The Sad Story of Anthropology 1950-1999

Within the social sciences, anthropology appears to have been more strongly affected by external political trends than its sister disciplines. The trends affecting anthropology appear to primarily reflect ideas and attitudes of the intellectual Left in American universities and colleges. As the intellectual Left moved from the antigovernment activism of the early 1960s to Marxism and expectations of the death of capitalism in the 1970s, and through the disenchantment with socialist communism and alienation from Western culture expressed by postmodernism in the 1980s and 1990s, the centrality of these attitudes in the anthropology professorate of the elite universities resulted in profound changes in the research organization of anthropology and its choice of methods. This article will attempt to outline these changes and their impact on the effectiveness of anthropology as science.