Robert Lynch started graduate school in 2006:
Like a lot of anthropology departments at the time, Rutgers was split between the biological anthropologists and cultural anthropologists. Although we were all supposedly in the same department and required to take some of the same classes, it was like putting the math and the art departments together — except they hated each other.
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In our second year, all the graduate students had to present their hypotheses at something called the Dissertation Proposal Defence. It was a crucial moment in the process of getting your PhD in anthropology. All of the biological anthropologists presented research questions that they were planning to test.
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I was already used to the massive differences between the two wings of anthropology, and familiar with the jargon employed by the cultural wing (embodied subjectivity, intersectionality, structural violence, hegemonic knowledge production), but I was still taken aback when the cultural anthropology students went up one after the other and explained what they were going to find. Not what they were hoping to understand, or learn, or test, or discover, but what they were going to find.
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There were no questions. No hypotheses. No data to be collected, let alone analysed. There were claims about arguments being “based on the ethnographic evidence”, but no evidence was ever presented. Conclusions were drawn from a series of assertions.