But perhaps the most serious misrepresentation in news-media coverage of this affair was the depiction of cultural anthropology as overrun by “postmodern fluff-heads” on a crusade against science. In the mid-1990s, when the “science wars” were at their height, and you had to be either for or against Foucault, there might have been some truth in such a characterization. Those were the years when it was fashionable to talk about “the social construction of scientific knowledge.” As a sign of the times, the Stanford University anthropology department split into two departments, one of anthropological sciences and one of sociocultural anthropology.
But times have changed. The two Stanford departments have remarried; the French anthropologist Bruno Latour, high priest of the “social construction of science” school, has long since published an anguished article in Critical Inquiry—”Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern”—worrying about the tacit complicity between “postmodernist” social thought and oil companies seeking to deny the reality of climate change.
In my experience, younger cultural anthropologists tend to describe themselves as pragmatists, and they see the debates in the 1980s and 1990s about “writing culture” and the politics of knowledge, which were so formative for an older generation, as a part of the discipline’s history they have assimilated and are moving beyond. While the self-identified scientific anthropologists were filling my inbox with angry messages about the hegemony of antiscientific postmodernists, many anthropologists who use French critical theory in their work also e-mailed me to ask if the word “science” could not be restored, given its importance to colleagues. It is important to note that throughout this whole episode of e-mails, blogs, and news-media coverage, not a single anthropologist whom I am aware of insisted that the word “science” should stay excised.

— What if They Had a Science War and Only One Side Showed Up? [via]

Ahem.
The article was great, but falls under Shepherd’s Law, which I have just now invented:
Anybody, given a liberal arts education, some free time and a pop-culture genre canon from which to work, can position that genre as a defense of any philosophical, religious or political worldview.

— Shepherd commenting on Danny Boyle, Zack Snyder, and John Romero walk^H^H^H^H run in to a mall…

Quick — what is the “paradigm” of medicine, to which my correspondents claim to be alternative? Give up? Good for you, because there isn’t one. People are complicated and there are all sorts of entirely different things that can go wrong. Physicians don’t fall back on a paradigm to fix everything, they do whatever is likely to work. Antibiotics, surgical excision of tumors, hormonal therapy, receptor blockers, physical therapy, nutrition, prostheses, cancer chemotherapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, social support, surgical repair of joint trauma, monoclonal antibodies, antivirals, vaccinations, and so on and so forth, are all specific ways of addressing various, often entirely unrelated problems.
The only “paradigm” physicians worry about is whether something works or not. The way you find that out is to subject it to rigorous testing. It’s often helpful to understand as much as possible about the underlying biological processes that are making a person sick. It can help guide an efficient search for new therapies, and help select the right one for a particular case. But it isn’t always necessary — some remedies are just “empirical,” as they say, i.e. they are known to work but people aren’t sure why. Doctors aren’t above using these, even if they’d generally prefer to know what’s going on.

—

Alternative Healing Paradigms

tip: paradigms (like privilege!) may be hard to see when you are immersed in them.

I find it truly bizarre when I talk to people (okay if we’re being real the only people that really rile me up when they do this are MDs/med students) who are convinced that there is not cultural/moral/social influence on biomedicine, but rather all truth/behavior/procedure/therapies are derived from pure empirical research. Why aren’t y’all reading Kuhn?

It lets me know that the individual(s) that have done this have too much free time. They aren’t involved in the community and it lets me know one of two things: 1. that just some kids have come through and did it or 2. that they are individuals that actually support this group that want to scare tactic me and so on to try and get us from the viewpoints that we hold that or and (sic) they just don’t like anybody that’s against it. I really don’t know,

—

Pastor Joe Gutierrez of the Church on Fire, quoted in Bash Back! Strikes queer-hating church — Fort Wayne, IN

Seriously, “someone must have a lot of free time” as a way of minimizing someone else’s opinion/action is so obnoxious. And so what? Why is the idea of having free time such an insult anyway? I wish I made better use of my free time, and had more of it.

In the halcyon days of the final economic booms, everyone on your cul de sac could have died overnight from some mysterious plague, and while you might have been sad, you wouldn’t have been inconvenienced. Our economy, unlike any that came before it, is designed to work without the input of your neighbors. Borne on cheap oil, our food arrives as if by magic from a great distance (typically, two thousand miles). If you have a credit card and an Internet connection, you can order most of what you need and have it left anonymously at your door. We’ve evolved a neighborless lifestyle; on average an American eats half as many meals with family and friends as she did fifty years ago. On average, we have half as many close friends.

— Bill McKibben, EAARTH: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet (2010).  Excerpted on Alternet under the title, ” The Surprising Reason Why Americans Are So Lonely, and Why Future Prosperity Means Socializing with Your Neighbors.” [via]

The Daily Dish reader thinks abuse of girls happens less because girls have less sustained contact with priests, and it’s also possible that this lack of contact makes abuse of multiple female victims more difficult. However, the reader’s comments do reveal an interesting dichotomy: the girl-abuser is sad, pathetic, and fucked-up, while the boy-abuser is evil. Might this idea permeate the Church, and might it stem at least in part from the idea that homosexuality is itself a sin, and that gay men are naturally predatory and depraved? One Slate commenter thinks so, writing, “[T]he reason they focus so closely on the male victims is that then the church can (very, very wrongly) claim that homosexuality, not pedophilia, is the true sin in this situation.” But the true sin, of course, is abusing a position of trust to harm children — and this is no less wrong when the victim is female.

— The Forgotten Victims Of Priest Sexual Abuse: Girls - Catholic church sexual abuse

But this fussiness is part of a larger yearning for control altogether, which is where the anti-modernism comes in. Food has long been not only a means of forging and asserting cultural identity but of resisting the onslaught of a homogenizing, enervating modernity that threatens to dissolve not just cultural identities but individual identities. From the health spa/retreats of the Kellogg brothers and their peers (that gave us corn flakes and granola) to the popularity of Sweet-n-Low in the ‘50s and ‘60s to the communes of the hippie era to the herbal remedies of today, food has been seen as a way to “get back” to a more “natural” way of life – as opposed to the high-stress, low-community, detached and distracted way of life that is modernity.
None of this is to suggest that there are not very real food allergies – it’s hard to argue with anaphylactic shock. Nor, more importantly, is it to say that the 98% of food allergy sufferers in the study with no medically detectable food allergies do not, in a very real way, suffer. The bodily manifestations of the most obviously social disorders can still drastically limit a person’s quality of life.
What it does suggest is that treatment of food allergies needs to go much further than antihistamines and food avoidance to encompass the cultural psychological. If control is a central issue – as it is already recognized to be in anorexia nervosa and other eating disorders, which strike bright, ambitious young women with overbearing parents hardest precisely because they are the least in control of their lives and the most aware of it – then a) developing non-food strategies for regaining control, and b) developing a realistic relationship with the demands and pressures of daily life are also important to individual adjustment.

— Food Allergies and Modern Life

The fact that we are all racist already, whether we like it or not, is the point that the manufacturer completely misses. They do think in that way. We all do. Not thinking in that way consciously doesn’t mean that racism didn’t play a role in the manufacturing of a black Lil’ Monkey doll. In fact, their defense actually makes things worse. Their refusal to think about racism, in favor of a defensive reaction, is as racist as the doll itself. We can’t fight racism unless we’re prepared to admit that we hold unconscious biases.

— Black “Lil’ Monkey” Baby Doll

And make no mistake: irony tyrannizes us. The reason why our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down. All U.S. irony is based on an implicit “I don’t really mean what I’m saying.” So what does irony as a cultural norm mean to say? That it’s impossible to mean what you say? That maybe it’s too bad it’s impossible, but wake up and smell the coffee already? Most likely, I think, today’s irony ends up saying: “How totally banal of you to ask what I really mean.

— DFW from E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction [via]

Lazy misogynists fetishize evo-psych, and thus they compulsively wank to the idea that hunter-gatherer societies were built around Men of Action and Women of Submissive Servitude—because that means it’s human nature, and that means feminists and gender-queers are indeed the nefarious harbingers of the unnatural, the unorthodox, the aberrant totems heralding the downfall of humankind that misogynists claim them to be.

— Apatowcalypse Now: Dawn of the Dudebros [via]