I used to wonder how the ideological capture of institutions (e.g. universities) takes place and found this article quite illuminating. An essential ingredient appears to be government and/or corporate interests lining up with those of ambitious, corruptible careerists within the institution. Each hand then continually washes the other as the former provide the money and the latter spread the idea while providing it with a veneer of intellectual respectability. In many ways, the current transgender medicine madness has many of the same elements of the shamanism sham (hehe, I hope that pun was not beneath the good professor), and I now see that it is unlikely to be the last or worst put on we'll all have to suffer.
These latter generations of anthropologists manage to make their Victorian predecessors look frickin' amazing. Those gentlemen in pith helmets had their biases but at least they weren't lacking in basic honesty.
Just tracking down Schultes’ back story was very disillusioning for me. More than two decades ago I started out sort of bright eyed and puzzled after I saw how an NGO-funded “laboratory” (that never had running water) installed next to the home of a shaman in a remote part of Bolivia didn’t turn out to be a success but instead a disaster for him and his family. Where did the notion it was going to be a good idea come from? This led me to Schultes and then the backstory to Schultes was so effing dark and weird and misrepresented and it really did make me look at everything differently afterward: how many other cases are like this, of narratives that shape our worldviews that are just completely fake and sort of malevolent? Turns out, of course: many such cases.
I used to wonder how the ideological capture of institutions (e.g. universities) takes place and found this article quite illuminating. An essential ingredient appears to be government and/or corporate interests lining up with those of ambitious, corruptible careerists within the institution. Each hand then continually washes the other as the former provide the money and the latter spread the idea while providing it with a veneer of intellectual respectability. In many ways, the current transgender medicine madness has many of the same elements of the shamanism sham (hehe, I hope that pun was not beneath the good professor), and I now see that it is unlikely to be the last or worst put on we'll all have to suffer.
These latter generations of anthropologists manage to make their Victorian predecessors look frickin' amazing. Those gentlemen in pith helmets had their biases but at least they weren't lacking in basic honesty.
Just tracking down Schultes’ back story was very disillusioning for me. More than two decades ago I started out sort of bright eyed and puzzled after I saw how an NGO-funded “laboratory” (that never had running water) installed next to the home of a shaman in a remote part of Bolivia didn’t turn out to be a success but instead a disaster for him and his family. Where did the notion it was going to be a good idea come from? This led me to Schultes and then the backstory to Schultes was so effing dark and weird and misrepresented and it really did make me look at everything differently afterward: how many other cases are like this, of narratives that shape our worldviews that are just completely fake and sort of malevolent? Turns out, of course: many such cases.