Just a few observations from someone struggling to decise whether to become an academic or not (partly due to the reasons that Louis outlines): First, in response to this: > Since they say that academics should not make value judgments, that is one > of the main reasons I never went into academia. Two books have just come to > my attention that I will now make value judgments on. Just to note that "academics" make value judgments all the time. In fact, part of the problem with academia is that many academics just overlay their value judgments on what they study. In a sense, that's only human, but this is the whole problem: academic work is human work, but is often taken out of the realm of human activity and reified into some transcendant or abstractly objective. I just had my students read an article by Thomas Buckley entitled "'The Little History of Pitiful Events': The Moral and Epistemological Contexts of Kroeber's California Ethnology" just published in a new book on the history of anthropology. Buckley very strongly demonstrates how Kroeber's own value judgments influenced his work as an anthropologist and how his ideas both emerged from and became entangled with social, cultural, and political circumstances of early-20th century California and the new discipline of anthropology. Buckley does a good job of showing how Kroeber's ambivalent, often elitist ideas of morality influenced the sort of knowledge he produced about California Indians, how it ignored the suffering and genocidal fervor generated by the invasion of California by Euro-Americans in the mid-19th century. In fact, Kroeber's entire theory of culture is colored by a combination of metaphysical optimism and emotional distanciation that not only ignored but derided and devalued the experiences of Indians. The real kicker is, Kroeber isn't exactly evil. Like a lot of anthropologists, he just couldn't handle his own experiences, so he created a theory and philosophy that he could use to make sense of them and use them. The problem, of course, is that this abets the evil that others do, The real problem with a lot of academic work is that it doesn't take a situated, principled stand, nor does it address the problems of its reception or effects. Axtell is a classic case. Not only does he make statements such as those that Louis outlines, but his scholarship itself perpetuates distortions and fails to ask tough questions about power, oppression, and the complexity of politics and culture that characterized the colonial era. My reading of Axtell's work, in particular *The European and the Indian*, is that for the most part there was an occassionally bloody but generally happy meeting of cultures in the colonial era. In fact, based on what he talks about in his work on "white Indians," the Native population takes on the task of turning the hapless colonists into Americans, as if they had all hunkered down one day and laid out some sort of tough-love curriculum for their guests. It is in large part a twist on the Noble Savage stereotype. It looks much nicer because Axtell packs his work with historical details, but it misses a host of issues that colonial American history has yet to address, and I think leaves the average college student feeling pretty good about the whole thing. That to me is the real crime. Kehoe is in many senses the anti-Axtell, although she is certainly one academic who is not afraid to make value judgments! I saw her give a paper on Morgan at an anthropoogical meeting a few years ago and she did everything short of calling him a scumbag. She did a very precise, polemical, and impassioned analysis of of Morgan's thought and life, analysis in the true sense of taking it all apart to see how it works. She razed many treasured chestnuts about LHM, and looking out over the audience (I was to present right after her) I saw shock, indignation. and a few smirks and nods. Everyone clapped, but I think some folks had to force their hands together. Kehoe does exactly what Axtell refuses to do, which is to take a stand *within* her work, and to use it to shake people up. Her short book on the Ghost Dance was one of the reasons I found anthropology potentially useful. She was able to make her moral stance clear while telling the story of the Ghost Dance in all of its complexity and humanity. While her work was considered "ethnohistory," I felt she was really doing anthropology, really trying to understand why human beings do what they do. She seems to take the idea of ethnohistory and turn it into a site of struggle, a place where the often placid rules and assumptions of American history can be broken and shown up for their deep ethnocentrism and mythologizing tendencies. Kehoe is a great example of academics properly done. Finally, there's more information on Morgan's ideas in Joan Vincent's book *Anthropology and Politics*, (1990: U. of Arizona), especially in the first half of chapter 1. Cheers, John Stevens PhD Student, Cornell University Contributing Editor, *Native Americas* magazine Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
