Defense against dark anthropology
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2260036 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Fernando A Villanea (0000-0002-6661-0368, Department of Anthropology University of Colorado Boulder Boulder United States, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2023 |
| Volume | 125 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 184-185 |
| Publication date | 2023-03-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | American Anthropologist (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0002-7294 • E-ISSN: 1548-1433 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1111/aman.13818 |
| OpenAlex | W4319787831 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
| References cited | 6 |
Anthropological Association annual meeting, where he imagined how we would conduct the business of anthropology differently if it were reconstructed as a decolonizing project.In the address, later published in American Anthropologist, Gupta and Stoolman (2022) propose that US anthropology was intended as a decolonizing project from its inception, and yet this path was never realized.In recent years, the frustration over what anthropology should have been has ignited the engagement of a younger generation of scholars with the "inability of our discipline to jointly deal with questions of race and racialization at home, and militarism, imperialism, and predatory capitalism abroad."In response to the Presidential Address, a contingent of anthropologists has expressed their concern at the direction the discipline has taken in the past decade, an anthropology intrinsically braided with activism and ethical engagement.In a "Letter of Concern," circulated in April of 2022, the authors and signatories view this overly moralizing anthropology as "committed to a particular ideological paradigm that brooks no dissent," and in doing so, walking away from a strength of classic anthropology as a free forum untethered from political opinion.Among the recent discourses highlighted is an anxiety over the dominance of a "dark anthropology" in recent literature, which I have chosen here as a heuristic to approximate the larger conversation."Dark anthropology" is a term coined by Sherry Ortner (2016) in her article "Dark Anthropology and Its Others," referring to a trend in the tone underlying anthropological studies, where human misery has become the matrix upon which all anthropology literature is bonded.It is important to remark here that there is a fundamental cause/effect fallacy under which these cultural processes are reported as a choice as opposed to a consequence of the author's immediate environment.It's obvious that Ortner's intention was to present "dark anthropology" as a natural consequence of the "increasingly problematic conditions of the real world under neoliberalism" and not a stylistic choice made by the author.This is a key distinction that is easy to miss, as concerned parties wrongly portray "dark anthropology" as a fashionable choice rather than the reckoning of anthropologists with decades of a neglected social environment.For biological anthropologists today, this is clear-cut.Biological anthropology has to reckon with very real consequences of all published material in our field.When studies fish for statistical support for polygenic risk scores in traits that are driven by social environments, such as educational attainment or violence, they are cited by white supremacists as support for violent or terrorist acts (Bird 2021; Panofsky, Dasgupta, and Iturriaga 2021).When minorities are largely excluded in medical genetic trials, those same individuals become at risk of being prescribed ineffective medication (Krainc and Fuentes 2022).When museums and government institutions purposefully unaffiliate skeletal remains to avoid Tribal custody under NAGPRA, Tribal governments rightfully remove themselves from participating in anthropology (Cortez et al. 2021).When the skeletal remains of two Black girls were misappropriated for a university's teaching collection, the entire population of Philadelphia was galvanized against their academic community (McGreevy 2021).There are numerous other examples of biological anthropology harming people, each one our responsibility to correct-every day, in every classroom, in every article, in every book, in every conversation.A misunderstanding that permeates the discourse of those reluctant to the braiding of activism and ethical engagement in the discipline is an anxiety over censorship imposed on any protesting scholars.However, I argue that dissenting anthropologists are in effect censoring themselves by pursuing viewpoints that are not relevant to the communities they are meant to serve.This is the message I wish the entire anthropological community to hear: the core academic value of anthropology is not the pursuit of truth, because all truth is subjective.Conversely, there are millions of people who are adversely affected by the subjective version of truth we choose to tell.That is the objective reality, and so our core value should instead be to serve their interests.As Gupta and Stoolman highlight in their piece, "scholars in the Global South often complain that their expertise is rendered into data by scholars from the Global North who treat their academic colleagues as 'local informants.'"This is the experience of Indigenous and minority communities and their history of participation in biological anthropology: being viewed solely as a source of data.To combat this inequality, Indigenous and
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| Unique citing works | 3 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1 |
| Citation span | 2023 - 2026 (4) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 2 |