The Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences identifies anthropology as the single most extreme case of scholarly deterioration in the humanities and social sciences. The American Anthropological Association rejects that characterization, not out of institutional defensiveness, but on evidentiary and methodological grounds the committee itself would claim to care about.
Anthropologists welcome rigorous critique of the discipline. What we cannot accept is a sweeping verdict about anthropology’s intellectual culture, scholarly practices, and professional norms built on selective evidence and issued without consultation. Anthropologists routinely argue that understanding a community, institution, or social world requires engagement with the people who inhabit it. We teach students to listen carefully, examine multiple forms of evidence, situate claims in context, and remain attentive to internal diversity and disagreement. It is therefore striking that a report offering such far-reaching conclusions about anthropology appears to have done so without meaningful engagement with the largest professional association representing the field.
The committee did not contact the American Anthropological Association, not its elected leadership, not its editors, not the broad range of scholars who comprise the discipline. This despite there being an anthropologist and a linguist among the committee’s members. This is a central methodological failure of a report that claims to assess an entire field. Anthropology is not a small or intellectually uniform field. It encompasses cultural anthropology, archaeology, biological anthropology, linguistic anthropology, applied anthropology, and numerous interdisciplinary areas. It contains vigorous and ongoing debates about theory, evidence, ethics, method, public engagement, and the future of the discipline itself.
In fact, the presentation of the report’s flagship example of anthropology’s “scholarly deterioration” is factually wrong. The report implies that the deteriorative position is embodied in one article they cite and refer to a single commentary on that article and their “internal report” as evidence. Their position is a significant misrepresentation of the state of the discourse and only stands if one ignores the substantial current literature. There is substantial and active literature that contradicts or at least complexifies the assertions made by the report, literature that would have been immediately apparent to anyone who had consulted working scholars in the field.
The report also characterizes anthropology’s attention to positionality and reflexivity as evidence of a broader rejection of objectivity. This is wholly incorrect. Reflexivity is not, as the report asserts a claim that facts don’t exist, that they are irrelevant, or that all interpretations are equally valid. It is a methodological commitment to examining how knowledge is produced and to making visible the assumptions, relationships, and contexts that shape research. Far from weakening scholarly rigor, many anthropologists see reflexivity as one of the ways rigor is strengthened.
The authors argue that the humanities exist above all to prepare students for “a life as a free citizen” – invoking the Latin liberalis, befitting a free person, then later condemn as politicized and distorted the scholarship associated with social justice, decolonization, and women’s liberation. But are not social justice, decolonization, and women’s liberation granular descriptions of freedom, articulations of what is required for all people to be free citizens? One can disagree about whether these are the right paths to freedom. But that debate is precisely what the academy exists to have. The committee forecloses it rather than engages it, which is exactly what it accuses anthropology of doing.
More broadly, the report risks conflating intellectual disagreement with intellectual decline. Anthropology has never been a discipline defined by consensus. It is characterized by debate, critique, revision, and self-examination. Those are not signs of a discipline in decline. They are signs of a healthy scholarly community actively grappling with complex questions rather than avoiding them.
Universities should absolutely encourage robust discussions about scholarly standards, evidence, viewpoint diversity, and academic freedom. Anthropology has much to contribute to those conversations. But those discussions are most productive when they are grounded in broad engagement, careful representation of the field being assessed, and the same evidentiary standards we expect of all scholarly work.
The report raises questions worth asking about the relationship between scholarship and political commitments and then fails to address them with the kind of methodological rigor, disciplinary engagement, and intellectual humility that are essential to the scholarly enterprise itself. We are ready to have that conversation. We invite the committee to begin it the way any serious scholarly exchange should begin, by talking with the people they are writing about.
Carolyn Rouse
President, American Anthropological Association