Uncouth Reflections

Fenster writes:

Here is an interesting account of the controversies surrounding the anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon, famous for his studies of the fierce Yanamamo people of the Amazon jungle.  And here’s his page on . . . uh . . . Amazon.

I remember Chagnon’s Yananamo book was everywhere back in the day, that I owned it and that I probably even read it.  But I didn’t follow the Chagnon controversy over the last, oh, forty years.  Peter Wood’s article is a good refresher course.

Wow, anthro.  For me, long time no read.  I was an anthropology major in college, way back when it was OK, even fashionable, to major in something not useful.  Even then, anthropology was that.  Today, it often tops the list as the worst possible major from a career point of view.

Anthro always was prone to PC infection given its relativist and culture-uber-alles tendencies.  From the tiny bit I have observed over the years, it does seem like it fell into right-thinking rot more than its academic neighbors.  It probably needs a good thwack or two like this.

Things were not always thus.  One of my college idols was the Syracuse anthropology professor Agehananda Bharati, author of the autobiographical The Ochre Robe. Despite his Indian name and mystical training, Bharati was originally one Leopold Fischer, an Austrian caught up in the German back to nature movement and an early voyager to India for spiritual enlightenment.  Also a hard headed academic.  Also a devotee of the Tantric Tradition and thus into what Marvin Gaye would later call sexual healing.  I remember in his introductory course, Bharati defined anthropology, in his thick German accent, as “the schtudy of man”, at which point he leaned forward and leered, adding “embracing voman!”  No PC there!  Today he’d be keelhauled for fooling around with his schtudents.