2 Anthropology NewsfelfedDecember 1997

Extendon

Cor remondence This section is primarily for rhe use of

AAA members for rhe purpose of address- ing issues tho! relate to the discipline and practice of anthropology. The Anthropolo- gy Newsletter reserves the right to select and edit letters. All letters must be clearly marked for Anthropology Newsletter Cor- respondence, be typed double-spaced, not exceed 500 words and consist of a signed original plus an electronic copy whenever possible. Letters published reflect the views of the correspondents; their publication does not signijj endorsement by the Ameri- can Anthropological Association.

Kennewick’s Message of Unification

As author of the article on Kennewick Man in the New Yorker, I would like to rcspond to Alan Goodman’s commentary in the October 1997 AN (p 3). I think Good- man has mischaracterized the Kennewick debate. The anthropologists I spoke to were exceedingly careful not to racialize the issues. For Goodman to accuse some of his colleagues of harboring a “crude, racial worldvicw” is. in my opinion. preposterous.

One sourcc of confusion for Goodman lies in thc conflict between legal and scientific terminology. When the plaintiffs in the law- suit assert that Kennewick Man might not be “Native American,” they mean only that he does not meet the legal, NAGPRA defini- tion, not that he is somehow nonnative. Goodman also mischaracterizes the views of James Chatters and others by repeatedly sug- gesting that they are using the word Cau- casian to describe the skeleton. This is false: Chatters and most of the anthropologists I interviewed strongly objected to the use of Caucasian in this context. They uscd the term Caucasoid and then immediately point- ed out it is mcrcly (as I wrobe) ‘‘a descriptive

term applied to certain biological features,” irrelevant to the actual “race” of Kennewick Man. It is Goodman himself who is misusing the word Caucasian by putting it in the mouths of those who never spoke it. Further- more, I stated quite clearly that many anthro- pologists feel that “the concept of ‘race’ may not be applicable to human kings” 10,ooO years ago.

Goodman criticizes Boyce Rensberger for falling prey to “racial typing” because he used the terms Caucasoid and Mongoloid in his Washington Post article. But what other terms could Rensberger employ to describe certain defied clusters of cmiofacial char- acteristics? Perhaps anthropologists should come up with a different classification vocabulary, such as “Group A,” “Group B” and “Group C” and thus remove any suggcs- tion of race. In this, Goodman makes a valid point-that his profession’s terminology is outmoded-but it is unfair for him to accuse a science reporter of racial typing for using the only terms available to himYWorst of all, Goodman conflates the ideas and specula- tions of some anthropologists with the views of hardcore racists who are misusing the sci- entific debate for their own ends. He even compares the subtitle of my articfe with the paranoid conspiracy views of the ultraracist publisher of The Turner Diaries, implying I share those views. Goodman thinks the media and some scientists are “hyping” the value of Kennewick Man. Kennewick is one of only half a dozen early skeletons known from North America, and it is at the center of a lawsuit that may fundamentally alter the course of biological anthropology in this country. If this doesn’t make Kennewick important, I don’t know what would.

Chatters spoke for most of his colleagues when he said, “The message this man brings us is one of unification: there may be some commonality in our past that will bring us

together.” This is not the language of some- one intent on “racializing Kennewick Man.”

D o u g h Preston Research Associate, Laboratory of

Anlhroplogy, Santa Fe, NM

Vanity Yes, Pernicious Maybe Without addressing G A Clark’s position

on affirmative action (beyond noting that we disagree). a nostalgia for the rational tndi- tion he defends compels us to note two criti- cal weaknesses in his October 1997 AN com- mentary (p 56).

While y e understand that redefinitions constitute a key rhetorical strategy for elimi- nating doubt or dissent (long before post- modernism), we would hope that someone arguing for reason as well as the transcen- dent individual would maintain a certain degree of rigor in his choice of words. Even the most cursory examination of any small library’s holdings would establish that expressly “scientific” works were composed in the 19th and early 20th centuries and that not a few of these (including foundational works in anthropology) were explicitly con- cerned with something called “race.” To call a preoccupation with race inherently “presci- entific” is thus simply misrepresentation. “Pre-genetic,” yes, “crude” or “false,” indeed, but race has also becn a part of nor- mal science in the past, not simply “anti- science’’ and certainly not “prescientific.” Retending otherwise replaces the historical record with a p r l y scripted morality play, one in which science is not merely virtuously self-correcting but immaculately never wrong in the fust place.

Second, even if we were to agree with Clark’s conclusion in his comparison of gen- der and race we would fmd his standards of

See Correspondence on page 4

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