Ex-SJSU prof decries college's narrow-minded Wokeism in new book
Our readers will recall anthropology professor Dr. Elizabeth Weiss, ousted from SJSU last year for her view against reburying bones. This month, the Nat Review discusses Weiss's new book “On the Warpath: My Battles with Indians, Pretendians, and Woke Warriors”—and how a celebrated researcher was condemned to career-threatening censure, just for (you guessed it) standing up to the Woke elite.
[Under] the ever-rising tide of identity politics … the interests of a preferred group are advanced at the cost of the common good. This approach, part of a Marxist-based ideology that has been spreading through the institutions, is known variously variously as “wokeism” and “cancel culture.” It is an ideology that reduces all social, cultural, and political differences to two categories, the suppressed and the suppressers. In the case of American history, the Native Americans are the victims and the majority-white population are the suppressors. Since this movement deals with the acquisition and the holding of power rather than with the advance of science, its advocates do not counter their opponents with rational arguments.
Instead, they use rhetorical devices — misrepresentation, distractions, irrelevant points, misleading information, guilt by association, ad hominem attacks — to put them on the defensive and force them into silence, Since such attacks might jeopardize their professional standing, even to the point of endangering the the targets’ employment, they usually work. This movement has gained willing adherents at the expense of scholarship. It has affected university administrators and departments of anthropology as well as publishers, museums, and anthropological associations, with the result that the scientific analysis of human ancient remains is blocked, thereby closing down the study of American prehistory.
One anthropologist, Elizabeth Weiss, has stood up to this corrosive movement, and in doing so has experienced the methods of cancel culture as seen in sometimes vicious personal attacks. She has, however, refused to remain silent and instead has confronted those who have attacked, including her colleagues. The battle ended one phase of her professional career, a story she tells in detail in her book On the Warpath.
She begins with personal information to show the reader her credentials and her professional status before she ran afoul of the establishment. While she was a student, she did field work in a field school in Kenya run by Harvard University. Later, she became a faculty member at San Jose State University, where she taught courses in physical anthropology and carried on her research. She was also curator of the Ryan Mound Collection of human remains and artifacts at San Jose State, overseeing material collected from the largest prehistoric site west of the Mississippi. She has also examined human remains from other collections. She performed a CT scan of Kennewick Man and wrote about in “Kennewick Man’s Funeral,” and in the journal Politics in the Life Sciences, published by Cambridge University Press. In the course of her career she has published in anthropology and medical journals and has written four books on the topics of human evolution and the methods of physical anthropology and bioarchaeology as well as on the effects of repatriation and reburial on scientific inquiry.
In her study of the Ryan Mound Collection, she reconstructed personal histories as revealed in bones, detecting signs of disease and abnormalities that in some cases indicate that the individual lived a life of pain. Patterns of violence are also evident in the collection. In men, wounds to the front of the head suggest hand-to-hand combat; in women, they suggest victimization. She notes that such signs of violence are not surprising when the collection is viewed as evidence of multiple peoples replacing one another through successive invasions, which is typical of history in all parts of the world. These facts, however, are not popular among those she calls virtue-signaling “indigenous groupies” who push the romantic narrative of the Noble Savage: the image of wise, environmentally friendly, and peaceful Native Americans living in harmony with one another and nature until the white “settler colonists” came to displace them. …
She tells us in her book about the point when her work began to threaten her professional standing. This was with the publication of Repatriation and Erasing the Past (University of Florida Press, 2020) a book she wrote with attorney James Springer. It coincided with the 30th anniversary of NAGPRA. The book is divided into an introduction followed by discussions of human remains and the law and of the scientific study of human remains, a critique of the reparations movement, and a conclusion. The authors define repatriation as it is practiced as “any ideology, political movement, or law that attempts to control anthropological research by giving control over that research to contemporary American Indian communities.” They tie this to the postmodern movement, which began in the 20th century and which we see today in the Marxist-inspired doctrine of critical theory, of which critical race theory is one variant. This ideology turns reality on its head by asserting that the concept of knowledge is fraudulent and that objective science and scholarship are expressions of the ideology of the dominant class or subcultures.
Repatriation and Erasing the Past got some good reviews and was listed among the top 75 titles recommended for community colleges by the Association of College Research Libraries, a division of the American Library Association. But the opposition on the part of what Weiss calls “woke anthropologists” soon got underway, with messages on Facebook and Twitter calling for the withdrawal of the book and attacking the authors and their ideas in typical woke fashion. They called the arguments in the book “outdated, racist ideas,” and the authors “racist.” This caught the attention of the publisher, which decided not to pull the book from publication but rather to respond to the attackers with an assurance that they would double down on their commitment “to amplifying Black, Indigenous, and marginalized voices in archaeology, as well as every other field we publish in.” The publisher promised to accelerate the time frame for a “graduate diversity fellowship,” adding that “friends of the press will make a donation to the Association on American Indian Affairs as a show of support of their work.” Increasing pressure was put on Weiss in the university, in an effort to discredit and censor her by falsely stating that she had not published in a first-rate journal, banning certain messages she sent on the university internet service, and criticizing what she taught in class.
The attacks went so far that she viewed them as career-threatening. Photographs of her holding skulls were used as an excuse for the university to lock her out of the curation facility and remove her from curation. To save her job, she sued the university. With the help of the Pacific Legal Foundation, a settlement was eventually reached in which she retired from the university with emerita status and full benefits, freeing her to practice her profession in the traditional way, in a scientific pursuit of knowledge. The value of the book is that it describes in detail in one field the ongoing process of the top-down directed culture change that is not only erasing prehistory but is changing the culture in general. Also, in telling the story, she provides a description of physical anthropology and how it helps reveal the hidden past, a topic of interest to many people in all walks of life.
Read the whole thing here.
Follow Opportunity Now on Twitter @svopportunity
Related:
Opp Now enthusiastically welcomes smart, thoughtful, fair-minded, well-written comments from our readers. But be advised: we have zero interest in posting rants, ad hominems, poorly-argued screeds, transparently partisan yack, or the hateful name-calling often seen on other local websites. So if you've got a great idea that will add to the conversation, please send it in. If you're trolling or shilling for a candidate or initiative, forget it.