I'm hopping around the old Internets and what do I come across but a recent National Review column by Peter Wood, my old grad school professor. In it, he takes issue with the AAA (the American Anthropological Association, not the auto-club people) for its declaration last year that:
I would have hope that by now anthropologists would have in fact taken a comprehensive look at the different styles of marriage found out there in the world. One reason I think that hasn't happened might be because anthropologists traditionally make their bones working in one specific location -- many, in fact, base their entire career on a year or two fieldwork in one tiny village. I think that cross-cultural survey work is looked down upon. That's a shame, if true.
It also raises another question I've often wondered about. Where are all the public anthropologists? You hardly ever see any as talking heads on TV or writing op-eds. (Unless they're physical or forensic anthros and that's a whole different thing.) Anthropology is a unique field -- the most scientific of the humanities and the most humanistic of the sciences, as the saying goes. We're vexed by problems that the big public disciplines like economics and political science aren't really helping to explain that well -- like religious fundamentalism, terrorism, even abortion and euthanasia. Why isn't the public getting the anthropologists' take on them? Part of it might be that anthropologists are, by nature or nurture, put off by the idea of self-promotion. I think that's a shame too.
The results of more than a century of anthropological research...provide no support whatsoever for the view that either civilization or viable social orders depend upon marriage as an exclusively heterosexual institution.Wrong, he says, you "reflexive affirm[er] of leftist pieties." In fact:
[S]ome 150 years of systematic inquiry by anthropologists leaves little doubt that heterosexual marriage is found in nearly every human society and almost always as a pivotal institution. Homosexual marriage outside contemporary Western societies is exceedingly rare and never the basis of "viable social order." (emphasis added both times)What Wood really must know is that no one is actually proposing that we throw out heterosexual marriage all together and build a new society based entirely on male-male/female-female unions. The idea is, of course, to augment the existing base of marriages with a wee sprinkling of same-sex ones. So I think the more interesting question is whether 150 years of anthropological research supports that that the idea of marriage now bandied about -- 'one man and one woman for all time' -- is always the foundation on which society is exclusively built. And I seem to recall from my studies that the ethnographic record includes a whole range of different ways that marriage is done. Off of the top of my head and to the best of my memory, it includes places where young people join together in 'practice marriages' that are dissolved after they reach maturity, where men inherit their brother's widows or marry their widow's sister, even where women marry their own body parts so that they might claim the social standing that comes with marriage. And, as far parenting goes, it includes societies where the maternal uncle takes the dominant role in raising his sister's kids. All I'm saying, the ethnographic record isn't crystal clear on just what marriage and family always means.
I would have hope that by now anthropologists would have in fact taken a comprehensive look at the different styles of marriage found out there in the world. One reason I think that hasn't happened might be because anthropologists traditionally make their bones working in one specific location -- many, in fact, base their entire career on a year or two fieldwork in one tiny village. I think that cross-cultural survey work is looked down upon. That's a shame, if true.
It also raises another question I've often wondered about. Where are all the public anthropologists? You hardly ever see any as talking heads on TV or writing op-eds. (Unless they're physical or forensic anthros and that's a whole different thing.) Anthropology is a unique field -- the most scientific of the humanities and the most humanistic of the sciences, as the saying goes. We're vexed by problems that the big public disciplines like economics and political science aren't really helping to explain that well -- like religious fundamentalism, terrorism, even abortion and euthanasia. Why isn't the public getting the anthropologists' take on them? Part of it might be that anthropologists are, by nature or nurture, put off by the idea of self-promotion. I think that's a shame too.
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