What can I say?

With that, I withdraw from this forum.

I think we can agree (for once) that Daniel Pipes belongs in a loony bin. I subscribe to his list merely for the grim sadistic pleasure of watching him rant. But he is shrewd enough to exploit a fact of which you seem unaware: Whenever the dust settles on one of these fractious academic disputes about the Israel/Palestine problem, and one looks around to see who has benefitted concretely, it always turns out, irrespective of who “wins” or “loses” the issue itself, that the sole real beneficiary is the Israeli right–the settlers, the blackhats, the Greater Israel irredentists, and so forth. It’s never the Palestinians, whose problems are much to deep to be touched by these frivolities, still less the Israeli left, which once more is put on the defensive with the argument the “the goyim are out to get us, no matter what we do”.

I may not be able to argue with you on critical theory & other scholarly issues unique to your fields, but in talking about the subject above I am in my element. You are entirely wrong in yr assessment. The reason this blog exists, the reason progressive Jews are pressing issues like Nadia Abu El Haj, or Debbie Almontaser, or Joseph Massad, or Rashid Khalidi, or Walt-Mearsheimer is that opening up debate on these issues is a good thing that benefits everyone including the Palestinians. The pro Israel loony right must be fought tooth and nail on every point if we are ever to truly open debate in the Amer. Jewish community about how to attain I-P peace.

I care not a whit when I hear Israeli apologists say “the goyim are out to get us no matter what we do.” These statements are excuses anyway allowing them to retreat to moral or political choices they would make anyway even if there were no goyim at all in the world who could get us.

If you think that Nadia Abu El Haj getting tenure means Campus Watch or Daniel Pipes or extremist settlers win anything (except points among their own narrow band of followers), you are sorely mistaken. Pipes is a toxin running through our Jewish system. When we fight against him & he loses it drains a bit of the toxin out of the system. If we fight against him & he wins or if we refuse to acknowledge he is a toxin and do not fight him then the toxin will rise & eventually overwhelm us.

Just who the hell is supposed to be an “expert” in the cultural influence of archaeology? Surely you don’t mean to suggest that archaeologists automatically have that status? The first people I would ask, frankly, are the antiquities dealers and the tombaroli, although they’re obviously dealing with a narrow spectrum of the culture, i.e., people with a lot of dough.

As to K-man, “caucasoid” is a technical term in physical anthropology used by the first expert to take a look at the skeleton, Jim Chatters, who observed that the skull was more caucasoid than was consistent with identification as “native American.” So far as I know, nothing contradicts this assessment, although more extensive examination of this and other very ancient N. American remains suggests that the closest modern affiliate population is the Ainu aborigines of northern Japan. This also suggests that the most likely origin for this ancient population was Southeast Asia, rather than Siberia–which raises very interesting questions. Of course, it has recently been plausibly, if not convincingly, suggested that the “Clovis” people actually derived from Solutrean Europe–but that’s another question, so far as is known. In sum, there was nothing in the least “loony” about the original “caucasoid” assessment; the fact that some white-spremicist idiots took it up withut understanding it in the least is simply not relevant. Then again, neither is the opinion school of thought by the tribal chauvinists who tried to claim the K-Man remains (or, sad to say, that of the PC ethnologists who egged them on.)

I’m glad you defend the free-speech rights of both Chagnon and Rushton, though your mention of both in the same breath suggests that the former is an ideological clone of the latter, which seems near-libelous to me. It would be more interesting to compare Chagnon with Abu el Haj, simply in terms of the hard work and outright hardship necessary to produce their respective work. In my opinion, the latter invested no more effort than the average journalist reporting from the region–that is, not negligible, but hardly Herculean.

The people I mentioned as being out in the cold are experts in philosophy and history of science and related epistemological questions. They are either unemployed or at provincial institutions where they’re stuck with four-course loads and the like. Certainly not the kind of folks “columbia” would suddenly decide to take under its wing. But they haven’t Abu el Haj’s double barreled advantage of being both theoretically and politically fashionable, as such things appear to a Cult. Anth. dept. in the current lamentable state of academic culture.
I won’t name these people because they have enough problems as it is.

The fact that definitions of positivism “similar to abu el Haj’s” are widespread within a certain segment of the academic community is, of course, a damning fact about universities and intellectual fashion, and probably taints the people who want to give the woman tenure. I published an article that touches somewhat on the origins of this confusion in “Free Inquiry” some years ago; basically, my thesis is that it is rooted in the bitter quarrel between the Wienerkreis logical positivists (Carnap, Schlick, etc.) and mostly German social philosophers of a Marxist bent (Adorno, the Frankfurt School, et al.) Be that as it may, nobody has the slightest right to call him or herself an expert on the epistemology of science without grasping something that is made quite plain to any freshman in an introductory survey of philosophy course. (In my pre-freshman summer, I had to read “Language, Truth, and Logic” along with all the other entering freshmen; I hope the spirit of those times returns, but I am not optimistic.)

I think we can agree (for once) that Daniel Pipes belongs in a loony bin. I subscribe to his list merely for the grim sadistic pleasure of watching him rant. But he is shrewd enough to exploit a fact of which you seem unaware: Whenever the dust settles on one of these fractious academic disputes about the Israel/Palestine problem, and one looks around to see who has benefitted concretely, it always turns out, irrespective of who “wins” or “loses” the issue itself, that the sole real beneficiary is the Israeli right–the settlers, the blackhats, the Greater Israel irredentists, and so forth. It’s never the Palestinians, whose problems are much to deep to be touched by these frivolities, still less the Israeli left, which once more is put on the defensive with the argument the “the goyim are out to get us, no matter what we do”. I only wish leftists in this country would try a little “cui bono?” gedankenexperiment before they plunge into these brouhahas. But then (pace Silverstein), that would require a “nondegenerate” left.

given the degeneracy of the current left

“Degeneracy?” That’s a tad too strong a word, don’t you think? Is this a moral battle for you or an intellectual one? I’d like to keep moralism out of the debate if possible since it always muddies the waters. No one here’s calling you degenerate so I’d prefer you return the favor.

I was in high school when Wilson published _Sociobiology_, so wasn’t really in a position to comment at the time, but did support Chagnon during that controversy, both online and in teaching, although I don’t have much use for his work. Same with Philippe Rushton, for example, of whom (you may remember from some years ago) I think far less than Chagnon. But just why exactly would you think yourself in any position to judge me on that issue, given your contempt for tenure and for academic freedom under conditions of controversy? You’re the one, after all, trying to get Dr. Abu El-Haj fired. You want to have people of your own views running things, so that you won’t be bothered by utterances you disagree with - presumably with Daniel Pipes providing local oversight for Middle Eastern Studies.

If you can identify to me this vast majority of ‘more sensible people’ left out in the cold (presumably in anthropology and archaeology) because people like Nadia Abu el-Haj gets tenure, I’d be grateful as well. Who are they, exactly? What views do they espouse, and how do those views rebound against them in the tenure search? You’re the positivist here: specificity shouldn’t be too difficult. I entirely accept your account of an individual who got stiffed by a political academic - but you’ll agree that a single anecdote is a poor basis for generalisation for all of the social sciences. I appreciate that you’ve come quite a distance from merely dismissing Dr. Abu el-Haj as ‘baggag’e, but it’s hardly that she has ‘no idea what positivism is’: she may be defining it in ways that you think erroneous, but your own posts indicate that similar definitions are quite widespread.

In general, as an archaeologist I would tread carefully in telling chemistry or math departments who they should hire, and what their applicants should believe. I’m really not an expert in those fields, you see - as you are not in anthropology or archaeology. That wouldn’t prevent me from commenting on the topic, but it would make me think twice about clamouring for a denial of tenure without familiarising myself with the applicant in question’s work, or relying on the inaccurate testimony of bigots and reactionaries.

I do have serious questions about ethical standards, but concentrated in my last post on her scholarly standards, especially with respect to philosophical and methodological issues. Take a look at her index and references; can you find among them anyone who is NOT, within a broad but reasonably well-justified meaning of the term, postmodernist?

My feeling about the question of who should be hired/tenured is based on the obvious fact that for every social constructivist who gets a job, there are a dozen other more sensible people who are out in the cold. The academy has a nasty way of protecting and advancing little cults that manage to get a foothold. Appeals to the solidarity of the left pop up when some adherent gets into hot water; given the degeneracy of the current left, its people turn into cheerleaders on cue. So: yes, I would like to see some more rigorous intellectual policing of the whole hiring/tenuring process, even if it gets peoples backs up. That’s the way the Institute for Advanced Study, for instance, was saved from disaster on a couple of occassions, despite the fact that Clifford Geertz howled in outrage.

Might I ask what you had to say about witch-hunts when Napoleon Chagnon was being hounded? Or when E.O. Wilson was getting it in the neck for having the temerity to write “Human Sociobiology’? Or when Elizabeth Loftus was effectively chased from U. of Washington (though she landed on her feet at UCSD–she’s too good and too important a figure not to be sanpped up by someone.). And what do you think about the B.J. Bailey case that’s recently erupted? And, as I have previously alluded to, I know of one case at Columbia where an extremely good and productive scholar in a largely apolitical field was denied tenure at the last minute precisely bercause he was apolitical whereas Columbia’s head honcho in a closely-related field (essentially the same area of research under a diffferent deparmental aegis) was determined to politicize everything in sight and couldn’t abide the cadidates lack of enthusiasm for this project. Sorry if I don’t give names, dates, and sources for this–but then, I’m essentially adopting Abu el Haj’s methodology here, frankly deferring to the fact that the scholar in question never wanted to make a fuss about the way he was screwed.

I’m merely pointing out that the left is very selective in defending “academic freedom” (as is the right).

All of these are cases where the “left”, in some inclusive sense, conducted a vendetta against a well-reputed scholar whose ideas it resented.

I don’t think academic freedom is at stake in the Abu el Haj case, not nearly so much as the issue of scholarly merit as against political fashion. That’s why I bring up the question of “positivism” so obsessively. What would you think of a Chem department that hired someone who didn’t know what an ionic bond is? Or a math dept. that hired someone who taught differential calculus on the basis of ratios of infinitesimals, a la Leibniz (without using Conway’s Surreal Numbers or anything like that)? So how can you tenure a scholar who cites as her central concern the epistemoloogy of a twentieth-century scientific field when she has no idea what “positivism” means?

From my point of view, archaeological theory has to be particularly concerned with how structures of understanding of the past are constructed, both generally (given for example the central role of modern analogies in virtually all archaeological interpretation) and in the specific modern contexts where the acceptance of a particular view of the past can have all kinds of political and social consequences. If the construction of a past was ever going to be fought over, it would be in Israel and Palestine. That doesn’t make that past entirely constructed and artificial, in my opinion (and in Abu El-Haj’s), but it does mean that this kind of examination of the cultural politics of archaeology is important.

I agree that the “bulldozer” controversy is a minor matter. But claiming to do philosophy of science and doing it badly is rather another matter. Not having “Facts on the Ground” at hand, I have resorted to the generosity of amazon.com to check into Abu el Haj’s sources on this difficult subject via her index and a look at relevant multi-page excerpts.

First of all, as I suspected, she does thoroughly misunderstand the term “positivism” as used in 20th century philosophy of science (see Abu el Haj, pp. 127-130). She takes it to mean exactly the opposite of what it does mean. Specifically, she identifies “positivism” with a robustly realist ontology (i.e., that science enables us to discover what things really exist, to picture them precisely, and to verify that existence), whereas positivism, especially in its uncompromising operationalist formulation, asserts that science ought to avoid ontological commitments (to such things as electrons, for instance) and that the distinction between the formalism of a science and its observational proceedures should be vigilantly maintained, the constructs of the former not being directly verifiable as “real” by the latter. On this view, science is phenomenological, not metaphysical or ontological. But this gets by Abu el Haj. Then again, it gets by pretty much all the folks who try to do sociology of science in its contemporary form, and indeed, evades lots of scholars who have no formal connection with the study of science but like to throw “positivist” around as a general term of opprobrium. So it’s hard to reprove Abu el Haj specifically for that (or for the parallel sin of failing to recognize that positivism has largely fallen from favor amongst philosophers and scientists alike). But it is highly consistent with the further fact that her entire schooling in “philosophy of science” comes from rather dubious sources. According to her index (and some textual references that escaped the index for some reason), she derives her philosophial insights such as they are, from the folowing laundry list of familiar characters:

D. Bloor, M. Callon, L. Daston, D. Haraway, F. Jameson, B. Latour, T. Lenoir, A. Pickering, H. Collins, S. Schaffer, S. Shapin, S. Traweek

(in other words, from hard-core social constructivists). She also references Kuhn, of course, but one must assume that her understanding of Kuhn is refracted by heavy social constructivist bias. For the most part, flaunting these names won’t by you much respect in a good philosophy department, especially amongst the guys who do hard-core philosophy of science.

For my money (and, via one son and one daughter, I’ve forked over quite a bit of the stuff to Barnard and Columbia), “scholarship” done on this basis is pretty strong evidence of mediocrity and worse, quite independent of whatever political proclivities are on display. Supposedly first-rate institutions like Columbia should not be indulging this fourth-rate stuff (although, sadly, it has in recent years done far worse things, in both hiring and firing, than the prospective tenuring of Abu el Haj).