But then I think that I maybe get something wrong. Maybe I miss something on a deep level.
Because so many seem to embrace “this” whatever it is.
I can’t understand it. Can anyone?
> I’m honestly shocked every time I read something like this. My first reaction is: where did this go so wrong? “Scepticism is violence”? Scepticism once was science! And everything I learned points to that it should be so.
The keyword that has to be pointed out is "violence".
From what I've been able to gather, there is a growing body of people within academic circles that view any & all conflicts as violent & destructive, and that should therefore be banned at all costs. The exceptions to that rule are when it comes towards the destruction of modernist ideologies, as a consequence of the mass application of post-modernist thought into STEM fields.
Reductively, they're engaging in a "Rules for thee, not for me" when it comes to academic rigor & objectivism: From a post-modernist lens, such qualia must be rejected in order to promote inclusion into the academic space, & that anyone not willing to follow this doctrine are engaging in "problematic behavior" as a consequence of such line of thinking.
> But then I think that I maybe get something wrong. Maybe I miss something on a deep level. Because so many seem to embrace “this” whatever it is. I can’t understand it. Can anyone?
As stated above, "this" is the systematic weakening of academic objectivism & rigor in order to promote inclusion into fields that had high requirements in the past. From a post-modernist perspective, they must be destroyed for the greater good.
Much of the issue is semantic, where a newfound freedom to redefine words (like “violence”) to mean whatever someone thinks they should mean, has weakened our shared epistemological foundations, making it much harder to escape polarization traps and hold reasoned discourse. The result is the de-emphasis of reason and the ascent of pure power struggle between competing tribes who are losing the ability to talk to each other.
Sciences are ruled by their real-world applications.
The main real-world application of anthropology is justifying or condemning racism, nationalism, colonialism etc. So that's what it delivers most of the time (which one depends on the demand).
This isn't new BTW - for most of our history the conclusion was given (for example "god made it so") and scientists were only tasked with getting to the conclusion in a persuasive and flavorful manner.
Everything but the few "hard" sciences is going back to the scholastic ways step by step.
If you care about what's real and you care about progress, scientific explanations are better than traditional ones. But when one's identity is partially composed of traditional explanations, contradictions are seen as an attack on identity itself.
In other words, some people find comfort and meaning in the familiarity of relative ignorance, especially when that ignorance is culturally shared. Processing new and contrary information is uncomfortable.
But no one has the right to insist that others validate their own ignorance, which is effectively what equating skepticism with violence is. And these days, at the extreme, you may even be accused of trying to "erase" someone if you question their cherished ignorance.
And yes, everyone is ignorant, although not equally. One true mark of a person is how they navigate and synthesize new information. Seeking better knowledge is directional, even if it's also asymptotic.
So, for history, you have a 'classical' approach of just focusing on the politics and intrigues of the most powerful, and you have a more 'modern' holistic way of going about it. I'd argue the latter is better, but to get there, there had to be some moments of open-mindedness and willingness to look at it from other angles.
My best guess is that many social sciences, including anthropology, are also undergoing some sort of 'classical' vs 'modern' approach, which I think is ultimately a good thing.
There used to be a time in the not-so-distant past where anthropologists would find, say, calendars that would count down 28 days and go "why would the men back then make a calendar that counts lunar cycles?" without ever thinking that maybe a woman made the calendar for herself. I think we're better off with a collective practice of anthropology that's capable of thinking those kinds of thoughts.
That having been said, though, I wouldn't want to be an anthropologist right now. It feels like they're throwing so many assumptions up in the air and questioning everything to the point that they can't really do studies of substance.
Like the whole bit about studying violence in native American cultures... doing such studies might impact the way those cultures are seen today, but surely there's a way to still study it in a way to mitigate those consequences? Surely it doesn't mean we can't even think about studying it?
I dunno, I think long-term we'll get a better anthropology practice out of all of this (I read a great but somewhat controversial book called "The Dawn of Everything" recently touching on some of this) but looking at it from the middle of the process without having any idea where it's going... it looks and probably is quite frustrating.
Your mistake as a historian is reading a primary source without considering what biases or social context it might have.