Why America's Top Pundits Are Wrong

Anthropologists Talk Back

Catherine Besteman, Hugh Gusterson, Catherine Besteman, Hugh Gusterson

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN:
  9780520243569
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780520938489
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

In this fresh, literate, and biting critique of current thinking on some of today's most important and controversial topics, leading anthropologists take on some of America's top pundits.

This absorbing collection of essays subjects such popular commentators as Thomas Friedman, Samuel Huntington, Robert Kaplan, and Dinesh D'Souza to cold, hard scrutiny and finds that their writing is often misleadingly simplistic, culturally ill-informed, and politically dangerous. Mixing critical reflection with insights from their own fieldwork, twelve distinguished anthropologists respond by offering fresh perspectives on globalization, ethnic violence, social justice, and the biological roots of behavior. They take on such topics as the collapse of Yugoslavia, the consumer practices of the American poor, American foreign policy in the Balkans, and contemporary debates over race, welfare, and violence against women. In the clear, vigorous prose of the pundits themselves, these contributors reveal the hollowness of what often passes as prevailing wisdom and passionately demonstrate the need for a humanistically complex and democratic understanding of the contemporary world.

Available: November 2004

Pub Date: January 2005

Table of contents

• Contents
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The Seven Deadly Sins of Samuel Huntington
• 3. Samuel Huntington, Meet the Nuer: Kinship, Local Knowledge, and the Clash of Civilizations
• 4. Haunted by the Imaginations of the Past: Robert Kaplan's Balkans Ghosts
• 5. Why I Disagree with Robert Kaplan
• 6. Globalization and Thomas Friedman
• 7. On The Lexus and the Olive Tree, by Thomas L. Friedman
• 8. Extrastate Globalization of the Illicit
• 9. Class Politics and Scavenger Anthropology in Dinesh D'Souza's Virtue of Prosperity
• 10. Sex on the Brain: A Natural History of Rape and the Dubious Doctrines of Evolutionary Psychology
• 11. Anthropology and The Bell Curve
• Notes
• Suggested Further Reading
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Index