History & humanities

Most soft sciences suffer from this and I agree anthropology too. The scientific method will eventually win out, but hey.
I have a great interest in evolutionary biology and I think even that field has some ideological divide (importance of chance, adaptionalism, selfish vs cooperative genes and so on).

I personally prefer a multi-disciplinary approach. My dream Veeky Forums would be like that but you cannot expect plebs to have a broad interest and knowledge. And yes I do think that biology is an important key.

I agree with you, although I will say that there's a lot of people who are interested in a field because they have a specific ideological bent.

Take Marxists for example. They imagine that before the agricultural evolution, there was some sort of egalitarian utopia(because implicit in agriculture is the division of labor), which is a claim that literally has zero evidence, and I personally think that it's highly unlikely that society didn't have social divided labor, simply because it was tribal and hunter-gathering.

But if you eat from the trashcan of ideology long enough, even the most idiotic myths can seem real in your head.

I've read a book on anthropology by someone who had studied psychoanalysis and perhaps it was my own ideological bent, but it did seem to affect the interpretation of certain rituals.

There's more such cases. You have environmental minded people who argue that agriculture was a mistake (I am sure in some cases it was) and that earlier hunter-gatherers lived in total balance with nature. You have people who have a feminist perspective and think that earlier cultures worshipped Goddesses. Evolutionary minded people dismiss the influence of nurture. And so on and so on.

Hopefully and eventually these different ideological perspectives get weeded out by the scientific method. And they aren't necessarily bad, I mean they can lead to looking at data or research from different perspectives.

But again eventually it should be accumulating evidence or falsification making it objective.

It is of course a problem if a field self-selects certain people with a ideological bent. Dare I say, ideological diversity is actually what we want.

>Take Marxists for example. They imagine that before the agricultural evolution, there was some sort of egalitarian utopia(because implicit in agriculture is the division of labor), which is a claim that literally has zero evidence, and I personally think that it's highly unlikely that society didn't have social divided labor, simply because it was tribal and hunter-gathering.

back to

>. You have environmental minded people who argue that agriculture was a mistake (I am sure in some cases it was) and that earlier hunter-gatherers lived in total balance with nature. You have people who have a feminist perspective and think that earlier cultures worshipped Goddesses. Evolutionary minded people dismiss the influence of nurture. And so on and so on.

Exactly. Which is my point. You're not doing yourself or your field a favor if you're using it for ideological myth-making.

I mean, just take a look at social psychology these days. It's literally quackery on the level of homeopathy, simply because it's infested with Marxists and Leftists in general.

Not all of us do.

Not a /pol/tard at all, I can't stand them.

You're a /pol/tard as soon as you challenge dogma just like you're a heretic as soon as you contest blind faith.

I gave up trying to appear moderate because there's no fucking point. The people that shriek about /pol/, half of them do it to shitpost, and the other half is intolerant beyond any reasoning or debate. They don't want to learn or discuss or overcome criticism. They just want to silence and freeze discussion and evolving ideas.

>I gave up trying to appear moderate because there's no fucking point.

There really isn't, but it's obvious why it isn't. Both extremes look at moderate people as traitors.

Wow, thanks captain obvious.

>tfw

Depends on the anth, but generally yeah, especially when we get into like bioanth and archaeo. Less in Ling. Ethnography's largely an exercise in observation and taxonomy.

Well the good news is that bioanth and archaeo are considered anth in the vast majority of departments.

>My dream Veeky Forums would be like that but you cannot expect plebs to have a broad interest and knowledge.
Agreed.

>-isms
Doing it wrong.

>Doing it wrong.

What do you mean exactly? Ideological hegemony isn't good for any field of inquiry; because as we all know, people who are wearing ideological blinds clearly aren't looking for states of affairs that counters their view.

It's not that a Marxist or a Leftist is axiomatically incapable of relaying evidence contrary to their own position(Orwell for example), it's just that this isn't what they actually do in general.

> (OP)
>Anthropology is based on science
>Race is just a social construct

>Anthropology
>Race

just get out

What are you even trying to express?