I'm not sure how to take it, either, honestly. I love science, am science-minded, but... like I said, I got into anthro because I love the way it doesn't get bogged down in statistics and numbers the way sociology often does.
What I don't like about it (and what I feel like this change is moving more toward) is the post-modernist theory and "there's no right answer" type of arguments, which... dude, sometimes there is a right answer. I know that culture is extremely complex, and I'm very much against being imperialist in our interactions with other cultures, but on the other hand I'm really against the sort of nonsense where people start defending FGM and murdering people for witchcraft or homosexuality because "it's their culture." Yeah, it's their culture, and it's wrong. For my money, that's different than our Victorian predecessors walking into other cultures and telling them to start dressing like civilized people and start worshiping the right god and speaking English. It's just not okay to stand by and say "we can't do anything" when people are actually being seriously hurt and traumatized.
...Sorry, rant. We got into a lot of big arguments about that kind of thing in my last few years of anthro, and it drove me up the wall because the moral questions made my head hurt and made me wish I could just curl up in a ball and make everything go away because I couldn't reconcile the ideas of protecting native cultures with the idea that sometimes those native cultures were really, seriously, horribly hurting people. It still drives me crazy, and I still feel like there's no good answer, but... I feel like there just has to be a line, you know?
Also, I feel like there's enough anti-science feeling around the world right now without my own field bowing to it, and that's making me really upset.
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Date: 2010-12-07 11:27 pm (UTC)What I don't like about it (and what I feel like this change is moving more toward) is the post-modernist theory and "there's no right answer" type of arguments, which... dude, sometimes there is a right answer. I know that culture is extremely complex, and I'm very much against being imperialist in our interactions with other cultures, but on the other hand I'm really against the sort of nonsense where people start defending FGM and murdering people for witchcraft or homosexuality because "it's their culture." Yeah, it's their culture, and it's wrong. For my money, that's different than our Victorian predecessors walking into other cultures and telling them to start dressing like civilized people and start worshiping the right god and speaking English. It's just not okay to stand by and say "we can't do anything" when people are actually being seriously hurt and traumatized.
...Sorry, rant. We got into a lot of big arguments about that kind of thing in my last few years of anthro, and it drove me up the wall because the moral questions made my head hurt and made me wish I could just curl up in a ball and make everything go away because I couldn't reconcile the ideas of protecting native cultures with the idea that sometimes those native cultures were really, seriously, horribly hurting people. It still drives me crazy, and I still feel like there's no good answer, but... I feel like there just has to be a line, you know?
Also, I feel like there's enough anti-science feeling around the world right now without my own field bowing to it, and that's making me really upset.