Commentary
Once a field of serious academic research and study, anthropology has devolved into a virtue-signaling celebration of identity politics. The original goal of evidence-based understanding of mankind, its evolution, society, language, and culture, has long since been jettisoned in favor of advocacy for preferred populations and their particular sectoral interests.
This devolution was launched at the behest of the flood of feminist anthropologists in the 1960s. The first group to make identity grievance central to their anthropology, feminists adopted a modified version of the simplistic Marxist class conflict model of society in which struggling female victims were viciously oppressed and exploited by the Patriarchy. The goal of feminists was to show through their research and teaching that women deserved both pity and celebration, while men deserved condemnation. But not just that: At the same time the parallel goal of feminists, like the goal of Marxists, was to change the world, in the case of the feminist, so as to benefit females even, or in the view of many, preferably at the expense of men….