Anthropology in the Mirror

Anthropologists were hardly pleased to see their discipline portrayed as a hotbed of “bad political groupthink,” or to read that “scientific neutrality” is, at best, an illusion and, at worst, a political dictate. They reacted angrily to the Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences, commissioned by Vanderbilt University and Washington University in St. Louis and prepared by a group of ten scholars. Recently released, the report presents anthropology as an example of a discipline experiencing a widespread decline in scientific standards, accompanied by a corrosive intellectual climate in which reasonable disagreement on politically controversial subjects is suppressed and punished.

What, then, remains of science when disagreement over methodology itself becomes subject to political, moral, and identity-based pressures?

Anthropology is a relatively recent discipline, yet it is among the fields that have acquired an increasingly prominent place in contemporary research, particularly at the intersection of history, politics, society, and culture. Political anthropology, in particular, has expanded its scope from the study of power and institutions to the study of the state, nationalism, identity, citizenship, violence, collective memory, religion, and the everyday practices of power. It has also become increasingly engaged with history, political science, and political philosophy. Contemporary academic institutions and programs thus present anthropology and politics as an interdisciplinary field for understanding cultures, politics, and international affairs in their historical, social, and cultural dimensions, through the collection and interpretation of evidence from different regions of the world.

In 2023, the American Anthropological Association and the Canadian Anthropology Society canceled a panel titled Let’s Talk About Sex, Baby: Why Biological Sex Remains a Necessary Analytic Category in Anthropology. The two associations justified their decision in the name of the safety and dignity of their members and the “scientific integrity” of the program. They argued that the panel rested on assumptions that presented sex and gender as simplistically binary.

But the decision itself drew objections from organizations committed to defending academic freedom, including PEN America and FIRE, which argued that canceling a panel on the grounds of the potential “harm” it might cause raised serious concerns about freedom of debate.

Can a scientific institution refuse to allow a scientific question to be asked because it believes that some of the possible answers might be harmful? And can it do so on the basis of judgments that may themselves fail to account for the full physical, biological, and anthropological complexity of the issue? This preoccupation with knowledge that remains largely conjectural reignited intense debate in 2026, as part of a broader crisis concerning politicization, scientific standards, and their reconfiguration in a context marked by significant theoretical breaks with the philosophy of the previous century.

These attacks come in particular from political forces advocating a biological reading of the world. Other political discourses likewise mobilize biological and social arguments to portray human differences as natural and immutable facts: billionaires are geniuses who deserve their wealth, while the poor are weak people born to remain poor. Such discourses challenge many of the insights produced by the social sciences concerning race, gender, class, and power.

The problem is not whether the social sciences are “left-wing” or “right-wing,” but that the boundaries of what may legitimately be subjected to scientific inquiry are sometimes drawn before the research itself has even begun. Yet anthropology emerged precisely to deconstruct what appears natural and self-evident. Today, however, it risks turning some of its theoretical conclusions into assumptions that may no longer be questioned. In other words, it risks moving from the critique of received truths to the production of new ones.

The social sciences unsettle the established order of social relations and distinctions and challenge the discourses of power. Should they therefore be silenced? They can also contribute to social justice. But what happens when social justice itself becomes a criterion for determining which knowledge is acceptable?

A report declares a crisis in the humanities and social sciences, and anthropology becomes emblematic of the conflict. The cancellation of the panel on biological sex provides one example. The question, then, is this: are we witnessing the politicization of science, or a legitimate scientific course correction?

The task is a difficult one. For a researcher, claiming scientific neutrality can amount to denying one’s own relationship to the world and may even constitute a form of bad faith. Yet objectivity, on the other hand, remains a fundamental principle of science, one that must constantly be strengthened through procedures and principles that make the pursuit of truth possible.

In the United States, the attacks initially targeted the social sciences before extending to climate science, microbiology, and even vaccines. In Europe, gender studies have long been under attack in countries such as Hungary. In France, an intervention by Higher Education Minister Frédérique Vidal in 2021 led to a call for an investigation into certain strands of critical scholarship.

It therefore seems essential to highlight the protocols and principles governing scientific work, which rests not on the neutrality of the researcher but on the objectivity of the method, as well as the conditions under which science can challenge what appears self-evident, and thus be genuinely critical. Politics should not determine what is scientifically true, just as science should not pretend to exist outside politics and society.

Carolyn Rouse, a professor of anthropology at Princeton and president of the American Anthropological Association, notably criticized the report’s authors for using artificial intelligence to analyze large bodies of text, even though this method is becoming increasingly common across many of the social sciences. She also argued that requiring biological anthropologists to teach that there are only two sexes would be “like turning an astronomy department into an astrology department.”

This divergence of views comes at a time when academia is facing an unprecedented assault. It needs communications experts capable of explaining the value of higher education to the broader public. Yet many academics continue to do and say things that remain largely unintelligible outside their own circles. The same applies to university presidents who stumble during congressional hearings, public-health experts whose pronouncements contradict one another, and think tanks attempting to rebuild trust and organize the objections being raised against the theoretical foundations of an anthropology that sees itself as constantly evolving.

The notion of “neutrality” in research is often associated with Max Weber. The famous concept of “value neutrality,” however, points to a more complex question: the distinction between a relation to values, which is unavoidable in the selection and construction of an object of research, and the value judgments made by the researcher. The French translation of two of Weber’s lectures, brought together under the title Le Savant et le Politique, was published by Plon in 1959, translated by Julien Freund and preceded by an introduction by Raymond Aron. The very translation of Wertfreiheit as neutralité axiologique, or “value neutrality,” has since been debated, with some preferring the notion of the “non-imposition of values.”

Another important contribution to the construction of scientific objectivity is Pierre Bourdieu’s (1930–2002) theory of reflexivity, which emphasizes that the social-science researcher is also subject to biases. Anthropology has never been a “neutral” science in the sense that physics or mathematics might be. Researchers enter the field carrying their own culture, language, social position, and prior questions.

One of the reasons most frequently cited for declining trust in academia is its perceived “political agenda,” followed closely by the cost of higher education and the perception that degrees no longer adequately prepare graduates for the job market. For years, academics have lent their institutions’ credibility to a variety of political projects. They now find themselves reputationally bankrupt. Unless they repair the damage, many of their institutions may eventually become financially bankrupt as well.

Objective science cannot, after all, be separated from a democratic society subject to the same critical demands of objectivity and contextualization. Science is a collective enterprise and, in defining what counts as knowledge, requires a certain form of democracy.

One of the criticisms currently leveled at universities is that freedom of expression is under attack. Yet such accusations sometimes seek to challenge an intellectual liberalism that has not resulted in censorship, but rather in the establishment of legally defined boundaries, particularly against anti-democratic, racist, or misogynistic speech that some of these critics would seek to legitimize once again.

And yet these are sometimes the same people who, without fearing contradiction, attack academic freedom through policies designed to control or silence scholars, as well as all those who work to defend freedoms and rights in the fields of justice, journalism, or an emancipatory culture, in the service of the public interest and the common good, and toward a world that is livable for the greatest possible number of people.

Science does not die when it becomes politicized. It dies when it becomes immune to correction.