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Ashraf Ghani—the now deposed president of Afghanistan—holds a PhD in anthropology (Columbia '83).  In addition, prior to moving to the World Bank in 1991, he was a professor of anthropology at Johns Hopkins.   There is evidence—from his academic publications in the 1980s and from what folks who “knew-him-when” say—that Ghani once thought and taught valuable anthropology grounded in both the lived experience of ordinary persons and democratic social theory.  And here it ’ s worth recalling that the Hopkins department of his time was rightly recognized as distinctly on the left and opposed to US neo-imperialism, having been founded and led by Sidney Mintz .  I myself found no such evidence of a democratic and anthropological consciousness the  one time I interacted with him, which was during his years at the World Bank.  The occasion was an annual meeting of the Society for Cultural Anthropology; Ghani was the keynote speaker, and I was serving, at the t...

In "Australian Aborigine Hair Tells a Story of Human Migration" (published on September 22), Nicholas Wade of the NY Times once again treats his personal judgment that races are biological phenomena as if this understanding of race is an established scientific fact, even though the overwhelming judgment of anthropologists is that human races are solely social constructions.  Wade writes, for example, that Australian "Aborigines are without any genetic mixture from other races."  This phrasing assumes, and conveys to the reader, that there are distinct human races as a matter of genetic (rather than social) fact.  Wade thus abandons his role of journalist by inserting his personal commitment to race and racial distinctions into his reporting. This is a violation of journalistic principles that the Times should not permit. In the same story, Wade provides a striking illustration of his biological understanding of human races: "Europeans and Asians," he ...