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In January and February, and again in June and July, I spend hours reading evaluations of the 1600 research grant applications that the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research receives every year. In March and April, and September and October, I repeat the procedure for applications who make it to the final round.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Our reviewers ask about sample size and statistical power. They challenge applicants to take into account politics, economy, geology, changes in the media, changes in the climate, and how these aspects of their site might play into what they find. They discuss gender, class, and race, and how these might affect what people say and do, and how the researcher\u2019s own background might come into the picture. \u201cYou\u2019re framing your research questions as if you already knew the answer,\u201d they sometimes write. \u201cYou\u2019re not talking to enough people, and not enough people from different groups.\u201d \u201cHave you considered X\u2019s findings in city Y and how your research setting might differ?\u201d \u201cThere\u2019s a mismatch between your research questions and your methods.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
I also host\u00a0informational webinars<\/a>\u00a0for prospective applicants. \u201cThe word \u2018experiment\u2019 comes from the same root as \u2018experience,\u2019\u201d I tell them. \u201cYou\u2019re doing empirical research if you are arranging experiences for yourselves that put your assumptions at risk.\u201d I don\u2019t have to explain this to\u00a0our reviewers<\/a>. They are based in institutions in Africa, Asia, Europe, and North and South America. They are experts in poetry and genomics, pastoralism and IT. But they share one thing in common: they understand that anthropology is an empirical pursuit.<\/p>\n The authors of the\u00a0Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and Humanistic Social Sciences<\/em><\/a> do not understand this.\u00a0<\/p>\n I don\u2019t need to dwell on the\u00a0Report<\/em>\u2019s\u00a0faulty research methods<\/a>. Yes, they missed broad swathes of current research in anthropology. And I do wonder why, if they were interested in scholarly standards, they didn\u2019t talk with some seasoned gatekeepers like me or my colleagues at National Geographic or the NSF. But the problem with the\u00a0Report<\/em>\u00a0runs deeper than that. The\u00a0\u00a0argument runs as follows: the political commitments of anthropologists are leading them to 1) only accept certain findings; and 2) value advocacy over the pursuit of the truth.<\/p>\n Let\u2019s take the first point. The\u00a0Report<\/em>\u00a0describes concerns over an\u00a0article<\/a>\u00a0on the sexual division of labor, which PLOS One supposedly only accepted because the article\u2019s authors\u2019 findings were of the sort that feminists would like. Now, I wouldn\u2019t be surprised if there were issues with the article\u2014reviewers and editors aren\u2019t infallible; they can overlook flaws. But that\u2019s a matter of the science, not the perspective that the authors brought to their work. In fact, when it comes to advancing anthropological knowledge, feminism has more often been the solution than the problem. Political commitments don\u2019t necessarily limit answers in anthropology; they potentially expand the range of questions that anthropologists ask.\u00a0<\/p>\n Consider Annette Weiner. She was a feminist, and because of this she paid heed to what women were up to in the Trobriand Islands, where she did research in the early 1970s. As a result,\u00a0Women of Value, Men of Renown<\/em><\/a>\u00a0offers a picture of this society that is arguably more accurate than those that came before it, including\u00a0Bronislaw Malinowski\u2019s more famous account<\/a>.\u00a0Marcel Mauss was a socialist<\/a>, and because of this he didn\u2019t assume that the pursuit of profit was the only thing that mattered to people, when it came to their relationships with the objects they exchange.\u00a0The Gift<\/em><\/a>\u00a0not only sheds light on the workings of small-scale societies, but also on the desires and values at work in France, where Mauss lived.\u00a0<\/p>\n Epistemologists speak of\u00a0the difference between statistical validity and construct validity<\/a>. Some fields might be better at generating big data sets and arriving at statistically significant findings. There\u2019s certainly a role for quantitative research in anthropology, and plenty of us care about whether the \u201cN\u201d is big enough to support a scholar\u2019s claims. But what holds for all of us is our commitment to construct validity\u2014we want to know that we\u2019re paying attention to the right variables. We\u2019re deeply contextualizing. Whether we\u2019re archaeologists sifting sediment for grain fragments, or cultural anthropologists mapping grocery stories in a neighborhood, we are alert to the factors that shape the lives, thoughts, bodies, and behavior of the humans and non-human primates we\u2019re studying. One of the contexts we care about is the pathway through the world that has shaped the concerns that a researcher brings to their work. I\u2019m not talking about political litmus tests. I\u2019m talking about the equivalent of a cart horse\u2019s blinders\u2014presumptions that can limit what a researcher can perceive.<\/p>\n My point is not simply that sexist science is bad because it does harm to women. Sexist science is bad because it is bad science. It\u2019s bad because it\u2019s not empirically rich in the way the best anthropology is. Scientists worth their salt approach their research with humility. They know that science is not about truth; it\u2019s about facts: findings that hold for the moment but may not hold for good.\u00a0<\/p>\n This takes me to the second point, on the valuing of advocacy. Anthropologists across the subfields are increasingly coming to recognize that they themselves are a factor in the situations they study. The assumptions they bring to their research don\u2019t just shape what they make of it; their presence has an impact on the situation they describe. Call it the anthropological version of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. (The headier among us might turn to\u00a0Karen Barad\u2019s riff on Niels Bohr<\/a>.) I\u2019m not talking about \u201csocial construction,\u201d which the\u00a0Report<\/em>\u00a0translates as \u201cmaking stuff up.\u201d I\u2019m talking about how the universe works.\u00a0<\/p>\n Research has consequences.\u00a0In 1952, the Wenner-Gren Foundation gave the Viking Medal to Carleton Coon<\/a>, a notorious race scientist, and funded the research that went into his 1962 book,\u00a0The Origin of Races<\/em><\/a>. Coon was writing to fellow scientists; he and they felt they were engaged in a scholarly pursuit. But\u00a0his ideas were popularized<\/a>\u00a0in a best-selling pamphlet,\u00a0Race and Reason<\/em><\/a>, published around the same time by Carleton Putnam, a white supremacist and anti-integration activist.\u00a0<\/p>\n The pamphlet sold 150,000 copies, was taught in Louisiana schools, and inspired the governor of Mississippi to declare \u201cRace and Reason Day.\u201d The contemporary neo-Nazi and white supremacist, David Duke, who is still alive, has claimed that\u00a0Race and Reason\u00a0<\/em>changed his life. Once our findings are out there, they are available to do work. It\u2019s both clear-eyed and ethical for anthropologists to take into account the kind of work that their research is likely to do.<\/p>\n Taking this work into account requires paying heed to the impact of research on the people being studied. When behavioral ecologists ask for funding for fieldwork among the Hadza, our reviewers make sure they are aware of how colonialism and the state, among other factors, have shaped the lifeways of this contemporary population. But they also make sure that the research participants have a stake in the research \u2014that they benefit from it, and participate in it as thought partners, rather than simply being treated like survivals from the distant past.\u00a0<\/p>\n There\u2019s nothing weird about any of this. We\u2019re not the only discipline that\u2019s committed to the principle \u201cDo no harm.\u201d We\u2019re not the only discipline that understands its mission in relation to a higher cause. Researchers at the\u00a0Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center<\/a>\u00a0do basic research. The reference to cancer doesn\u2019t limit the questions they ask; it gestures towards the utopian horizon of their science. It\u2019s only fitting that the President of the American Anthropological Association should\u00a0speak to the discipline\u2019s impact and purpose<\/a>; listen for a moment, and you will hear presidents of other scholarly associations singing the same tune. It\u2019s what presidents are elected to do.<\/p>\n I just returned from a conference in Kenya, where I spent time with African paleoanthropologists, along with a smattering of scholars from the US and Europe. I was excited to explore the nitty gritty of their research. Fossils only form under certain conditions. It\u2019s hard to overstate how rare and precious these discoveries are.\u00a0Paleoanthropology has progressed in leaps and bounds in recent years<\/a>. This is not just because new technologies and methods, drawn from adjacent disciplines, have expanded the toolkit for analyzing these materials. Researchers have also discovered new sources of inspiration\u2014they have come to ask new questions and developed new techniques for addressing them.\u00a0<\/p>\n Increasingly, inspiration is coming from colleagues whose approaches and methods differ significantly from theirs. It\u2019s exciting when anthropologists from different subfields get together.\u00a0At\u00a0Wenner-Gren<\/a>, I\u2019ve had the good fortune of discovering that it isn\u2019t all that difficult to get them into the same room. How anthropologists think about evidence varies. But that difference is a strength, and it\u2019s increasingly recognized as such. Given the conversations that anthropologists are having, reading the\u00a0Report<\/em>\u00a0is like entering an alien world.\u00a0<\/p>\n Mostly, it\u2019s a world whose time is past. I found my way to anthropology in the late 1980s. I know who\u00a0Alan Sokal<\/a> was and why the\u00a0Report<\/em>\u00a0mentions his name. Those debates were raging when I started graduate school\u2014we called them \u201cthe science wars\u201d\u2014and anthropology staged its own skirmishes, mostly over James Clifford and George Marcus\u2019s landmark volume,\u00a0Writing Culture<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n