The Boghossian Report: "[I]n a 2021 presidential address to the American Anthropological Association, Akhil Gupta writes that 'anthropology is an outlier among the social sciences … because its political project is to challenge the culturally dominant commonsense of capitalist consumerism' (Gupta and Stoolman 2022, emphasis added). In a reply published in American Anthropologist, Fernando Villanea emphasizes the point that 'the value of anthropology is not the pursuit of truth, because all truth is subjective,' but rather to 'serve the interests' of people who have been harmed by anthropologists in the past (Villanea 2023). Two years later, in the same journal, José Santos argued that 'all ethnographies' — the stock in trade of cultural anthropology — have as their goal 'not voyeurism but advocacy' (Santos 2025)"
"Taken literally, such remarks call, not for scholarship in the service of a social goal, but for a rejection of the core idea that scholarship aims at understanding."
Though they temper this quickly (albeit in a footnote): "More commonly, such remarks call for combining scholarship in the traditional sense with an activist project and incorporating this mix into the official self-conception of the discipline."