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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   5483 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 20, 2026

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I can't speak for anthropology specifically, but what Rouse says in that interview does remind me a great deal of what I hear from left-wing professors in my field of religion and theology. Take this, for instance:

On that note, your statement also said that there’s “substantial and active literature that contradicts or at least complexifies the assertions made by the report, literature that would have been immediately apparent to anyone who consulted working scholars in the field.” What’s a citation or two you would recommend to that effect? And what’s the different view of anthropology that they would show?

Well, the first thing that came to my mind was my own recent paper. It’s called “An Anti-Genealogical Take on U.S. Anthropology and Disciplinary Reform: From Anti-Racism to Decolonization.” I wrote, “The ‘decolonizing generation’ is a critical new movement that has captured the imaginations of many younger scholars. While the author would like to consider herself an older member of this generation, she questions whether this moment needs periodization. Is today’s moment really so different from the past, when we saw the rise of world anthropologies, postmodernism, the crisis in representation, neo-Marxism, and anti-racist movements? And what is meant by ‘decolonizing anthropology’ when experiences with colonialism and decolonization differ around the world? While acknowledging the value of reforming the discipline, the author encourages her colleagues to separate the very important critique of anthropologists’ gatekeeping practices from idealized renderings of what anthropology should be. Rather than decolonization, the discipline ought to focus on establishing a continual decentering of hegemonic knowledge production.”

To me, that’s just a typical thing in our discipline — we’re debating each other in a friendly way.

I think she is completely sincere in saying this. From the outside we can see that this is a "fifty Stalins" situation, of course. She is criticising a particular movement, but she is criticising it from the perspective that there needs to be more of it, not less.

Nonetheless, internally, I think she's serious, and simply sees the borders of legitimate scholarship as ending somewhere short of the possibility of conservative or traditional anthropology.

It's easy to mock this, but let's consider whether that might not be the system that we built, deliberately. The whole point of an ivory tower is to be sealed off from the world. It's supposed to form its own unique culture, and to be free of the currents of the wider culture around it. Should we have built such a system? Well, probably not. But we did, and maybe we shouldn't be surprised when said tower has formed its own bizarre little culture that's significantly out-of-step with the wider population.

What is ‘traditional anthropology’? Margaret Meade’s work was mostly based on lies. Early anthropologists said all kinds of crazy shit. The field has been ideologically driven fan fiction, sloppy research techniques, and actual lies since the beginning.

It's easy to mock this, but let's consider whether that might not be the system that we built, deliberately. The whole point of an ivory tower is to be sealed off from the world.

The steelman argument for the ivory tower is to isolate them from market pressures and short-term fads, so they can focus on higher pursuits, not to create a cult that thinks itself impervious to criticism from anyone that hasn't been initiated into it, but feels entitled to your money at the same time.

How do you create the former without the risk of the latter? And if the latter does eventuate, how do you remove it without making the tower once again vulnerable to fads and markets?

I don't mean this as a gotcha question. I think the current situation is clearly bad, and I'd like to find a better option that still achieves everything we want universities to achieve.

I think like this. Increasingly massive consensus that produces an increasingly universal political pressure, making clear that the only choices are reform or closure. If you are emotionally comitted to the principle that the humanities must remain open as academic departments, then you cannot apply the leverage that will produce reform.

How do you create the former without the risk of the latter? And if the latter does eventuate, how do you remove it without making the tower once again vulnerable to fads and markets?

This is sufficiently abstracted away as to make it pretty much impossible to make meaningful answers to these questions, but one core that's missing is academia being tied to things that are real. Whether you call that "empiricism" or "truth" or "fact" or "science" or whatever, this connection is fundamental to the value that academia offers society/humanity/civilization/etc., and the current state of academia is the result of academics and their leaders for at least the past few decades taking a machete to that connection with abandon.

It's hard to say what controls could have been put in place and how they could have been enforced to make sure the ivory tower's fads don't turn against being tied to reality. But I believe that any way of saving the ivory tower from its many self-inflicted wounds (or hypothetical ways in which they wouldn't have inflicted them on themselves in the past) would need heavy emphasis on enforcing this, since without that connection, the ivory tower provides almost no value to society beyond being a daycare for young adults.

I don't mean this as a gotcha question.

No worries, I didn't take it as such, but the question is a lot deeper than it looks like at first glance.

Even though I don't think the 2 particular issues would come up here, as it's hard to make money off anthropology, so I don't see how market pressures or short term fads could enter here, generally I don't think there's a systemic solution. We've spent the last 80 years trying to replace human virtue with systems that will force good behavior on bad people, and all we ever got for it was Goodhart's Law up the wazzoo. Whatever rule you come up with will be gamed the same way peer review and the h-index were.

The other solution of a strongman entering and cleaning up house also has issues, in that some people think the ivory tower is also supposed to be isolated from political pressures. There are many reasons why this is at best unsustainable, at at worst impossible, ranging from "you may be not interested in politics, but politics is interested in you" to the frequent theme of FCFromSSC posts: "the only reason something felt apolitical in the past is that our values were largely converged in the past, and we'll never get it back now that we have values divergence".

Now, just because there doesn't seem to be a fix that doesn't risk other issues, doesn't detract from the fact that something must be done. If our attempt to insulate academia from outside influence ended up in the setting up little cults, we have to get rid of the cults, even if that results in other issues.

The whole point of an ivory tower is to be sealed off from the world.

The sealing is insufficient, as it is leaking tax dollars, electricity, telecommunications access, food, water and air, among other notable deficiencies which crave rectification.

Nationalize the endowments and the pensions. Nuke and pave.

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