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#AAAFail
War between anthropology-as-science and anthropology-as-literary-theory continues, news at 11.

The short version: Anthropology has long been split between people who consider themselves scientists (they are using falsifiable hypotheses and empirical data to learn facts about how people behave) and people who feel that postmodern literary theory is a better way to approach the subject in a way that is conscious of one's own cultural biases. The scientists call the literary theorists "fluff-heads" while the literary theorists call the scientists as shallow as pro wrestlers. The American Anthropological Association (generally considered to be on the anthropology-as-literary-theory side of the fence, but still playing an important role in the rest of anthropology as the host of the annual academic-job-seeking process) recently amended their mission statement in the anti-science direction. Or rather, they wrote a new "long-range plan" that differs from their previous mission statement in the important sense that it can be approved by the executive committee without an actual vote of the membership.

As some Iain M. Banks fan writes: "I thought it was pretty telling that the AAA's move was not to make the statement more inclusive or add language clarifying that nonscientific inquiry was also valued. It was just to delete science."

There's a lot of self-important posturing and other forms of wanking on all sides, on the blogs and (of course) on twitter. This post has quite a few more good links.

Disclaimer: anthropology was my worst subject in college, and I haven't paid much attention to it since. I know which side of this debate I'd stand on, but I'm woefully underinformed.

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	shinga 2010-12-06 02:59 am UTC (link)
	I just want to know what Dr Brennan thinks. ;) (Reply to this)(Thread)

	chaos_theory 2010-12-06 03:48 am UTC (link)
	Probably something cringingly inaccurate and not in keeping with anything an anthropologist who has matriculated in the last 20 years or so would even breathe aloud. I love Bones, but seriously, that show has about as much to do with forensic anthropology as The Flintstones has to do with prehistory. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	major_fischer 2010-12-06 05:20 am UTC (link)
	At the risk of asking for a rant... As an outsider, care to point out the major fallacies in bones? Besides that the woman is obviously floating around on the autism spectrum? (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

goddessleila
2010-12-06 06:06 am UTC (link)

I can't say much on the science end of things, but one thing I do know about Bones is that the writers decided not to write Bones as being on the autism spectrum, just very focuses and drastically out of touch with pop culture, whereas the actress who plays Bones apparently did a lot of googling or something and decided to play her as being on the autism spectrum, against what the writers had decided. This came from an interview the actress gave, and I didn't get the sense that she did a lot of in-depth reading before making that particular character decision; that probably accounts for a lot of the more drastic discrepancies right there. (Not all of them, of course; sometimes the writing, especially in the last few seasons, can be really uneven. But some of them.)

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	tofuknight 2010-12-06 07:12 pm UTC (link)
	This makes me sad, because I would have sex with her in a nanosecond, and people not doing the research right makes me sad. (would still have sex with her, though.) (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	goddessleila 2010-12-06 07:25 pm UTC (link)
	I, too, would hit that in a second. I'd just feel guilty about compromising my principles later. (Reply to this)(Parent)

chaos_theory
2010-12-07 03:23 am UTC (link)

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.

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major_fischer
2010-12-07 04:45 am UTC (link)

No, actually I was quite interested. I have had similiar conversations (and rants to be honest) about my position on the character of Daniel Jackson and how I'd want him to DIAF if he was a real person.

I'm an academic enough to recognize and chuckle at the academic world stuff that Bones touches. My only encounters with anthro outside of General Anthropology when I was an undergrad have been ethnographies assigned to me in grad school in history. As has been pointed out up thread, history tends to steal from a lot of other disciplines. Especially when we're trying to work around the bias' of surviving sources. I'm a particular flavor of historian that borrows more than others, but it's still reading others work not understanding the field as an insider.

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chibikaijuu
2010-12-07 09:46 pm UTC (link)

The funny thing is, Bones is often quite culturally sensitive compared to other characters, and the show has varied wildly on how she reacts to certain things. She thinks religion (all religion, any religion) is utter bunk, and half the time treats it as ridiculous, and half the time treats it as an important part of the background culture they are plowing through in a given episode.

Yeah, they are wonky as hell about race, but the actual cast - wow. There aren't actually a lot of other popular shows with three full-time, major female characters (and two supporting) who are either scientists or work closely with them (and two of them are POC and one of those is the boss).

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chaos_theory
2010-12-07 10:09 pm UTC (link)

Yeah, there's a weird writing problem I think-like half the time Bones is so overly culturally relativistic, and the other half she's mocking people to their face about their cultural beliefs. She's so inconsistently written from episode to episode that it can be sort of frustrating, especially because all the other characters are so consistent and have such distinctive personalities.

I think the cast is great and I love that they really make no issues about women and POC being in positions of power, they just treat it matter-of-factly, which is how it should be treated.

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chibikaijuu
2010-12-10 03:04 am UTC (link)

It's sort of a damning fact about fandom, though, that when I went looking for fic I found much more m/m than I did f/f, despite fact that the focal relationships on the show are either between a man and a woman or two women, and in general the male characters aren't actually that close to one another and don't have a lot of interactive screentime (particularly before the introduction of Sweets). There was the relationship between Zack and Hodgins, and that was kind of it for the first three seasons. And yet, so much m/m.

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