The Task
This document represents a supporting chapter in our Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences. Our interdisciplinary panel was charged with assessing the epistemological health of several disciplines on the more humanistic side of the university. The Chancellors of Vanderbilt University and Washington University in St. Louis, Daniel Diermeier and Andrew D. Martin, tasked our panel as follows:
- As chancellors and presidents working to restore trust in higher education, we are concerned about the dramatic erosion of support for the humanities and humanistic social sciences amongst students, parents and government officials, as well as by the steady drumbeat of complaints about the deterioration of scholarly standards within those disciplines.
- The complaints have been various in nature. Several scientists have alleged over the years that there is widespread misunderstanding and misuse of natural science in the work of prominent humanists. Philosophers have worried about the unquestioning embrace of problematic philosophical views, especially those concerning truth, evidence and knowledge. More recently, many different voices have suggested that humanistic disciplines have allowed background ideological values to distort the objective pursuit of knowledge in those fields.
- To help us assess whether, and to what extent, there is a problem here, we charge a commission of eminent scholars from these disciplines to examine the state of scholarly work in their respective areas and to evaluate whether these allegations are justified. We are concerned that, without such an examination, the well-documented erosion of support for the humanities will continue unabated.
My role was to assess my own field, Anthropology, with a focus on scholarship within U.S. institutions. I accepted this charge out of a love for my field and a belief that anthropological insights, approaches and methods can and should play a central role in developing ideas that will help improve the lives of individuals and communities around the world. I’ve been thinking about anthropological epistemology for many years. In 1993, when I arrived at UCLA to pursue my graduate studies in cultural anthropology, I found a field already sinking into a quagmire of epistemological conflict (D’Andrade 1995; Scheper-Hughes 1995) and drifting in a direction that would make it increasingly difficult to develop theories capable of addressing social and economic problems. Nevertheless, I committed to continuing because I saw profound value in anthropological perspectives. To develop my own approach, I began engaging with ideas and methods from economics (Kagel & Roth 1995), political science (Ostrom 1990) and psychology (Kahneman et al. 1982). UCLA’s 4-field breadth requirements meant I had to take a course in biological anthropology. This course showed me how ideas from evolutionary biology could help us think more clearly about culture, cultural change, and the emergence of phenomena such as social norms, institutions, rituals and cooperation (Boyd & Richerson 1985). Much of my career has focused on bringing the richness of anthropology to other parts of the social and biological sciences (Bergeron et al. forthcoming; Blasi et al. 2022; Henrich 2000; Henrich et al. 2010b; Henrich & Henrich 2010; Henrich & Muthukrishna 2021), while learning how these other fields generate knowledge — harvesting insights and techniques to integrate into our work. The framework that emerged from the efforts of many people in several disciplines is now a major enterprise, the field of ‘cultural evolution,’ which has its own society and biennial meetings. My immersion in these other disciplines, which includes earning tenure and promotion to full professor, gives me a unique perspective on Anthropology.
My thinking on anthropological epistemology, which traces back to my graduate work, can be summarized as follows:1
- Like many anthropologists, I believe a central goal of anthropology and the social sciences should be to understand how the world works so that we can develop ways to improve the lives of individuals and communities worldwide. This includes addressing global threats, such as climate change, deforestation and pandemics, as well as countless local challenges, such as building schools, reducing crime and digging wells.
- To address these challenges, we need to improve our knowledge-generating framework, including our theoretical approaches and methodological toolkits, to better understand human behavior, psychology and the dynamic interactions that produce higher-level sociological phenomena, such as institutions, social classes, castes, and ethnic groups.
- While our goals are ultimately applied — improving the world — we should work as a scholarly community (Longino 1990) to keep our moral preferences and political goals as separate as possible from the machinery of knowledge generation. This is a challenge (Elliott 2017), but field-level scholarly standards (e.g., in peer review), rigorous methods and formal theory (e.g., mathematical models) offer important guardrails that shield the knowledge-generating process and thus improve our scholarship.
Failing to maintain an epistemological framework that strives to safeguard our knowledge-generating process jeopardizes our long-term ability to solve problems, big and small.
Of course, in no way am I suggesting that inquiry is or should be free from our values and moral commitments, nor can we expect individuals — on their own — to fully separate moral commitments from knowledge generation — indeed, much of my own scholarly work has focused on challenging ‘rational’ models of human behavior and explaining aspects of religions (Atran & Henrich 2010; Henrich 2002; Henrich et al. 2005; Henrich & McElreath 2002). For this, we need a scholarly community endowed with epistemic norms for open discourse and a full toolkit of methods and techniques to facilitate and safeguard knowledge generation (Mokyr 2016; Strevens 2020). Nevertheless, our commitments should influence the questions we ask, how we collect data, and what we do with the knowledge and insights we generate.
Further, in no way should we eschew important but politically charged topics like colonialism, racism, sexism, gender, oppression and violence. The point is that these and other topics deserve our best efforts — as a field — at generating a deeper understanding. When our political preferences and moral commitments penetrate the knowledge-generating process too deeply, we endanger these scholarly endeavors. As I’ll show, some anthropologists seem to favor injecting our moral commitments directly into knowledge-generation, including our normative standards.
None of this argues for epistemological uniformity. In my judgment, anthropology is, and should continue to be, a place where scholars challenge existing epistemologies and ontologies. For example, Professor Luhrmann’s work on how people in diverse populations conceptualize the porosity of minds, ultimately rooted in her field experience and ethnographic expertise, changes how cognitive scientists understand and interpret their experimental findings (Luhrmann 2020; Weisman et al. 2021). Similarly, Professor Descola’s (2013) work illustrates the ontological peculiarity of the nature-culture divide that still permeates Western thought, both inside and outside the academy. Both examples apply ethnographic insight to challenge common ontological assumptions while building bridges accessible to those who favor replicable methods and competitive hypothesis testing. Humanistic approaches should enrich, rather than constrain, the field's epistemological and ontological diversity.
The problem is not epistemological diversity or challenges to prevailing assumptions — that’s the bread and butter of our field — but that an epistemology that incorporates moral and political advocacy has become normative in some parts of anthropology. That is, some of our colleagues have shown an intolerance for those who hold versions of the 3-point epistemological commitments summarized above. People who hold and affirm certain moral and political views, or who seek to separate advocacy from knowledge generation, are sanctioned in small and sometimes large ways, as the evidence below suggests.
Reviewing an entire discipline is essentially impossible for one person. Anthropology and anthropologists are incredibly heterogeneous. Many biological anthropologists effectively operate as evolutionary biologists, geneticists or paleoecologists, while many cultural anthropologists engage in ways closer to those of literary scholars, historians, social critics or journalists. In the North American context, the field includes anthropological linguists and archaeologists. Some archaeologists rely on ancient DNA and isotopic analysis, while others apply hermeneutic or interpretive approaches. As I’ll explain below, one of anthropology's great strengths, which drew many of us to the field, is that it intentionally positioned itself at the nexus of the sciences and the humanities.
The upshot is that I make no claim to have conducted a “full review” of any sort; no single individual could. Instead, I’ve focused on identifying epistemological strains and trends within the field that — in my judgment — jeopardize knowledge production. I’ll pay particular attention when those strains are presented normatively — enforced on anthropologists who might prefer approaches that exclude moral advocacy from knowledge generation or that rely on rigorous, reliable methods. The evidence below suggests that many anthropologists reject advocacy-based epistemologies yet remain silent, perhaps out of pluralistic ignorance or fear.
In addition to informing university leaders, I hope this document sparks a discussion about anthropology’s current direction, methods and approach to knowledge creation. I expect many of my colleagues in anthropology to offer thoughtful, well-informed critiques of my work, and I look forward to a rich exchange of views that will help us shape our field for the 21st century and beyond.
As we begin, I’d like to thank the many anthropologists and other scholars who helped me develop this report. First and foremost, I thank the several anthropologists I interviewed over Zoom or in person about their experiences, including the intense pressure to ‘toe the political line’ in the field. All asked to remain anonymous. I had to leave out several disturbing stories because my informants feared that some of their colleagues might identify them, or, in some cases, didn’t want to destabilize the fragile peace that had been established. Second, I’d like to thank the dozen or so anthropologists and others who offered constructive feedback on my early drafts. Some faithfully responded to a long series of emails as I tried to nail down the details of various cases. Since most of my readers explicitly asked to remain anonymous, I made that the policy. If we’ve been in contact for this report, I offer you my heartfelt thanks. Any errors are my own.
1 Here, I use the term “epistemology” to broadly refer to the knowledge-generating process used in different fields of inquiry and across societies. This includes what counts as a valid source of knowledge or understanding. These sources include, but are not limited to, the use of evidence and arguments. Epistemologies tell us what counts as ‘evidence’ (e.g., dreams or regressions) and how to weigh different sources or types of evidence. They also tell us what’s a good argument and how to tell if one argument is better than another. Arguments and evidences must also be weighed against other epistemic sources like intuition, authorities and dreams (Hong 2022; Hong et al. 2024; Hong & Henrich 2021; Strevens 2020).