Gimme Culture

Let me close by observing two ironies. The first is that the scientific anthropologists seem, more than they might want to admit, to have internalized aspects of the postmodernist point of view. One of the essential insights in Foucault’s work was that the words we use have the power to shape reality. Race and gender activists likewise attach great importance to language; hence all the energy they have put into contesting the use of exclusionary pronouns and racial epithets and critiquing mass-media representations of women and minorities. Discourse matters, they have taught us. In pitching their discipline into a fight over whether or not a particular word, “science,” is used in a planning document, the scientific anthropologists seem to have accepted a core part of the postmodernist and activist sensibility—the preoccupation with representation and the formative power of words. Second, at just the moment that scientific anthropologists were pressing the fight about the long-range plan, a little video went viral of Rep. Adrian Smith, Republican of Nebraska, inviting ordinary Americans to join him in hunting down grants in the National Science Foundation’s budget that waste taxpayer money. By inviting citizens to circumvent and cancel the system of peer review that has anchored the NSF since its inception, Smith implicitly negated the regard for expertise that undergirds both scientific and humanistic knowledge. It is Smith and his cohort, not the residual influence of Foucault, that represent the real danger to scientific research. And I fear that Smith may be quite happy to use some of the recent misleading rhetoric about postmodernism in anthropology to further his cause.