> Discover Anthropology > Levi-Strauss, Clastres > Boas

Just Transfer

>>2747328
Seeing stories like this all the time made me worried for college, but so far i've, for the most part, only worked with unbiased, (or as close as a person can really get), professional instructors. What gives?

>>2747644
It's almost like people are more interested in outraged reactions than the truth on a Taiwanese fecal sculpture forum.

>>2747644
Based on your use of "college" I'm guessing you're American? You're gonna experience a bunch of commie profs, don't worry. Challenging them can be tricky though

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im a anthro major with the same gripes 3 more classes man. there being no anthro memes doesnt help

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>>2747328
>All of the professors are urbanite Marxists teaching Marxist classes
>Country is showing signs if extreme political division
>All it takes is a few more years and an economic crisis to turn us into Weimar

Revolution soon fellow wehraboos

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>>2747328
>anthropology
Hello fellow Anthropologist. Get ready for
>>2747677 we will soon be able to create the Aryan race thanks to genetic engineering.

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>>2747652
>He's going to the full university to study everything instead of his particular college

Why are euromutts such spergs?

>>2747686
>implying we're using genetic engineering for nazi fanfic stars

>implying we're not using geneng for /pol/'s ultimate dream of nympho catgirls

>>2747328
>Levi-Strauss
>Boas is pretty tight

Jews who switched from accepting race as a defining biological classification, anthropoligists without any scientific education, Boas himself was a professed socialist, so supporting him but then complaining about "marxist professors" makes no logical sense, Boas was their progenitor. You should read about "Ashley Montagu", you'll be simultaneously very entertained and discouraged to know how influential he was. Also look up his biography.

Boas is quite literally a hack that engaged in academic fraud.

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>>2747758
Made the cover of Time though

>>2747328
>> Want to really figure out what culture is, how different cultural logics can construct different religious perspectives, social systems, ect.

All you had to do was read Campbell for that.

>>2747328
>Still haven't really gotten a fulfilling take on the classic stuff.
Theory in every field advances. Psychologists don't study Freudian psychoanalysis, physicists don't stop at Newton, biologists haven’t stopped at Darwin. You're learning other stuff because that's what relevant in the modern field of anthropology.

Also, you might want to spend more time trying to understand what you're being taught and not just on thinking about how you don't like it. Unless you're in a shitty program exclusively taught by very old people, I highly doubt any of your professors are Marxists; that means something very particular, and isn't just a catch-all term for everything /pol/ doesn't like. Marxism as a theoretical trend hasn't been popular in anthropology since the 1970s, although some of its descendants (like Word Systems Theory) are still used. I'm sure they are talking about ethnic relations and oppressor-oppressed dynamics, but now those are mostly just frameworks for discussing trends in social dynamics. And they are useful; if you’re talking about a minority group that’s been oppressed for generations, that history is going to play a role in their culture and how they interact with society as a whole. Acknowledging that doesn’t mean you’re arguing that class struggle is the defining feature of their existence. So yes, those concepts are still used, but in more nuanced ways that try to take broader-scale interaction into account. If it helps, just think about it as an update on Boas’s historical particularism, just with more specific terminology to discuss the historical processes Boas and his students wanted to describe.

>>2748304
Continued:

>I just wanted to study culture though
That’s not how any academic field works. You can’t just read about facts you find interesting and not doing anything productive with it. For a field to actually contribute anything, people have to use theoretical frameworks to organize information and analyze trends. If you don’t want to do that, then switch majors. But be aware that pretty much any other field is going to require you to do the same things.

>>2747644
The stories that always pop up in threads like this are either made up, or are the result of people whining because they don’t like being exposed to new ways of thinking. And no, I don’t meant that in a “Marxist Jews are going to brainwash you” way, I mean that most people aren't familiar with the theory that guides these fields, and being exposed to it is jarring at first. Like OP, most people get into these fields because they’re interested in them, and the idea that the field is more than just reading about interesting things is strange.

I’m an anthro grad student, so I’m pretty familiar with the field, and I’ve never encountered the kinds of things that people always bring up about social science academia. I also never hear complaining about liberal brainwashing from my super-conservative classmates, either. I'm sure the same can't be said for the meme-tier fields like gender studies and sociology, but aside from a few people who make it clear that's they're being political (like Nancy Scheper-Hughes, who's not a very popular figure), anthropology as a field tires to stay pretty neutral.

>>2747562
^This.
If your department sucks and you don't actually study ethnography, get out.