Science and Anthropology in a Post-Truth World is a book about the recent anthropological origins of the celebration of unreason that permeates academia and much of the world we now live in, especially in the U.S.. The book logically falls into three parts.
The first and most lengthy part of the book is devoted to the influence that postmodern European writers and theorists have had on social science in the U.S. They have declared war on reason, and their gullible New World adaptors have fallen for their self-declared and overconfident European charm and pseudo sophistication.
The second is that somehow American cultural anthropology has been the most receptive discipline—more so than sociology, literary analysis or philosophy for example—in the adoption of the thought of these professional European confusionists who, almost to a man, argue that Western culture and science is just another culture and no different in essence from any others.
This has distracted anthropologists from hypothesis building, serious fieldwork, and comparative study, whether scientific in result or in process. Goodbye, old-fashioned, long-term ethnographic fieldwork and hypothesis building.
To best exemplify this trend, Sidky spends some time describing the literary turn in recent American cultural anthropology, and it follows that this has thrown out any notion of objectivity and the possibility of scientific investigation. He shows this by highlighting research that takes the study of spirits and paranormal phenomena by anthropologists who believe they are real, and therefore impervious to secular explanation. Simply put, if you study magic, witchcraft, and sorcery in a non-industrial society, you can also believe in it, and as Seinfeld would have said, “And that is ok!”
Finally he argues that these key ideas of subjectivity, cultural relativism, and the acceptance of the supernatural of other cultures as real, has opened the floodgates of policy and political irrationality on what he calls the “Far Right” or in the “Conservative Movement,” and which epitomizes the thought world of President Donald Trump and his supporters such as journalist Steve Bannon.
Sidky argues that Trump and his supporters’ world view is directly or most likely indirectly inspired by this assault on truth in the academy and among anthropologists and has greatly contributed to a Post Truth world where you can create and select your own facts and theories about the world from the various self-contained silos of the digital universe.
One must work extremely hard and read Sidky’s book carefully, as it is so easy to be put off by his near-constant, uncontrolled anger, Trump bashing, and hatred of the right, which come out early in the first chapter of the book and permeate his conclusions.
Despite all this, one can still argue that Sidky is correct in his general estimation of the negative influence of European postmodernism on American cultural anthropology and the general Zeitgeist of our time. The book is worthwhile for those who want to explore in a nuanced way how American social science and anthropology lost their way. Sidky knows the literature and has done his homework well. Let me simply highlight what I think are some of the main points of the book’s three parts.
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In Chapter Two, “Delegitimizing Science in the Academy; Ideological Underpinnings,” Sidky argues strongly for the influence of Nietzsche on the writers who came after him in the project which one can call the “deconstruction of Western thought and science.” Of course, he writes about Derrida, but here is a telling quote from this chapter which should have been highlighted on the first page:
The paragons of this movement, Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, Baudrillard, Latour may have had their differences, but they all shared a disdain for the rationalist tradition of the Enlightenment and a disregard for empirical data and logic or rationality. (Page 35).
Sidky is not alone in pointing out that the vagueness and jargony writing of people like Derrida makes it hard to pin him down. And the main takeaway of this chapter and most of the following is that the Post Modern takeover of American academia is self-perpetuating in the hiring of students who then get tenure and spew out this garbage to a new generation of indoctrinated students.
Postmodernism is thus rightly characterized by a lack of interest in the real world, as defined by the early European scientific revolution, the Enlightenment, and, oh yes, the extensive ethnographic studies that have been carried out among the world’s peoples during the last two hundred years and which are the stuff of anthropology.
Interestingly, Sidky quotes writers who point out that this hostile takeover has acted like a cult. So, it is the social organization of this nonrational movement, with its believers and heretics and disdain for the common man and woman, that drives the adoption of formlessness without real content.
For the curious reader, Sidky does have an answer for how it was or is that 20th-century Americans, whether in or outside academia, can be such naïve believers. He points out that after WWII and into the 60s, the tobacco industry hired elderly scientists to do studies that showed that one could not prove a direct correlation between lung cancer and smoking.
The fact that evidence and experience eventually overwhelmed this bogus science says something about skepticism, but also something else about the American soul of the average consumer, which allowed it to go on for far too long. It’s hard to answer that one, but Sidky suggests it is or was a precedent for the postmodern invasion.
This detailed social and intellectual history of the post-modern European invasion continues until the end of Chapter Eight, which is titled, “How Do We Know What We Know?” For anyone but a dedicated historian of ideas, these first few chapters are hard work, but Sidky does a rather good job of giving the reader a nuanced description of this breakdown in rationality and how it has worked out in the world of academia. It is instructive but not for the lighthearted.
The book really gets going and begins to expand on its title in the final chapters, where Sidky focuses on anthropology. There are four main villains in this story, and having read some of their books carefully, I can see where Sidky is coming from.
These are Clifford Geertz, George Marcus, and Michael Fischer. I have read much of what these three writers have written. And then there is Castaneda—hold that thought!
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Sidky quotes the essence of Geertz, who wrote that, “anthropology is not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning.” And so following Geertz, a culture is like a text and must be rendered as a literary phenomenon.
I do not think Geertz was as bad as Sidky maintains. His book on Javanese Religion is an ethnographic tour de force. Geertz spent years studying the language and then years conducting participatory research, and the book is a fine ethnography still worth reading.
He also wrote a remarkable short book called Islam Observed, in which he contrasts the Moroccan self-understanding of their adoption of Islam based on Jihad and conquest with the Javanese version, which harkens back to Hindu Bhuddist metaphors of enlightenment in the traditional Javanese self-explanation of their own adoption of this foreign Arabian religion. These are measured cultural and historical interpretations worth contemplating.
Geertz believed in cultural immersion and that the essential aspects of a culture are revealed in detail and nuance as set out in his programmatic book The Interpretation of Cultures.
Geertz “problem” was that once he was ensconced as a tenured professor at Princeton University he could cavalierly dismiss the libraries of ethnographic material around the world and related long term, cooperative projects such as the Human Relations Area Files (HRAF) at Yale University and whose researchers do quantitative and comparative studies to see if they can construct tentative ethnographic hypotheses and use statistics to test the degree of their validity.
No, Geertz, like so many postmodern anthropologists, merely dismissed an entire dimension of anthropological scholarship that had empirical and enlightenment assumptions. His argument, or perhaps his belief, is that of the “incommensurability of cultures,” which begs the question of why we should believe his own ethnography of Java if that is indeed the case.
Then there came Marcus and Fischer, who justifiably and somewhat counterintuitively asked, What is the end product of any bout of anthropological fieldwork? Their clever answer has been a “written text,” an ethnography. And so they have gone into the business of evaluating or interpreting the literary nature of ethnographic texts.
They are not as far off the mark as Sidky would like to think for I remember reading the PhD thesis of a prehistorian who read a large number of PhDs in her subject—early human origins—and empirically pointed out that the narrative structure of so many reports from the field are structured like the hero’s journey so well-articulated in the comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell’s work The Hero With A Thousand Faces, suggesting that even when we are trying to write scientifically, the narrative structure of story telling either gets in the way or facilitates what you experienced and saw in the field.
There is nothing amiss with a Geertzian approach to ethnography or a recognition that Marcus and Fisher point out that ethnographies are texts, but Sidky corners them well by implying, “Why deny everything else?” Sidky has the usual answer, succumbing to the postmodern European theorists and the fact that they cannot define science, facts, hypotheses, or anything else that may help us better understand ourselves and the world around us. On the contrary, they denigrate and reject them.
Sidky does the reader a great favor by summarizing Carlos Castaneda’s phenomenon and the fact that many of his readers and some anthropologists still think his writings have truth value.
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In the 1960s, a charming Latino Californian showed up at the University of California (LA campus) Department of Anthropology with a story to tell. He had crossed the border into the Sonoran desert of Mexico and apprenticed himself to a Yaqui Indian Shaman named Don Juan. Castaneda’s first book, The Teachings of Don Juan–A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, describes in some detail his apprenticeship and his peyote-induced visions.
It is important to understand that no one in the department questioned him, asked for his field notes, asked for pictures of Don Juan or recordings of interviews, or suggested that they join Castaneda and meet this mysterious Mexican.
Armed with the legitimacy of the department of anthropology at UCLA, Castaneda became a literary success and made much money from a series of books and lectures that he published and gave about his invented field work. He also gathered a harem and started his own new age cult, which ended when he died and caused some of his female followers to take their own lives or wander off into the desert, never to reappear.
One would think that with the outing of Castaneda, his star would have fallen, but Sidky explains that he became the inspiration for “paranormal anthropologists” who take the spirit worlds of their ethnographic subjects as real. Instead, Castaneda gave birth to a growing movement whose main proponent was the late Bruce Gindall, who developed his paradigm when
he arrived at this insight through personal experience after ingesting powerful hallucinogenic drugs while doing field research among the Jivaro of Ecuador. That is when he personally met the beings and beasties of the paranormal world of his host culture and became a true believer. (Page 146).
It is worth noting that the late, great American cultural ecologist/anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon, also lived among a group of jungle dwelling Amazonian tribes people, the Yanomamo, and who similarly ingested their many hallucinogens to communicate with their spirit world, had no such experience. As a daring anthropologist Chagnon took the hallucinogens, was very aware at the time of what they did to his psyche and body and remembers thinking about anthropological theory during his “Psychedelic trip,” specifically the theories of French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss.
I contend that had Sidky ended his book with chapter ten and left out his final chapter called “From Post Modernism to Post Truth United States” his argument and examples would have had more persuasive power. This is because he has done anthropologists a great favor by painfully and in detail showing how a once vibrant, empirical, and semi-scientific discipline that explores the definition of human nature through cross-cultural analysis has gone astray, due to the “elite capture” of American anthropology by sophisticated European charlatans.
Instead, he tries to show that although only a tiny minority in academia maintain the core ideas of contemporary postmodern anthropology, these ideas permeate the social and political world of the USA from the President through Breitbart and Fox news. This is a bold hypothesis and Sidky admittedly says he does not have direct evidence for this, but the similarities suggest an origin in academia. He may be right, but I am not sure.
To be fair to Sidky, here is a fairly telling example:
A case in point is Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giulani’s assertion during an NBC New Meet the Press in August 2018 interview in defence of his patron, ‘Truth isn’t truth…It is somebody’s version of the truth” In another interview with CNN Chris Cuomo, Giuliani also stated that nowadays facts are ‘in the eye of the beholder’ It is highly unlikely that a boorish opportunist such as Giuliani or his boss have read any post modern tracts. Even if they did , there is a good possibility that they would not understand any of it. What we have here is a very dumbed down postmodernism at work in contemporary American politics.
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Sidky may be correct, but he often avoids similar observations about the Democrats, their representatives, and their leaders.
Although Sidky points out the academic left has indeed become post truth and post science, his writing is weakened by the fact that his examples ignore such whoopers such as Dr. Fauci’s famous line, “I am Science,” RFK juniors’ magnificent study of Fauciand the many fairy tales that came out of the CDC, during before and after Covid—let us not even begin to talk about the medical profession’s blindness to vaccine injuries during and after Covid—or the talk of Presidential candidate Kamala Harris and her postmodern, “your truth, my truth, their truth.”
Stern words are lacking for the fervent insanity of Cultural Marxism and the assault on truth by U.S. university history and Islamic studies departments, funded by Arab Gulf money, which promote Holocaust denial, ignore the ISIS genocide of Yazidis in Iraq, deny Jewish history in biblical lands, foster institutionalized anti-Semitism in Ivy League institutions—battled by Trump—and support anthropological calls for Israel’s destruction as a Jewish state, as evidenced by the American Anthropological Association’s endorsement of the BDS movement.
Let us also not forget Biden’s endorsement of the transgender movement, where men can claim to become women and women can claim to become men! So, if Sidky is correct and we live in a post-truth world, one must admit that the Democrats and the left are equal opportunists in this field.
All things considered, Science and Anthropology in a Post-Truth World is a worthwhile book. It is a report from the trenches. Sidky has collected a lot of texts and, like a good trial lawyer, lets the advocates of relativism, postmodernism, and post-truth in academic anthropology speak in their own words and dig their own intellectual graves. It must have been a tedious job, but someone had to do it.
Cover of Science and Anthropology in a Post-Truth World: A Critique of Unreason and Academic Nonsense on Amazon
An excellent review, thank you! Lucid and well illustrated.