Why America's Top Pundits Are Wrong

Catherine Besteman is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Colby College and author of Unraveling Somalia: Race, Violence, and the Legacy of Slavery (1999), among other books. Hugh Gusterson, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Science at MIT, is author of Nuclear Rites: A Weapons Laboratory at the End of the Cold War (California, 1996) and People of the Bomb (2004).

• 1. Introduction Hugh Gusterson and Catherine Besteman 2. The Seven Deadly Sins of Samuel Huntington Hugh Gusterson 3. Samuel Huntington, Meet the Nuer: Kinship, Local Knowledge, and the Clash of Civilizations Keith Brown 4. Haunted by the Imaginations of the Past: Robert Kaplan's Balkan Ghosts Tone Bringa 5. Why I Disagree with Robert Kaplan Catherine Besteman 6. Globalization and Thomas Friedman Angelique Haugerud 7. On The Lexus and the Olive Tree, by Thomas L. Friedman Ellen Hertz and Laura Nader 8. Extrastate Globalization of the Illicit Carolyn Nordstrom 9. Class Politics and Scavenger Anthropology in Dinesh D'Souza's Virtue of Prosperity Kath Weston 10. Sex on the Brain: A Natural History of Rape and the Dubious Doctrines of Evolutionary Psychology Stefan Helmreich and Heather Paxson 11. Anthropology and The Bell Curve Jonathan Marks Notes Suggested Further Reading List of Contributors Acknowledgments Index

"The punditocracy are our modern day mythmakers. The anthropologists assembled in this collection deftly debunk their myths and make a passionate case for the importance of anthropology to public debate. The authors present sustained, intelligent, and often biting and humorous criticisms of some of the most influential recent popular writings on social science and international relations. This is a very important book." - Bill Maurer, author of Recharting the Caribbean; "From an anthropological standpoint, the world increasingly looks as if it is led by glib, but uninformed, insensitive dolts. In this volume, the authors fight back against the pundits whose influential publications presume the same expertise as anthropologists. They underscore the overgeneralizations, prejudices, false reasoning, and inaccuracies of these popular authors and in doing so provide a useful corrective." - William Beeman, author of The Study of Culture at a Distance"