Anthropology

Franz Boas by Sam Francis TWO OF THE major superstitions of our time are the notion that man is merely a blank slate whose behavior is merely the product of the social environment and its sister, that race doesn’t exist. Yet one by one, the pseudo-scientific sources of these myths are being discredited…

“Spiritual” hoaxer Carlos Castaneda by Revilo P. Oliver Through the Looking Glass EARLY IN 1969, while looking over the ordure on a newsstand, I noticed a paperback, The Teachings of Don Juan: a Yaqui Way of Knowledge, by Carlos Castaneda, and I squandered $1.25 on it. It purported to record…

by Revilo P. Oliver EARLY IN 1983, fifty-five years after it was perpetrated, Margaret Mead’s great anthropological hoax was at last definitively exposed by the publication of Professor Derek Freeman’s Margaret Mead and Samoa. See Ray Hill’s review of that book in the May issue of The Liberty Bell…

by Revilo P. Oliver IF YOU ARE NO longer young, you may have read as a child a book about the aborigines of the Western Hemisphere, who entered a new world at a time when the level of the oceans was lower and it was possible to walk across the gap that is now the Bering Straits. And you probably learned that those…

by Revilo P. Oliver THE RENEGADE TECHNICIANS who call themselves “creation scientists” constantly scrounge about, trying to devise arguments to impair the validity of the doctrine of biological evolution, the only plausible explanation of the existence of animal life, including…

The “Middle Eastern” ancestry cited was Neolithic, including some from ancient Anatolia, which was once almost entirely occupied by proto-Europeans, and likely included Sumerians, another essentially European people. ANCIENT EGYPTIANS were more closely related to people from…

by William Scott, Jr. THE “New Age” craze has merged with “liberalism” in several interesting ways. Both new-ageism and liberalism spring from the same kind of reality-denying mentality. Both elevate wishful thinking to a kind of moral and philosophical principle, and…

The Resolution A VOTE TOOK place on this resolution to boycott Israeli academic institutions at the American Anthropological Association business meeting on Friday, November 20, 2015 in the Colorado Convention Center. The resolution passed 1040 for BDS to 136, 87% in favor. It will be forwarded…