Some ImplicationsMy complaint about

Some Implications
My complaint about the contemporary anti-anthropology
discourse involves more than a concern for fairness. I
am concerned about the loss of knowledge from the past.
Anthropology consisted of far more than ethnographies,
far more than just the works of Mead and Geertz, Benedict
and Malinowski, Levi-Strauss and Radcliffe-Brown,
Boas and Redfield. As a field it had produced a vast storehouse
of knowledge about the peoples of the world, with
neither the intent nor the result of conquering and dominating them a rich literature of concern for both the universals, the things that all humans share, and the differences among us, and how these might be explained. We rightly prided ourselves on our holism and our wide-ranging
ability to compare peoples and cultures, without implying
inferiority and superiority, in an effort to know
what makes us all tick, all of us humans. This heritage has
been reduced to a handful of stereotypes and misperceptions,
with the result that students and younger professionals
have been led to ignore (perhaps even to execrate) this
body of ideas, problems,information,debate,and struggle
against ignorance and prejudice.
Let me offer just two examples: the cases of Black
Athena and The Bell Curve. Both have to do with the relationship
of race, language, and culture.
The massive volumes by Martin Bernal, Black Athena
(1987, 1991), have gained a great deal of publicity and notoriety.
In volume 1 Professor Bemal argues that racism
has pervaded European studies of the classics, especially
of Egypt and Greece, and as a result scholars have knowingly
hidden the truth: that the Greeks learned everything
that was novel and valuable in their culture from the Egyptians.
And Bernal leads us to believe that the Egyptians
were "black." Volume 2 presents what Professor Bernal
claims to be the empirical evidence for his thesis about the
origins of Greek culture. What troubles me most as an anthropologist
is not that Bernal is playing the old game of
posing as the crusading amateur fighting against and
scorned by the bigoted professors, or that he has simply
turned the racist formulations of the nineteenth-century
upside down. (Of course these bother me plenty, too.) I am
concerned that in 1991 the American Anthropological Association
honored Bernal with a full afternoon symposium
devoted to his work but did not bring forward a single
scholar to challenge his abuse of anthropological, linguistic,
and historical scholarship. A number of classicists
have heavily criticized his work (e.g., Lefkowitz and Rogers
1996), but anthropologists have been silent, perhaps
through cowardice but more likely because too few remember
the lessons that Boas, Sapir, Kroeber, Greenberg,
and others taught us.
Martin Bernal's second volume violates the primary
Boasian principle that "race,language,and culture" must
each be analyzed in its own right, that they can vary independently,
that evidence of the presence of an element
from one realm is no proof of the existence of those from
others. The very lessons that made it possible for Joseph
Greenberg to remove racism and ethnocentrism from African
linguistic classification, and thus set the whole study
of African history on a new basis, do not exist for Bernal.
The phenomenon of diffusion, and the distinction between
it and migration and genetic connection, have no
meaning for Bernal. Everything that we have learned
about processes of change and cultural transmission is ignored.
He barely acknowledges the existence of G. Elliot
Smith and W. J. Perry, two of the "extreme diffusionists"
whose writings remarkably anticipate his own but whose
work brought diffusionism and anthropological historicism
into total disrepute in Britain, for good reasons (see
Stocking 1995:197-232). Rather than respond to the serious
historiographical and anthropological criticisms of
Elliot Smith ' s writings, however, he devotes just over two
pages and a footnote to a garbled history hinting that a variety
of sinister professional, political, and racist motives defeated Smith and his school (Bernal 1987:27>272,
486). We have lived through some of the same claims of
Egyptian superiority before, but in earlier times it was in
the service of Eurocentric racism (see, e.g., Stanton
1960:45-53, as well as Perry 1924 and Smith 1911, 1923).
The scholarship is no better when the same outmoded
ideas are used to turn the tables.