There are two main types of anthropologists: cultural and physical. Cultural anthropologists tend to be extremely woke (although there are examples of cultural anthropologists, such as Fox and Tiger, who do strong, realistic scientific work on cultural questions, for instance all the various types of family structures possible). Physical anthropologists work with bones, DNA, etc.
The cultural clashes between the two flavors of anthropologists tend to be severe enough that sometimes Departments of Anthropology split into two departments.
Some anthropologists try to do cultural anthropology on no longer existent cultures using archaeological information, like who gets buried with whom to estimate family structure norms.
In this century, the physical anthropologists have the vast improvements in DNA technology to bolster their side. For example, Svante Pääbo, who figured out how to read the Neanderthal genome in a massive breakthrough for science, is at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
On the other hand, physical anthropology doesn’t have a monopoly on ancient DNA. For instance, Harvard superstar David Reich has a Ph.D. in zoology and is in the Department of Genetics.
Some physical anthropologists engage in forensic anthropology: when a skeleton is found in a shallow grave in the woods, the cops call in a forensic anthropologist to determine the sex, race, age and other basic facts so they can get a start on who in the missing persons reports it might conceivably be. (Recently, DNA has made the process of identifying unknown murder victims more efficient.)
Obviously, figuring out clues to help identify murder victims is a Good Thing. But it violates dogmas such as Race Does Not Exist and Your Sex Is Whatever You Assert so it is now Bad.
From Jonathan Turley:
Anthropologists Call for an End to Classifying Human Remains by Gender and Ancestry
July 18, 2022
There is an interesting controversy brewing in anthropology departments where professors have called for researchers to stop identifying ancient human remains by biological gender because they cannot gauge how a person identified at that the time. Other scholars are calling for researchers to stop identifying race as a practice because it fuels white supremacy.
… University of Kansas Associate Professor Jennifer Raff argued in a paper, “Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas,” that there are “no neat divisions between physically or genetically ‘male’ or ‘female’ individuals.” Her best selling book has been featured on various news outlets like MSNBC.
Weiss has criticized the book as “just plain wrong” on critical points of history and objects that Raff seems “eager to pay homage to every current progressive orthodoxy.”
However, Raff is not alone. Graduate students like Emma Palladino have objected that “the archaeologists who find your bones one day will assign you the same gender as you had at birth, so regardless of whether you transition, you can’t escape your assigned sex.”
Indeed.
Firstly: gender + queer archaeologists and scholars have been working for decades to unpack assumptions that archaeologists make about gender and identity, both today and in the past. No field is perfect, and there's absolutely more work to be done, but by and large, 2/
— Emma Palladino (@EmmaPalladino) July 4, 2022
And even IF some shitty archaeologist in the future misgenders you, that will never change who you were, regardless of whether you've medically or socially transitioned, regardless of anything. You are you, a dignified human, and always will be, even in death. 10/10
— Emma Palladino (@EmmaPalladino) July 4, 2022
Professors Elizabeth DiGangi of Binghamton University and Jonathan Bethard of the University of South Florida have also challenged the use of racial classifications in a study, objecting that “[a]ncestry estimation contributes to white supremacy.” The authors write that “we use critical race theory to interrogate the approaches utilized to estimate ancestry to include a critique of the continued use of morphoscopic traits, and we assert that the practice of ancestry estimation contributes to white supremacy.”
The only people who use the verb “interrogate” are Gestapo secret policemen in Hogan’s Heroes and woke college professors who would have made fine Gestapo secret policemen if they’d been in a slightly different political climate.
The professors refer to the practice as “dangerous” and wrote in a letter to the editor that such practices must be changed in light of recent racial justice concerns.
“Between the devastating COVID-19 pandemic and the homicides of numerous Black Americans at the hands of law enforcement officials, we have all been reminded about the fragility of life, and the failures of our society to live up to the ideals enshrined in the foundational documents which established the United States of America over two centuries ago. Tackling these failures seems overwhelming at times; however, changes can be enacted with candid and reflexive discussions about the status quo. In writing this letter, we direct our comments to the forensic anthropology community in the United States in hopes of sparking a discussion about the long-standing practice of ancestry estimation and changes that are frankly long overdue.”
The end result of such proposals would be to curtail or bar the classification of human remains by gender or ancestral heritage by anthropologists.
