American Anthropological Association

Darkness’s Descent on the American Anthropological Association

In September 2000, the self-styled “anthropological journalist” Patrick Tierney began to make public his work claiming that the Yanomamö people of South America had been actively—indeed brutally—harmed by the sociobiological anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon and the geneticist-physician James Neel. Following a florid summary of Tierney’s claims by the anthropologists Terence Turner and Leslie Spo...

Sixty Years of Modern Human Origins in the American Anthropological Association

We present a review of the history of scientific inquiry into modern human origins, focusing on the role of the American Anthropologist. We begin during the mid–20th century, at the time when the problem of modern human origins was first presented in the American Anthropologist and could first be distinguished from more general questions about human and hominid origins. Next, we discuss the eff...

From Types to Populations: A Century of Race, Physical Anthropology, and the American Anthropological Association

In the 1960s, U.S. physical anthropology underwent a period of introspection that marked a change from the old physical anthropology that was largely race based to the new physical anthropology, espoused by Washburn and others for over a decade, which incorporated the evolutionary biology of the modern synthesis. What actually changed? What elements of the race concept have been rejected, and w...

Farm Work and Fieldwork: American Agriculture in Anthropological Perspective

Statement on the publication of Alice Dreger's investigation, Darkness's descent on the American Anthropological Association: a cautionary tale.

We feel it is important to explain to the readership of Human Nature why we decided to break with our tradition of publishing only those papers based on evolutionary approaches to human behavior that are highly empirical in terms of substantive testing of theoretical predictions with data. Our decision to publish an investigation of the conduct of a professional society needs to be explained to...