[Pen-l] Timothy Burke on Jared Diamond

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

From a discussion about the New Yorker scandal on Crooked Timber.

http://crookedtimber.org/2009/05/19/diamonds-vengeance/

Diamond frequently starts with an argument that’s some kind of 
sociobiology or Marvin-Harris-style material determinism and then goes 
delving for some kind of anecdote that he thinks illustrates it. 
Sometimes he gets it from his own travel—and as a lot of folks observed 
in that previous discussion, he is often at the very least inclined to 
re-cut whatever he’s told to fit whatever he wants to have been told—or 
he grabs something from published work that fits the bill, usually 
ignoring what the bulk of publication says. If this was just to spice up 
something, it would be annoying enough, but he often seems to think he’s 
actually proven something with this kind of embroidery. In a way, that’s 
less Diamond’s unique flaw: it’s how a substantial amount of 
sociobiological/evo-psych argument proceeds when it wants to compile a 
claim that a particular practice or behavior is universal, by a careless 
grabbing at whatever confirms a hypothesis out of work which has a great 
deal else to say, as if all the contest and complexity of cultural or 
social anthropological research is irrelevant as long as there are two 
or three round-peg sentences that can be pounded into the square hole of 
a hypothesis.
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