An Attack On Cultural Anthropology

A guy (maybe a geneticist/biologist) from this site, http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2013/02/against-the-cultural..., wrote the harshest critique against Cultural Anthropology I have ever read. Where are the cultural anthropologists?

"Many cultural anthropologists need to move to staff positions at organizations like Survival International. They don’t belong in the academy. Those who remain should be scattered across other disciplines, such as economics, psychology, sociology, etc. The reason I post about cultural anthropology now and then isn’t that I want to argue or discuss with cultural anthropologists. Rather, I want to aid in spreading the message the discipline should be extirpated from the academy, just as Creationists have been extirpated from biology. They don’t belong at universities. Cultural anthropologists don’t know much about the world in any systematic sense, but they know what they believe about how the world should be organized. Let them do their organizing in their proper environment. Like exotic species without natural predators these political operators only cause mischief in academic halls."

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Permalink Reply by NIKOS GOUSGOUNIS on May 2, 2013 at 12:45am

5/ and last ( but not least) : Anthropology IS a science exactly because in the middle of the objectivity/subjectivity scale (and this is not an axiom but an objective note even if reflects a subjective opinion of mine )

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Permalink Reply by John McCreery on May 2, 2013 at 1:47am

From LinkedIn

A great quote from Isaac Asimov covers some of this:

"How often people speak of art and science as though they were two entirely different things, with no interconnection. An artist is emotional, they think, and uses only his intuition; he sees all at once and has no need of reason. A scientist is cold, they think, and uses only his reason; he argues carefully step by step, and needs no imagination. That is all wrong. The true artist is quite rational as well as imaginative and knows what he is doing; if he does not, his art suffers. The true scientist is quite imaginative as well as rational, and sometimes leaps to solutions where reason can follow only slowly; if he does not, his science suffers."