UC San Diego anthropologist Roy D'Andrade has an excellent assessment of the current crisis in anthropology in a forthcoming article to appear in Current Anthropology this summer, about the time we are holding our HBES meetings in Santa Barbara. Opposition to the anthropological academic left has been late in coming, possibly because anthropology has always been tolerant of multiple theories of culture and has tended to attract self-selected individuals who not only advocate Rousseauean ideas about the nature of Man, but who also seem to assume that qualitative approaches are preferable, if not superior, to quantitative ones. Fieldwork now means that you are present at a crime scene and should become a witness whose first duty is to report crimes. You should use 'interpretation' to identify crimes, not empirical data. This oppression is, in turn, caused by states.
States wield power.
Power rests on authority. Science is a kind of authority that the powerful will appropriate for oppressive goals. Therefore, scientific anthropologists are oppressors and are to be condemned for ethical, moral and even criminal wrongdoing. Instead it leads to denunciations of various social practitioners, such as social workers, doctors, psychiatrists, economists, civil servants, bureaucrats, etc., and especially other anthropologists. A few weeks ago I would have been skeptical of D'Andrade's assessment.