YOU CAN'T REMOVE IDEOLOGY FROM SCIENCE...:

Anthropology: the great divide (Kate Riley, 10/07/07, Seattle Times)

The rift in academia broadly breaks down between the scientists whose work relies more on calipers, data and tables, and those whose work relies more on relationships with modern Native Americans.

As Audie Huber, a lead expert on the Kennewick Man case for the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla, ruefully noted: "If you want to study dead Indians, you have to work with living ones."

The tensions are exacerbated by the dark history of anthropology — past horrific propensities, including 19th-century governmental orders to collect Native American remains. There are also the erroneous efforts of some scientists more than a century ago to use skull dimensions to suggest racial superiority — a movement Boas himself famously worked to counter.

At the extremes, one school of thought insinuates dark, possibly racist intentions of scientists under sway of their Eurocentric biases, linear thinking and arrogance in their dealings with modern tribes. The other school is dismissive of the slaves to political correctness and their warm and fuzzy research — or, as one physical anthropologist smirked to another: "What do you think? Are cultural anthropologists scientists?"

Not even Condoleezza Rice, now the U.S. secretary of state, could surmount this divide as it manifested at Stanford a decade ago. Then the university's provost, Rice was faced with a huge breach in the anthropology department.

On one side were cultural and social anthropologists, generally humanists interested in interpreting living cultures. On the other side were anthropologists who used more traditional scientific methods to study the role of human evolution in culture.

Troubled by the bitter feuding, Rice installed her vice provost temporarily in charge of the department. Visiting teams of prominent anthropologists arrived to counsel the two factions but to no avail.

By 1998, Rice reluctantly approved divorce papers. Stanford now has two anthropology departments — the more data-driven Department of Anthropological Sciences and the more relationship-driven Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology.

...but you ought to at least add a little science to the ideology.

Posted by Orrin Judd at October 7, 2007 7:34 PM