Anthropology Wars

This review of the book and the work of Napolean Chagnon, who studied the Yanomamo of the deep remote jungle of Venezuela, deserves your attention.

Wow, what he found and wow how his anthropology colleagues reacted badly. They reacted badly because he upset their “consensus” about primitives.
The old joke is that Academic politics are so brutal because the stakes are so low. That’s just not true, reputation and standing are very important in Academia, which brings out the long knives.
It is also essential to remember that the first casualty of ideology is the truth or even a search for the truth.
Chagnon’s sin was he observed that the primitives were very violent and very family/tribal anchored, which screwed up the materialistic determinism of the Marxist professoriate.
Marxist post modernist attitudBS also makes them irrational in areas like the social sciences.
Read this great essay on Chagnon–it’s a shocker and revealing on intolerance in the salons of the elite scholars. Anthropology is the home of some junk science, no doubt–you might recall the scandal of Margeret Meade’s junk studies of Pacific Islanders that was revealed after she had enjoyed decades of fame as the most honored anthropologist. Meade did quack/hack studies of the Islanders of the Pacific–boy was she a faker but still revered by some, since she worked a sex/feminism theme that was attractive to many on the left and in the Universities and chattering class.
Meade made up stuff. Chagnon didn’t and ran into a buzzsaw, but he kept on and his scholarship is the real deal, it appears. Steve Malanga of the Manhattan Institute is a reliable writer.
http://www.city-journal.org/2014/bc0413sm.html