Innocents imagine that universities, the names of many of whose departments include “science” (as in social science), do not perform exorcisms. That is a mistake. Today, universities are among the busiest sites for the practice of intellectual exorcism. Ask any current student to define “investigate”: you will get the definition for “indict.” The latest outbreak of academic exorcism comes to us from anthropology. At issue are the Yanomamö, a stone-age, indigenous people of the Amazon rain forest. The current repellent effort rests on postmodern scripture: the idea that science is just window-dressing for Western hubris and colonialism.

Today, universities are among the busiest sites for the practice of intellectual exorcism.

Thirty years ago the distinction between technical disagreements and moral-political warfare began to dissolve. A whole generation of students and teachers became convinced that everything, including scientific inquiry, is inextricably political because knowledge itself was inextricably a social —i.e., a political—phenomenon. Politics, meanwhile, is a matter too important for niceties. The Berkeley anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes exemplified these enthusiasms when she demanded from her colleagues, in 1995, a “militant anthropology,” the education of a

new cadre of “barefoot anthropologists” that I envision must become alarmists and shock troopers—the producers of politically complicated and morally demanding texts and images capable of sinking through the layers of acceptance, complicity, and bad faith that allow the suffering and the deaths to continue.

The excuses for such self-righteousness are manifold: a concern for virtue, the environment, racism, sexism, imperialism