Lifted from the comments, Elizabeth Weiss attends the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association:
There were many red flags indicating that this conference would have a greater emphasis on the political trends of anti-colonialism, indigenous knowledge, and atonement for past behaviour. For instance, there were nearly eighty sessions that used the keyword “decolonisation” and over seventy sessions that used the term “white supremacy” (none of these were ethnographic studies on actual white supremacist groups, such as the Aryan Brotherhood).
What she finds, it turns out, is in large part a gathering of the pretentious and neurotic, the casually incompetent, and the ideologically addled. Among whom, audio recordings of interviews are equated with colonialism and strip-mining, and therefore neglected in order to disavow an “extraction mindset,” and for whom “scepticism is violence” and “asking for evidence… plays to ‘right-wing pundits.’” Oh, and among whom, “anthropology of the self” is The New Hotness. Yes, these titans of rigour and fearless enquiry.
Via Darleen.
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