[lbo-talk] Diamond New Yorker controversy

[Sheldon]

As some on this list are probably already aware, there is now a
controversy brewing around the work of Jared Diamond and an article of
his in the New Yorker.  Louis Proyect has blogged about it.

http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2009/04/22/new-yorker-magazine-sued-by-slandered-new-guineans/

Here is another link from an anthropologists' group blog"

http://savageminds.org/2009/04/22/vengeance-is-hers-rhonda-shearer-on-jared-diamonds-factual-collapse/

Good money quote:

"Questions about scholarly competency and institutional licensing.
Diamond is like some sort of great Victorian polymath—geographer,
ornithologist, anthropologist, historian… in his books it appears
there is nothing he can’t do, and to experts in each of these fields
it appears that he can’t do any of them. While popular audiences love
Diamond’s work, the scholarly consensus on it has been pretty firmly
established: much of what the public thinks is Diamond’s original
ideas are cribbed from other authors, often with the bare minimum of
acknowledgments performed in footnotes to stave off accusations of
plagiarism. Overall, what Diamond gets right, he gets from others.
What he gets wrong tends to be the stuff he has made up himself.

It is one thing to have Diamond’s book show up on the shelves of
airport bookstores, but quite another for it to be described as
‘anthropology’ in the subheading of a story in the New Yorker. Now
that Diamond has tried his hand at some ethnographic ‘research’ in a
public forum, I think we are beginning to see the differences between
avocational anthropology and the real thing. So what is an
anthropologist? Is it someone who follows the best practices of our
discipline, or do we really feel there must be some sort of
institutional licensing in the form of a departmental appointment of
degree in order for someone to take up this mantle? Its an interesting
question that Diamond’s piece raises."