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Veritas (![[info]](http://www.journalfen.net/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} chaos_theory) wrote in ![[info]](http://www.journalfen.net/img/community.gif){kind=small} otf_wank, |
There's a few different levels of wrongness with Bones. First is the headslapping errors that are silly and fun to point out, things like carbon-dating things that can't be carbon-dated. I think they c-14 dated a pirate to the 17th cen in one episode-which is funny, because carbon-dating gets less accurate the more recent an item is, so radiocarbon-dating something from the 17th cen would give you a several hundred years time range. Knowing something comes from any time between 1500 and 1950 isn't very useful.
Second is the stuff that's wrong and sort of enraging, like when they dip into some physical anthro stuff that is more subtly wrong and therefore worse, because it's often actually fairly racist, sexist, etc. and not really an accurate representation of how doing things like establishing race is actually done, or how those methods are problematic-basically any time someone looks at a skeleton and says "Oh, that's an African-American woman in her 50s" right off the bat is total rubbish. Those things often require a series of measurements from various parts of the body, and are really based on statistically defined groups, and don't take into account the wide range of variation within and between populations. I'm sure Bones would have read The Mismeasure of Man, at least (Awesome book, I highly recommend it!). I am not a physical anth so there are probably things I missed or didn't get right here.
Third, and what I find most annoying, is that Bones often is so completely culturally insensitive and dismissive of the practices of other cultures. Any anthropologist who managed to make it through a first year Anthro theory class would have been so slammed with Boas and the importance of context and cultural relativism that they would know, even if they were superjudgemental of other cultures, to keep their fool mouths shut or sound like some grumpy old ethnocentric tool of colonialism.
Don't get me wrong, I love Bones and think it's good times, but they way the deal with race, especially, is sometimes so cringeworthy. Haha. I tried to keep it unranty. I don't know if I succeeded.
Second is the stuff that's wrong and sort of enraging, like when they dip into some physical anthro stuff that is more subtly wrong and therefore worse, because it's often actually fairly racist, sexist, etc. and not really an accurate representation of how doing things like establishing race is actually done, or how those methods are problematic-basically any time someone looks at a skeleton and says "Oh, that's an African-American woman in her 50s" right off the bat is total rubbish. Those things often require a series of measurements from various parts of the body, and are really based on statistically defined groups, and don't take into account the wide range of variation within and between populations. I'm sure Bones would have read The Mismeasure of Man, at least (Awesome book, I highly recommend it!). I am not a physical anth so there are probably things I missed or didn't get right here.
Third, and what I find most annoying, is that Bones often is so completely culturally insensitive and dismissive of the practices of other cultures. Any anthropologist who managed to make it through a first year Anthro theory class would have been so slammed with Boas and the importance of context and cultural relativism that they would know, even if they were superjudgemental of other cultures, to keep their fool mouths shut or sound like some grumpy old ethnocentric tool of colonialism.
Don't get me wrong, I love Bones and think it's good times, but they way the deal with race, especially, is sometimes so cringeworthy. Haha. I tried to keep it unranty. I don't know if I succeeded.
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