I just published an article in the Small Wars Journal examining the roots of the current “difficulties” between Anthropology and the “military” (broadly construed). This spawned a couple of comments in the Social Sciences forum at SWC, including a discussion of academic ethics.

Academic ethics has been a bug-a-boo of mine for a number of years now, especially in Anthropology. I would argue that much of what passes for”ethics” these days is really politically correct aphorisms wrapped up in the robes of sacrality. By way of example, let me turn the clock back 100 years to the time of Boas. Boas held his ethical positions based on principles: the psychic unity of Mankind, the irrelevance of “race” and “gender” for capability, and an unswerving dedication to an attempt to achieve objective “truth”. While I disagree with some of his specific interpretations, e.g. his stance on the military, I certainly can applaud his stance on principles.

Where we (Anthropologists), as a discipline, have fallen is in that exact area. We no longer stand on principles but, I would argue, on a “flavour of the week” form of political correctness. This is not even a disciplinary “morality” - it is far worse: it is a retreat from both morality and ethics into political kitch.

There are a number of Anthropologists who I see as bucking this tide: Regna Darnell, Jerome Barkow, Charles Laughlin and Brian Givens come to mind. Why? Because each of them is passionate about their work, principled in the extreme and, in the last instance, willing to be proven wrong. They embody the spirit of science in its truest sense; the sense exemplified in the apocryphal comment by Oliver Cromwell “Brethren, I beseach yea in the Bowels of Christ to consider that yea may be wrong!.”

Modern, Western science stems out of both a highly sophisticated Roman Catholic and Protestant theologies. At their core is the belief that no human perception can capture absolute truth - at best, we can capture a workable, for the time being, map of a small part of reality. This uncertainty, combined with both a desire and a willingness to be proven incorrect, is at the heart of “science”. And these are the core principles that have been jettisoned by the discipline of Anthropology in its recent rush into the lamia-esque embracing of political correctness.