14:56:44 UTC 2011

Linganthers:  Here's a response from an AAA member of the executive
board  on the "science" issue that I found useful.  It was published
in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

There are lots of comments responding to this on the CHE site, which I
haven't included.

Hal S.

What if They Gave a Science War and Only One Side Came?
Ask the American Anthropological Association

By Hugh Gusterson

In November the executive board of the American Anthropological
Association, of which I am a member, met for one and a half days. In
preparation for the meeting, we were expected to read a 250-page
briefing book. About three pages of that 250-page book were taken up
by what the meeting will now be remembered for: a revision of the
association's statement on its long-range planning. We did not know
it, but those three pages were to set off a short "science war" within
anthropology. Now that tempers have died down, we can ask what the
controversy shows about the force of the word "science" and about
anthropology, a discipline that has always stood at the crossroads of
science and the humanities.

Most of the 250 pages, and most of our time in the executive-board
meeting, was given over to issues that many of us saw as more urgent
than the long-range-planning statement: a detailed review of the
association's budget in a time of national recession; a discussion of
our publishing model in a context in which most of the association's
journals operate at a loss and their content is increasingly available
free via the Web; an analysis of our publishing partnership with
Wiley-Blackwell; a briefing on the introduction of a
multimillion-dollar computer program to facilitate the association's
business; a conversation about recurrent issues in organizing the
annual meeting and issues that had already arisen with regard to next
year's meeting, in Montreal; a discussion of the search for a new
editor of our flagship journal, American Anthropologist; a performance
evaluation of the association's executive director and the staff he
oversees; and a tricky discussion about whether, or how, to make
available as an archival document a 10-year-old official report of the
association's that had since been repudiated by the membership through
a ballot.

At the end of the 12-hour meeting, in what seemed like routine
business, we briefly discussed and approved two documents that had
been revised by subcommittees of the executive board. (For the record,
I was on neither one.) One was a statement called "What Is
Anthropology?" It was intended to give an overview of our discipline
to interested outsiders. The other was the AAA's statement on its
long-range planning.

In view of the furor that has followed, it is important to note that
the second sentence of the "What Is Anthropology?" statement, approved
back-to-back with the long-range plan, reads as follows: "To
understand the full sweep and complexity of cultures across all of
human history, anthropology draws and builds upon knowledge from the
social and biological sciences as well as the humanities and physical
sciences." While the word "science" was front and center in that
document, it was absent from the new long-range plan. That was a
change from the former plan, which began, "The purposes of the
association shall be to advance anthropology as the science that
studies humankind in all its aspects, through archaeological,
biological, ethnological, and linguistic research; and to further the
professional interests of American anthropologists." In the process of
making revisions, that sentence was replaced with, "The purposes of
the association shall be to advance public understanding of humankind
in all its aspects. This includes, but is not limited to,
archaeological, biological, social, cultural, economic, political,
historical, medical, visual, and linguistic anthropological research."

Within a few days, the executive board began receiving angry e-mails
from self-identified scientific anthropologists who were irate about
dropping the word "science" from the long-range plan. Some announced
that they would be resigning from the association. Most had not seen
the "What Is Anthropology?" statement, with its reference to science,
and they were not mollified by protestations that science was implied
by the new long-range plan's references to archaeology and biological
anthropology. The word "science" had taken on a talismanic
significance, and our critics wanted to see it in the long-range plan.

It was becoming clear, as a sympathetic colleague put it to me, that
the executive board had "stepped in something it didn't mean to." The
revisions had been intended to make the long-range plan more inclusive
and to give an enlarged sense of the increasing body of research
paradigms that anthropologists these days embrace. It had never
occurred to the subcommittee rewriting the plan, or to the executive
board, that the revised wording would be seen as excluding or
attacking science.

The temperature of the debate rose when the news media began to report
on it. Articles featured quotes from some anthropologists, speaking in
the name of scientific objectivity, characterizing the process by
which the new wording was adopted in ways that were often quite wide
of the mark. A common theme was that the executive board had been
overrun by postmodernist extremists on a vendetta against science. An
article on the Web site Inside Higher Ed quoted an
anthropology-department chair as saying that the change in wording
reflected the power of "scholars who are actively hostile" to science.
It also quoted a blog post on Psychology Today's site by Alice Dreger,
a pundit and professor of clinical medical humanities and bioethics at
Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine, who regularly
comments on anthropology, attributing the new wording to "fluff-head
cultural anthropological types who think science is just another way
of knowing." Most bizarre was a posting: "No more science in our
mission? Now the terrorists and Sarah Palin have both won. ... Welcome
back to the middle ages."

By far the most inflammatory and inaccurate coverage was in The New
York Times, by Nicholas Wade, a reporter who has also written a number
of books popularizing evolutionary biology and anthropology. In one
article, he traced the new wording of the long-range plan to "a
long-simmering tension between researchers in science-based
anthropological disciplines—including archaeologists, physical
anthropologists, and some cultural anthropologists—and members of the
profession who study race, ethnicity, and gender and see themselves as
advocates for native peoples or human rights." He, too, quoted an
anthropology professor who saw behind the new language "the
postmodernist critique of the authority of science" and denounced
"so-called critical anthropologists, who see anthropology as an arm of
colonialism and therefore something that should be done away with."
(Yes, according to Wade's source, there are lemming anthropologists
who want to do away with their own discipline.) In a follow-up
article, Wade referred to a "longstanding cultural gap within the
association between the evidence-based researchers, who include some
social anthropologists, and those more interested in advocating for
the rights of women or native peoples."

What is there to say about all this? First, to state the obvious, it
is clear that the process of consultation between the executive board
and some sections of the association did not work well. Unaware of
concerns about the new wording, we did not discuss the excision of the
word "science" when approving the document. Had we known the strength
of feeling its removal would provoke, we surely would have retained
it. As the AAA president, Virginia Dominguez, a professor at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, made clear in a letter to
association members in response to the controversy, and as the
executive board further clarified in a subsequent press release, the
wording of the long-range plan will be revised again, taking account
of feedback from the membership. The word "science" will surely find
its way back into our long-range plan.

Second, neither the public nor anthropology was well served by
news-media accounts that presented the new wording of the long-range
plan as the work of postmodernist extremists, or that mischaracterized
anthropology as divided between those who adhere to the scientific
method and those preoccupied with the politics of race and gender or
with activist advocacy.

Far from being a cabal of postmodern insurgents, the executive board,
which approved the long-range plan unanimously, included three
archaeologists and three practicing anthropologists. (Practicing
anthropologists, until recently known as applied anthropologists, use
their training as the basis for social interventions, and tend to be
oriented toward broadly predicting the outcomes of such
interventions.) The supposed schism between archaeologists, biological
anthropologists, and positivist cultural anthropologists on one side
and radically relativist cultural anthropologists on the other turns
out to be more complicated.

As for the alleged divide between "evidence based" and "activist"
anthropologists, plenty of anthropologists who write critically about
race and gender do so within a "scientific" framework, and many
anthropologists who advocate for indigenous or underprivileged peoples
claim science as the ground for their authority to speak. For example,
those who speak up for indigenous peoples' being damaged by climate
change do so on the basis of empirical studies of such peoples'
ecological settings, and it would be bizarre to think that those
anthropologists have any interest in undermining the science that
allows us to understand climate change. Similarly, anthropologists
concerned with race and gender often use scientific methods, broadly
construed, to demonstrate inequities in income, access to housing,
education, health care, and so on.

But perhaps the most serious misrepresentation in news-media coverage
of this affair was the depiction of cultural anthropology as overrun
by "postmodern fluff-heads" on a crusade against science. In the
mid-1990s, when the "science wars" were at their height, and you had
to be either for or against Foucault, there might have been some truth
in such a characterization. Those were the years when it was
fashionable to talk about "the social construction of scientific
knowledge." As a sign of the times, the Stanford University
anthropology department split into two departments, one of
anthropological sciences and one of sociocultural anthropology.

But times have changed. The two Stanford departments have remarried;
the French anthropologist Bruno Latour, high priest of the "social
construction of science" school, has long since published an anguished
article in Critical Inquiry—"Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From
Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern"—worrying about the tacit
complicity between "postmodernist" social thought and oil companies
seeking to deny the reality of climate change.

In my experience, younger cultural anthropologists tend to describe
themselves as pragmatists, and they see the debates in the 1980s and
1990s about "writing culture" and the politics of knowledge, which
were so formative for an older generation, as a part of the
discipline's history they have assimilated and are moving beyond.
While the self-identified scientific anthropologists were filling my
inbox with angry messages about the hegemony of antiscientific
postmodernists, many anthropologists who use French critical theory in
their work also e-mailed me to ask if the word "science" could not be
restored, given its importance to colleagues. It is important to note
that throughout this whole episode of e-mails, blogs, and news-media
coverage, not a single anthropologist whom I am aware of insisted that
the word "science" should stay excised.

Let me close by observing two ironies. The first is that the
scientific anthropologists seem, more than they might want to admit,
to have internalized aspects of the postmodernist point of view. One
of the essential insights in Foucault's work was that the words we use
have the power to shape reality. Race and gender activists likewise
attach great importance to language; hence all the energy they have
put into contesting the use of exclusionary pronouns and racial
epithets and critiquing mass-media representations of women and
minorities. Discourse matters, they have taught us. In pitching their
discipline into a fight over whether or not a particular word,
"science," is used in a planning document, the scientific
anthropologists seem to have accepted a core part of the postmodernist
and activist sensibility—the preoccupation with representation and the
formative power of words.

Second, at just the moment that scientific anthropologists were
pressing the fight about the long-range plan, a little video went
viral of Rep. Adrian Smith, Republican of Nebraska, inviting ordinary
Americans to join him in hunting down grants in the National Science
Foundation's budget that waste taxpayer money. By inviting citizens to
circumvent and cancel the system of peer review that has anchored the
NSF since its inception, Smith implicitly negated the regard for
expertise that undergirds both scientific and humanistic knowledge. It
is Smith and his cohort, not the residual influence of Foucault, that
represent the real danger to scientific research. And I fear that
Smith may be quite happy to use some of the recent misleading rhetoric
about postmodernism in anthropology to further his cause.

In the end, after the word "science" is restored to the planning
document, one can only hope that scientific and humanistic
anthropologists can make common cause against the real danger to our
fractious, untidy, and glorious discipline that the distinguished
anthropologist Eric Wolf once aptly described as "the most scientific
of the humanities, and the most humanistic of the sciences." E
pluribus unum.

Hugh Gusterson is a professor of anthropology and sociology at George
Mason University and a member of the executive board of the American
Anthropological Association.

from: http://chronicle.com/article/What-if-They-Had-a-Science-War/125828/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

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 Harold F. Schiffman

Professor Emeritus of
 Dravidian Linguistics and Culture
Dept. of South Asia Studies
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305

Phone:  (215) 898-7475
Fax:  (215) 573-2138

Email:  haroldfs at gmail.com
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/

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