Hi Steve,
"Mafia" - a good description . Personally, being an individualist, I've always tended to refer to the extreme post-modernist crowd as suffering from Post Modernist Syndrome (PMS); a psychological syndrome characterized by occasional outbreaks of ego-maniacal paranoia, irrational assaults, and the adoption of psychotic forms of reality occasionally accompanied by command hallucinations (e.g. "Foucault has said that...") .
I've had the same thing happen, both from the PMS crowd and from Marxist-Leninist true believers. What always bothered me about the Anthro PMS crowd was their habit of disregarding anything pre-Geertz (~1970). Their rejection of the older works in the discipline didn't come from actually reading them but, rather, from the assumption that they were flawed. Certainly some of them were, but their automatic rejection of all works that didn't meet their "purity laws" meant that they also neglected all of the insights available. Since this included all of the core philosophical assumptions behind the post-modernist movement, many of which had been in Anthro from the 1920's, I was frequently left feeling that the pomos were acting like people who, having just reinvented the wheel, were trying to prove to the world that they were the first to come up with it .
Too true! I have no problems with biases since they are inevitable. Still and all, I think that biases should be stated - e.g. "This article is concerned with cavalry tactics" - or an attempt should be made to present all sides involved. A forced perspective, and maybe we should translate that as a PC perspective that valorizes "victims", is a travesty that, to my mind, erodes core scientific values. As you can tell, I get a bit "touchy" as well .
Marc
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