Why America’s Top Pundits Are Wrong: Anthropologists Talk Back

Catherine Besteman, Hugh Gusterson9780520243569, 0520243560

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

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Table of contents :
EEn……Page 1
Why America’s Top Pundits Are Wrong – Anthropologists Talk Back……Page 2
Copyright Info……Page 6
Dedication……Page 7
TOC……Page 9
One – Introduction……Page 11
Two – The Seven Deadly Sins of Samuel Huntington……Page 34
Three – Sameul Huntington, Mee the Nuer – Kinship, Local Knowledge, and the Clash of Civilizations……Page 53
Four – Haunted by the Imaginations of the Past – Robert Kaplan’s Balkan Ghosts……Page 70
Five – Why I Disagree with Robert Kaplan……Page 93
Six – Globalization and Thomas Friedman……Page 112
Seven – On The Lexus and the Olive Tree, by Thomas L. Friedman……Page 131
Eight – Extrastate Globalization of the Illicit……Page 148
Nine – Class Politics and Scavenger Anthropology in Dishe D’Souza’s Virtue of Prosperity……Page 164
Ten – Sex on the Brain – A Natural History of Rape and the Dubious Doctrines of Evolutionary Psychology……Page 190
Eleven – Anthropology and The Bell Curve……Page 216
Notes……Page 239
Suggested Further Reading……Page 271
Contributors……Page 277
Acknowledgments……Page 281
Index……Page 283