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What happens when foundational scientific concepts clash with modern identity politics?

Today, our guest is Elizabeth Weiss, professor emeritus of anthropology at San José State University, Segal Center research fellow, and a renowned author. Her latest book, "On the War Path: My Battles with Indians, Pretendians, and Woke Warriors", is now available. Weiss recounts her tumultuous journey through academia and the underlying conflicts within anthropology. These conflicts range from the debate between scientific knowledge and postmodern truths to the intersection of identity politics with the discipline. She also discusses the controversy surrounding the cancellation of a panel on the concept of binary sex by major anthropological associations, only for it to gain global attention after being reinstated. 

Join us as Elizabeth Weiss shares her steadfast commitment to objective knowledge and truth, her experiences with being canceled, and her aspirations for reform within the field of anthropology.

Elizabeth Weiss is professor emeritus of anthropology at San José State University. She's a 2023-2024 Faculty Fellow at the Mike & Sofia Segal Center for Academic Pluralism. She is on the board of the National Association of Scholars. Her latest book is On the Warpath: My Battles with Indians, Pretendians, and Woke Warriors (Academic Press, 2024).

Episode Transcript

John Tomasi: Elizabeth Weiss, welcome to Heterodox Out Loud.

Elizabeth Weiss: Thank you very much for having me.

John Tomasi: So you're from California, and yet I think you hold the distinction of having traveled the shortest distance to come to the podcast studio. You're a visiting fellow in the Heterodox Academy's Segal Center for Academic Pluralism, and your office is right next door to the podcast studio.

Elizabeth Weiss: That's actually correct, and even my apartment's not more than a five-minute walk.

John Tomasi: Well, so you walked probably 15 feet to come into the studio. So anyway, thanks for making the trip today. Appreciate it. You're an anthropologist.

Elizabeth Weiss: Yes.

John Tomasi: Can you just tell us first, where did you come from? How did you become interested in anthropology? What was the path that led you to the path that led you to this room this morning, this afternoon?

Elizabeth Weiss: Sure. So I'm a physical anthropologist, which means that I study skeletal remains. Sometimes you'll also hear it referred to as an osteologist, so the study of bones, or bioarchaeologist, which is the study of skeletal remains and the archaeological record. And basically, from a little on, from when I was a very young child already, I loved anatomy.

John Tomasi: How old?

Elizabeth Weiss: Probably around five or six.

John Tomasi: Wow.

Elizabeth Weiss: So I loved anatomy. I always had my parents get me those kits where you put together body parts like the plastic model of the eye or skeletal models to put together the different parts. Parts of the body.

John Tomasi: Can I ask, were they encouraging you? Do they want you to be a doctor or something? Or was this actually coming from you? How do you see it now, looking back at age five?

Elizabeth Weiss: I think it was very much coming from me. My mother has very similar interests. And so my parents were very open to what we wanted to study, what we wanted to learn. They were always very encouraging. And we made many, many trips to the library growing up. So that was another aspect of it. And so while I was growing up, I was also reading books and during high school years, like Don Johanson's book about the discovery of Lucy, the 3.5 million year old early human ancestor. And I realized that.

John Tomasi: And this is there, by the way, I think when I was in high school as well, perhaps, or maybe a little bit before you, but I remember books like Konrad Lorenz, The Nature of Human Aggression. Is that the right author and book?

Elizabeth Weiss: Yes, I think so.

John Tomasi: And I remember reading things that were all being widely discussed about the gentle people, the Tasaday, and the Yanomamo. Are these things that were part of your, is that part of the world you were?

Elizabeth Weiss: Absolutely.

John Tomasi: The early stew?

Elizabeth Weiss: The Napoleon Chagnon, the Yanomami, the forced peoples, another one. So those are like the cultural anthropology aspects of anthropology that I really enjoyed. And also just books about medicine, like Oliver Sacks type books were very, were of great interest to me. But when I got to college, I thought, should I do pre-med? Maybe thinking about becoming a pathologist, so like doing autopsies. Or should I do something like anthropology that is really asking the big questions? How did we get here? What makes us different or similar to other animals? And how does anatomy play into that role? And so I really felt that anthropology married my love of asking the big questions and possibly trying to answer them. And my love of anatomy, and especially skeletal anatomy. I think bones and skeletons, not only of humans, but of other animals, they're beautiful. And that's why we see so many, for example, artworks that incorporate skeletons. And it's just a perfect illustration of some of Darwin's evolutionary theory and how we are related and seeing the links and just fascinated me. And so once I took that step into physical anthropology, I never looked back and I continued on.

John Tomasi: So you're an undergraduate. You decided to go to get a PhD in anthropology.

Elizabeth Weiss: Yes.

John Tomasi: And where did you go to grad school?

Elizabeth Weiss: I did my master's at Cal State Sacramento, which was a fabulous experience. It was a two-year master's. And I basically did a study on the limb bones of a prehistoric California Native American collection, looking at sex differences in the femur or the thigh bones. And then I went to University of Arkansas in Fayetteville to do my PhD. And I was actually an interdisciplinary PhD with a geosciences, so geology and geography and anthropology. And I also, in between there, I did two field schools. I went to Kenya to do field school with Koobi Fora Field School, which was run by the Leakey Foundation and Harvard at the time. And then I did a field school in California as well through Cabrillo Community College.

John Tomasi: And so you're a professor at San Jose State, and we're going to come to that part of your story soon. Was that your first job, your first academic job?

Elizabeth Weiss: Yes, it was. I mean, I did a postdoc at the Canadian Museum of Civilization, but it was my first.

John Tomasi: And where is that?

Elizabeth Weiss: That's in Ottawa. So it's actually in Hull, which is right across the river from Ottawa. And I was able to do that because I collected most of my PhD data at that museum. And so then when I was finished and still looking for a job, I was offered the opportunity to stay on as a postdoc. And it was a purely research postdoc. So it was not teaching or anything like that, but just purely research. But then I, you know, I was applying to various places to get a tenure track job, hopefully. And I was, saw San Jose State was, had a opening. I applied to it. And what attracted me to San Jose State, besides it being in California, but also is that they, at that time, held the largest skeletal collection of a single site west of the Mississippi.

John Tomasi: Wow.

Elizabeth Weiss: So it was over 300 individuals of prehistoric California Amerindians.

John Tomasi: And I'm sorry, by individuals, you mean skeletal remains.

Elizabeth Weiss: Skeletal remains, yes. And so what I knew is that if I got this job, this was a resource that I could really build my career on, and which I did. I spent every semester pretty much looking at that, those remains, curating the collection in a manner that helped preserve them. And one of the most fun things was bringing in student volunteers to help seeing their excitement about studying the remains. But also, you know, bringing in scholars, both graduate students and other professors from around the world to study these remains.

John Tomasi: What year did you start at San Jose State as a professor?

Elizabeth Weiss: 2004.

John Tomasi: Okay, so I'm just putting this on a timeline. In 1990, there's the passing of the North American, sorry, the Native American Graves and Repatriation Act. And we're going to get to that and talk about what role that played in your experiences. I'd like to talk a little bit more about anthropology and just for a moment dig in a little bit about the role of sex.

Elizabeth Weiss: Okay.

John Tomasi: In the study of skeletal remains. So can you just take us through a little bit about this? As I understand, sex has been considered an important analytical tool by anthropologists, especially, I think, archaeological anthropologists for a long time. Can you just take us through some of the steps? I read around a little bit in advance of this interview, and I read about some things about the early attempts to determine sex over based on skeletal robusticity. What does that mean?

Elizabeth Weiss: So basically, if we take a step back and talk a little, you know, I'm going to break down anthropology into the four fields. These are subfields now.

John Tomasi: Subfields, right.

Elizabeth Weiss: So we have cultural anthropology that deals with living individuals and studying the cultures of those living individuals. And then linguistics that studies the languages of different peoples.

John Tomasi: So linguistic anthropology might talk about how the languages are connected to one another?

Elizabeth Weiss: Correct, yes.

John Tomasi: So in the back of a dictionary, you sometimes will find, those of us who look at dictionaries, you can find these maps showing linguistic patterns and changes and branches. And they can be used to draw family trees, so to speak, right?

Elizabeth Weiss: And then we have the two, like, more harder science anthropologies, you could say. So the physical anthropology, which looks at skeletal remains, also fossils, mummies, things like that. And archaeology, which looks at the skeletal remains in the archaeological record, but also things we've left behind. So artifacts like things from arrowheads to mortars and pestles and so forth. And so I sometimes use the term bioarchaeology, which is a term that probably started around the 1980s that marries biological anthropology with archaeology. Because many biological anthropologists look at the remains of those in the archaeological record. And so in order to understand how past people's lives were led, what their lives were like, we need to also understand who was doing what. Whether, was there a sexual division of labor, were males and females treated differently in terms of the access to resources they were getting? Was there infanticide? And if so, was that targeting, you know, female infants more than male infants and so forth? So all of these kinds of questions to try to reconstruct what past people's lives were like requires oftentimes to answer the question about sex. And so early on, anthropologists were looking at how to determine whether someone had died as a male or female by looking at what we call robusticity. Robusticity means that the bones are kind of bigger, more rugged. So like where a muscle attached is, which we call an enthesis, it would be raised and rough. And then we have gracility, which is like smoother and smaller. And so one of the first things that was being done was looking at robusticity to determine males and females. But robusticity is not just based on sex. It's also based a bit on age. so when you have a child, child's bones are very much more gracile. but then it's also based a bit on size. So larger individuals will automatically have, somewhat larger muscle markers or enthesis. and there's some variation, population variation, but there's two other factors in there. One is actually activity patterns. It's what is sometimes, people say like occupational stress markers. So you might have a big muscle marker because you were grinding acorns, but, but anthropologists were seeing was that there was always the same pattern where, where males always look to have larger muscle markers than females. And, this kind of clouded the, our ability to reconstruct the past. And so we had to start looking at, is there an, an independent way to determine sex and then go back and look at the robusticity to see what is leading what. And this is, and this is when people started studying pelvises more carefully. Pelvises was then the direction that would be going to look at something, a body part that wasn't affected by those muscle markers by robusticity. what we find is that as early as 1948, anthropologists started using the pelvis successfully to determine the difference between male and female. that was in Wash, Washburn published, a study in 1948. But the big jump came with the Phenice method in 1969 that uses just like literally, a small portion of the area of the pelvis pubic region and looks at four traits. And with those four traits, if you're trained and training doesn't take that long to identify the differences, you can tell the difference between a male and a female, 95% accuracy. You can tell that even from having a fragment of a pelvis.

John Tomasi: Yeah. So just a fragment of the pelvis, just a pubic section.

Elizabeth Weiss: So that would be the front section. But since that 1969 publication, we've found that sex differences really occur in almost every part of the body. And so anytime you want to try to determine what people were doing, you have to take into consideration the biological sex differences first. Because when we see patterns that cross cultures, it's likely something's biologically different between that group and this group, in this case, males and females. When we see things that are different from culture to culture, that's likely not biological. And so one of the big things is when you are trying to figure out what people's lives were like, we don't just want to know what their biology was like. We also want to know what their daily lives were like and what their culture was like. And you need to kind of cut out the noise of biology to make the sound of culture rise.

John Tomasi: Interesting. And just one more step on that methodological evolution in terms of the importance of sex as a concept that could be useful in understanding how people lived together. The DNA testing is really important. That's the final step, I suppose. So far, the final step of chromosome 23. Right. Tell us about that.

Elizabeth Weiss: So probably in around the 1980s, late 80s, we started being able to use DNA to determine whether someone was likely a male or female. And they use either dental and animal is one way. Sometimes they're not looking at the DNA directly, but at a protein that codes for male, that shows the differences between male and female. And that's called proteomics. And the other thing is you can find the DNA in a cut tooth. So like the inside of a tooth and in some hard body parts like what we call the petrous, petrous acid, like petroglyphs, right? Like rock right behind your ear, the petrous area. So these are the best places to get ancient DNA. They're the best places to get DNA in the bone anyway, but the best places especially that would preserve over long periods of time. So the importance of DNA, looking at the teeth and different parts of the body to find the best specimens, the best places to look.

John Tomasi: Anthropologists care about the DNA for what reasons? There's sex is one of the reasons.

Elizabeth Weiss: Absolutely.

John Tomasi: Are there other reasons as well?

Elizabeth Weiss: Diseases, such as congenital diseases, such as the extra Y or extra X chromosomes of sex disorders. You can also find the DNA of other parasites like tuberculosis in DNA testing.

John Tomasi: So pathologies.

Elizabeth Weiss: Pathologies. And then the other one is relatedness. Who is related to who?

John Tomasi: Interesting. Okay, good. So what we've done so far is you've shown that anthropology has a long history of wanting to learn some biological facts about the populations they're studying. Looking for clues that can help us explain how those people interacted and what their cultures were like. But there's some sort of linkage, an evidentiary linkage we might say, clues at least, based on things like sex, for example. So sex is an important analytical tool. There's been different methodologies for determining what sex might be through the history of anthropology. So DNA is kind of a breakthrough. Can you just say a word about how sex, the importance of sex as an analytical tool in anthropology versus the importance of sex as an analytical tool in, say, forensics?

Elizabeth Weiss: Sure. So one of the things is that anthropologists have basically led the way to identifying differences between sex in the skeletons. And that then spills over into forensics. And so when we learn about how to identify between a male and a female in a forensic setting, so if an anthropologist goes into forensics instead of archaeology, then what we basically have is that people learn that in part because of the anthropologist's work. So understanding the past helps us understand the present. You know, some people say, why does it matter what happened in the past? And they're not curious about, you know, past lives. But everybody should be concerned about identifying crime victims and solving crimes, in a sense, because it's an applicable thing that has real-life consequences in a way that something esoteric might not. And anthropologists have really been at the forefront of helping forensics identify difference between males and females, especially when those remains are fragmentary or just skeletalized. And now even the DNA research. DNA research has come from a variety of different fields. But what anthropology brings to that table is looking for methods to identify a usable DNA when the conditions are far from perfect. So we have this spillover from the past to the present when learning about sex differences, whether it's looking at bones or DNA. And DNA is a great, you know, using DNA to determine sex is a great way to ensure that you're going to get the right answer. You can, there can be contamination, of course, but it's a destructive method and it takes more time. So we should not be abandoning skeletal studies, you know, the looking at it with our bare eyes to determine sex just because we also have DNA. We should be using all the tools in our toolbox to make those decisions.

John Tomasi: Thank you. So we've been talking about sex having an important analytical role in anthropology. I want to skip a little bit over to some issues that led to some problems for you at San Jose State. There will be some issues with sex, as we'll come back to in a few moments. But so in 1990, as I mentioned a few minutes ago, there's the passing of the Native American Grave and Repatriation Act. Tell us a bit about that. What was that?

Elizabeth Weiss: So 1990 NAGPRA, Native Americans Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, was passed by President Bush. And it was an act that was intended as a compromise between archaeologists and anthropologists and Native American tribes, where skeletal remains and certain artifacts like funerary objects or sacred objects would be given back to tribes who are affiliated with the past collection. Affiliation or the connection was intended to be determined using a variety of methods like historic documents.

John Tomasi: Let me be sure I understand, just the broader cultural moment. So people are observing now, anthropologists going about their business, studying these human remains. We're now looking back at some of the authors I talked about before, Chagnon, Lorenz, and some others, and we're thinking, well, a lot of these anthropologists were white European males entering into these cultures, viewing them as foreign, maybe not always being as respectful of them as they might be. That kind of mindset, that sort of moral awareness is now coming into having us ask questions about how do we handle skeletal remains more respectfully, let's say. That's the context, right?

Elizabeth Weiss: That's some of the context.

John Tomasi: It wasn't only Bush, a Republican, the first George Bush, who was president when that act was passed. I understand it was also supported by numerous Christian groups or at least religious groups.

Elizabeth Weiss: Yes.

John Tomasi: So there was a moment around the passage of that act where people were trying to correct some insensitivity from the past, would you say? How would you describe that?

Elizabeth Weiss: I would say that that was...

John Tomasi: What was it intended to be?

Elizabeth Weiss: I would say it was intended to basically correct some of those insensitivities. Some of them, some of those insensitivities did not exist and were... There were a lot of exaggerations. For example, some of the anthropologists who were accused of not being sensitive actually had been working with tribes for decades, and the tribes were in favor of archaeology. So it was... So it's... That was part of the argument. I'm not sure that it wasn't greatly exaggerated. Another part of...

John Tomasi: Why would a tribe be interested in archaeology?

Elizabeth Weiss: Some people... Well, I think that considering that we did not have a written record from any tribe prior to contact because written history didn't exist in the Americas at the time, that this is a way for them to best understand their past.

John Tomasi: Interesting.

Elizabeth Weiss: And so one of the things...

John Tomasi: So those Native peoples would see anthropologists as allies in the project of understanding not just the general question about humanity, but the more specific questions about what happened to their people? What were they like? How did they live?

Elizabeth Weiss: Yeah. And I actually get emails from Native Americans who say, hey, I support your work as an anthropologist and are not in favor of reburial of skeletal remains. But I think the thing is, the other aspect of it was that there were some tribes, tribal activists, who we can even call them repatriation activists, who really didn't want their myths to be negated. So they didn't want stories about coming over from a land bridge. We were always here. We don't need that myth to be propagated that we came from elsewhere. And so they were against archaeology from that perspective. And then there was some arguments about creation myths and challenging the Native American creation myth, which is where we get some of the overlap with Christian groups who were supportive of the repatriation laws.

John Tomasi: Can I just pause on what you're saying? Because it's just, it's so fascinating. So, you know, we're familiar with Scopes trials and other kinds of times and earlier with straight up with the origin of species of science, unsettling people's settled worldviews or cultural views or religious views. And then being skeptical in the Western people, being skeptical of science and wanting to rein it in in some way. And we're seeing something kind of similar. It sounds a bit like with some Native peoples who have stories and understandings and cultural, deep cultural sets of beliefs and traditions that they now see science, anthropological science as perhaps unsettling. Maybe we have not always been here. Maybe there's some story about our origins. It's not the one that we thought that we've been telling ourselves. So it's kind of interesting, isn't it? That both, that sort of Western thing that happened with Darwin.

Elizabeth Weiss: It is. It's happening now in another dimension with another set of cultures. And several years ago, when NAGPRA turned, I think when NAGPRA turned 15, maybe when NAGPRA turned 20, I can't remember exactly. So we know that it turned 30 in 2020, which is going to be an important date for us in a moment. I did a study that looked at all the reasons why people were for NAGPRA and repatriation and reburial. And so I just went through like every interview I could find and tried to ensure that I wasn't like duplicating the results.

John Tomasi: Did you publish that study?

Elizabeth Weiss: I did. I've published it in Friends of the Past, I believe.

John Tomasi: I'd love to read that.

Elizabeth Weiss: Yeah. And so what I found was that academics almost always cited respect as the reason for repatriation. And Native Americans almost always cited religion.

John Tomasi: Interesting.

Elizabeth Weiss: So there was like this big divide between their perspective. NAGPRA was a compromise because it was still allowed for the continued curation of collections that were not affiliated to any modern tribe. It allowed for the maintenance of artifacts that were not sacred or funerary objects. And it allowed for the continuation of use of teaching collections.

John Tomasi: Interesting.

Elizabeth Weiss: And so it was considered a compromise, but that compromise has been slowly been eroded away.

John Tomasi: I want to talk to you about that exact issue now. So in 2020, very recently, you and two co-authors.

Elizabeth Weiss: No, one co-author.

John Tomasi: Oh, one co-author. Forgive me. Co-authored the book, Repatriation and Erasing the Past.

Elizabeth Weiss: Yes.

John Tomasi: Tell us about that book. Tell us about how it was received. What happened?

Elizabeth Weiss: So Jim Springer, who is a retired attorney and an anthropologist, he was trained as an anthropologist and then he went into law. He and I had been in contact for years about repatriation laws and about the problems behind them. We're concerned that these laws are changing in ways that makes the delicate compromise no longer a compromise. For example, they've now removed the concept of unaffiliated, so everything is supposedly identifiable to some modern tribe. And there's also issues about the separation of church and state because how the law is written, it requires that two committee members are Native American traditional religious leaders. So one of the aspects of the separation of church and state is that the state is not supposed to favor any religion. That's the establishment clause. And so it's not that you can't have a religious leader in a committee, but you're not supposed to say what religion, right? And so that's why it's this violation. And we decided that we would write a book together on the topic. He had written on the topic before. I had written on the topic before. And one of my first articles was Kennewick Man's Funeral, published in 2001.

John Tomasi: And I'm sorry, you decided to get involved in this book because you were already concerned that NAGPRA was being used in some ways that were not intended, or at least were deleterious to science in unnecessary ways. Maybe they were illegal.

Elizabeth Weiss: Well, I thought that NAGPRA was that the balance that they had struck was not going to work and that there'd be kind of like you give an inch and then another inch and another inch and it's going to creep into a way that will take all the collections away.

John Tomasi: So the compromise between, let's say, respect or whatever term we're going to put on that side and the needs of science to investigate and learn and help develop our understanding, that compromise in the original act was kind of being eroded in one direction more and more steadily. And we can just say, just as a background, as we follow at HXA intricately, with intricate detail, there were cultural changes affecting the universities, in fact, sometimes coming from the universities, that were consonant with and perhaps accelerating those trends in one direction and not the other. So the sort of scaling back about the weight that we give the claims of science and investigation starts becoming impinged upon and reduced because of the weight that's being given to concerns about respect or identity, you could say.

Elizabeth Weiss: And so when Jim and I decided to write this book, it was like maybe 2016 or 2017 and we thought we have to start it so that we aim it to come out 2020, 30 years of NAGPRA. And we put together a proposal, we submitted it to University of Florida Press. It went under peer review, the proposal did, and then they booked it and it was accepted and it came out, I believe, in September 2020 or October 2020. And I had basically thought, oh, you know, it's just a little academic book, price too high, not many people will read it. And I had kind of, you know, thought I did what I said I was going to do. I think it's an important book. I think we lay out some very important details about how NAGPRA has gone wrong about the legal aspects, which Jim did an excellent job highlighting the problems of the unconstitutionality of NAGPRA. And so I thought it was an important book in that sense, but I did not think that it was going to necessarily have the effect that I thought it should have. And what ended up happening was right before Christmas, I get an email from my publisher saying that they're in crisis mode because there's a Twitter campaign that is brewing, trying to pull down the book. Basically, they're calling for the book to be retracted.

John Tomasi: And is this campaign coming from anthropologists? Is it coming from native peoples who, is it coming from college undergrads here and there?

Elizabeth Weiss: It's mainly coming from anthropologists, from anything from, I think, mostly professors or lecturers, right? So, and...

John Tomasi: Let me just freeze at that moment if we can. And so, professors now who have an interest, professors of anthropology, let's say, who have an interest in some of these analytical tools you've been talking about, insofar as they care about learning about how past cultures lived and changed and developed, they're the ones who are importantly concerned about your book.

Elizabeth Weiss: So, yes, they definitely were...

John Tomasi: What's motivating them now? So, we would think, as anthropologists who care about the truth and the study of knowledge, we would think that they would be perhaps allies or at least would want to find some appropriate balance.

Elizabeth Weiss: But that's not what's happening. It was quite interesting because almost 1,000 people signed the open letter that called for the book to be pulled from libraries.

John Tomasi: So, they wanted to censor your book.

Elizabeth Weiss: They wanted to censor it.

John Tomasi: So, just to be sure I get it, just to make it really explicit for our audience. So, here we're seeing now in 2020, 2021... 2020, 2021, yeah. Just as soon as it comes out, we're seeing a mass call for censorship...

Elizabeth Weiss: Yes.

John Tomasi: ...of a book by two anthropologists, by other anthropologists.

Elizabeth Weiss: Yes.

John Tomasi: And worldwide.

Elizabeth Weiss: So, it wasn't only Americans. It was worldwide. And so, basically, they were saying the book was harmful to Indigenous people, anti-Indigenous, which I would say it was not. Of course, I would say that. But the reason why I would say it's not is even if they disagree with me, it's not like we were saying, oh, like, name-calling. We're not derogatory. We're, you know, it's more like, this is the science. And so, the book is split into three sections. Basically, a section on what you can learn from skeletal remains. This middle section, the legal aspect of NAGPRA. And then the last section is how NAGPRA has shaped the field, including increasing censorship because people don't want to upset tribes who might be the ones granting access, for example. So, there can be self-censorship on the part of scholars now. Yeah, and we argued that we really need to move away from what we call a repatriation ideology, which we define as a postmodern ideology that is built around the kind of narrative of the, there's the oppressed and the oppressor. The oppressors are apologists who want to study the remains. The oppressed are the Native American spokespeople. And we need to move towards objective knowledge. And so, one of the things we call for is not to use things like creation myths, superstitions, to make claims about the past or make repatriation claims. That if those claims are to be made, they should be made based on evidence. That's not to say that people can't believe those things. And I, you know, I think, but it's different to say, you know, my belief is going to determine what the truth is. It would be similar, to go back to an analogy we were running before, to people who said that Darwin's texts should not be read or should be removed from libraries. I'm not saying your book is like all the speeches, but it's, again, it's on the same side of people who are saying that make your case with evidence doesn't always apply. That idea of make your case with evidence and apply disciplinary standards and disciplinary tools, that's going to be now taking second seat to questions about identity and politics following the narrative of oppressed versus oppressor. And so one of the things in the open letter and a lot of the other different steps that people took to try to get my book pulled is that they kept on referring to things like the anti-indigenous or racist. and I noticed that many of the, these criticisms were coming from what I would call the tribes of anthropology, the, for example, the Black Trowel Collective, which is, a student, and early professor, group that's considers themselves kind of Marxists. then there's the queer archeology interest group. there's a trans doe task force. So all these different like kind of tribes were kind of calling for the book. And then also my presentation at the society for American archeology, to be pulled and for me to be basically banned from, from the field.

John Tomasi: I want to talk about that, about that, about that panel, but first let me be sure. I just, just want you on what you're saying a moment ago. So these are people now in the field of anthropology, graduate students, many of them, and they take say our, our, our, our studies can show fairly consistently that of the various populations in the academic world, graduate students tend statistically. To be the ones most likely to be the ones most likely to support cancellations and, shout downs and things like that. and now these tribes are tribes. You want to go, but these are people who are, who are anthropologists. And anthropology as a discipline, I think we started off by saying that it's interested in discovering and teaching us more about how cultures lived in the past. Do these new tribes, these, these, these, these new groups not see that as the purpose of our archeology, of anthropology? I don't think they do. Do they reject, do they call themselves the new anthropologists? And this is how anthropology should be done or is it a purely negative program against some of those evident, evidentiary ambitions to just know in a scientific way?

Elizabeth Weiss: I think it's a little bit of both, but I think what they do is they have an anti West or anti Western science. but, and a, anti-colonial, decolonization platform. But the other thing what they do is I think that they put their personality and traits and identity politics onto the past in a form of presentism. So if they are trans, then they're looking for trans and, in ancient Romans, right? As opposed to letting the data speak to them, they're speaking for the data as, as what I think that that's a big part of it. And, I, part of this is that it's political, you know, identity politics, narrative. And if that is what I did not see coming in a sense, I thought that my book was much more narrowly focused on the problem of repatriation. And I didn't see it spinning out of, out into these other problems. And now, as I, you know, look back, you know, it's been four years, I think, wow, how did I not see that coming? It's also interrelated. And one, I'll give you a really good example of how it's interrelated. One, one of the things that my university did when they decided to change the protocols and, and, and lock me out of the skeletal collection is they added a menstrual taboo that if, and in their menstrual tab, taboo and the protocols, they said menstruating personnel, not women. But menstruating personnel, because of course, they don't want to use the word woman, cannot go into the curation facility, cannot hold the skeletal domain. Well, that showed me that there was like this anti, the, the anti sex is binary group and the pro repatriation group had become intersectional. And so I think that these kinds of things are much more intertwined than I had ever expected.

John Tomasi: And so that intersectional moment, or you might even say intersectional tip of a spear to make it a little military, brings us to what happened to you at San Jose state. When you were shown holding a, a, a photograph of a skeletal remain, not wearing gloves, I believe in a picture that caused the problems. This is a picture that is, you can tell the story of what happened with you, but, but just, I think it began with this picture being a very similar picture of you being shown proudly by your university because of your excellence as a scholar.

Elizabeth Weiss: Yeah.

John Tomasi: Tell us a bit about that photograph and what, what, what was that about?

Elizabeth Weiss: So of course, everybody was, you know, not on campus for months at a time because of COVID, and the reaction to COVID. And so I had right before COVID literally like right before the university closed, I was in the curation facility, taking care of the skeletal remains, doing some work and then COVID hit and we were all, you know, sent away. And, when we got, finally got back after what, nine months or something like that, I was so happy to be back in the curation facility. And I was, you know, retaking care of some of those remains back among your bones, back among my bones.

John Tomasi: And again, I just, I just wanted to say, as you, as you said very eloquently before, one of the pieces of, one of the excitements for you about going to San Jose state was that it had these bones.

Elizabeth Weiss: Yes.

John Tomasi: So you could look and work on these skeletons.

Elizabeth Weiss: And so I was.

John Tomasi: Now you're back. You're back.

Elizabeth Weiss: I'm taking care of them. I opened a box in order to put something else in. And I see this beautiful skull. It's the skull of a child. And I, I, you know, recognize it as one of the individuals that I've seen many times. And I held it up and I took a photo. and I was just so, and I, I tweeted it so happy to be back with old friends.

John Tomasi: So COVID's over.

Elizabeth Weiss: COVID's over.

John Tomasi: You're back. You can start doing your work.

Elizabeth Weiss: the, you know, there's just a Twitter storm and it was kind of interesting because right before that, I also published an op ed criticizing California's new repatriation law that says that, that you must give deference to tribal narratives and that it's no longer a balance. That if there's a scientist's perspective and a tribal perspective, you have to give deference to the tribes.

John Tomasi: So this is the state of California law. And it governs university, universities, but also, but also museums, museums.

Elizabeth Weiss: Yeah. and so I had written an op ed that got in the newspaper and I posted that on Twitter and then the, and then the photo and very close to each other and time wise, but it was a photo that seemed to have caused the most upset.

John Tomasi: And now I'm sorry, I just need to say this because, you know, we were, we worked together a lot here at HX that you and I, and you have this gentle way of doing. Sort of bad ass thing. So you put the picture up there and you put an op ed taking a position that, you know, people are going to be objecting to in a strong way, but you do it anyway.

Elizabeth Weiss: Yeah.

John Tomasi: And I'm going to guess you didn't in your, but I always see it from you with this very quiet, but intense principled way.

Elizabeth Weiss: And I just, and I thought, oh, people will be upset about the op ed, but I did not see it coming for the photo. because in my, at that time, you know, 17 years or so at San Jose, the number of times I had been asked to pose with skeletal remains was numerous for the websites, for promotional things, before talks, even right before COVID. And I had a picture of me, well, it's very similar photo. and nobody had ever said, oh no, that's not right. And very similar photo.

John Tomasi: You mean a photo of you holding a skull, smiling, a skull.

Elizabeth Weiss: Yes.

John Tomasi: Smiling, no gloves, right?

Elizabeth Weiss: No gloves. And it's a common photo you see an anthropologist take. And so, you know, the provost wrote a letter to the whole campus wide community and saying that this photo, was disgusting and, didn't show San Jose values. And I had actually reached out to him and said, you know, I'm happy to talk to you about this and, and the actual situation and why, you know, this photo is now causing problems because I really do believe that it was caused. The problems were caused by the op ed and then the photo, as opposed to had, had I been pro repatriation and done the same photo? I'm not sure that anybody would have minded. and he, he decided not to meet with me. and, but he did send out the letter I had written in response to it, to, to the same community of people. And I did appreciate that he did that, but it, you know, it goes to show how, like, you can do the same thing from day one to day two. And, and, and the day before it was perfectly okay. Nobody would have said anything. And the next day it, because of your perspective, they attacked that act. the whole issue of gloves was, is an absurdity that I'll never understand. Anthropologists sometimes use gloves, forensic anthropologists use them more than, than other anthropologists. Because, you know, if it's a crime scene, you don't want to contaminate the crime scene.

John Tomasi: Perfectly makes sense.

Elizabeth Weiss: Sometimes anthropologists will use gloves and old collections that have been treated with arsenic. Like old mummies are sometimes full of arsenic. So, yes, you want to use gloves, right? But for the most part, when you're dealing with skeletal remains, especially remains that have been excavated 50, 60 years ago, handled by dozens of people, you don't use gloves. Because if you're holding the remains with gloves, you're more likely to drop them. And even like the National Park Service, which is the organ is part of the government that NAGPRA falls under, says you shouldn't use gloves. So, they say, you know, if all else is equal, don't use gloves. So there was nothing wrong with not using gloves, but it seems like there's this kind of, oh, well, her bare, her bare, dirty hands.

John Tomasi: Yes, yes. It's a moral issue, not a technical issue to them. So the storm starts building.

Elizabeth Weiss: Yes.

John Tomasi: And, I know there are lots of pieces of this story that we could talk about for, for hours, but, can you just tell us in a, in a, in a condensed way, what, what happened then? So you're a professor, you're now in suddenly in the midst of a storm, but your profession, a lot of, a lot of your professional colleagues are running against you in some ways. What, what's, what happens to your position at San Jose State?

Elizabeth Weiss: basically, basically, they tried to take away my curation responsibilities. They, my chair had said to a group of deans at a, at a webinar conference that he would try to keep resources away from me. if I assigned my book, he would want to take me out of the classroom.

John Tomasi: if you assigned your book to your students, to my students, that would be, again, something you can censor and prevent.

Elizabeth Weiss: I had reached out every single step of the way I first reached out to the people involved. And I said, you know, I'd really like you to withdraw that statement. Not you, you have to say you agree with me, not that you, you know, but that you will, that you're planning to keep resources away from me. That you're planning to take me out of the classroom, you know, things that were concrete things that I was like, you know, if not, I'm going to have to take action.

John Tomasi: And so again, you're, you're wanting to have, you're wanting to open up conversations about, about an act and the direction that, and the way to become, to be interpreted. And that's what is being objected to. You're opening up the conversation and you're, you're committed to doing it using evidentiary standards of the discipline and of the field. You're not doing any sort of hocus pocus or anything. You're just trying, you're, you're asking to do science in a way that's open to conversations about normal, normative issues that might constrain scientists in some way.

Elizabeth Weiss: And the other thing is I have never said like, oh, people shouldn't be for, the reburial of bones. I'm not, but it's not, I, I just have net, I've worked with people who are very pro repatriation and never had an issue.

John Tomasi: And you're not, you're sorry. You're not for the reburial of bones anytime, anytime.

Elizabeth Weiss: I think that you could draw the line at saying like a family, like person you knew that is. And, and it's interesting in, you know, in our own culture, we don't always bury bones, right? Some people donated to science, some people decide cremation, some people decide burial. I mean, so it's not, it's not that outrageous to say, well, you know, I do think that the, the body should be used after death and, and organ donations. There's another example. So 50 years ago, now people might be, you know, or a hundred years ago, people might think, oh, that's terrible to donate your organs. Everybody should be buried in pack. And now we have a discussion about, you know, organ donations, right?

John Tomasi: Let me be sure I understand that. So in those cases, people are making decisions about their own remains after they, after they pass. But sometimes those decisions are made by family members, right? Okay, good.

Elizabeth Weiss: Now it's getting more complicated or by tribal groups who speak for them. Sometimes by other groups, sometimes, you know, so it just depends. But let's say, for example, let's say my mother would die and my mother, she's already told me that she wants to donate her body to science. but let's say my father would want to have her buried. And I would say, no, I know she told me that she wants to donate her body to science. I'm actually more closely related to her biologically than my father, who's not, hopefully not related to her biologically, but he gets the final say so as a spouse. So there are, there are these kinds of nuances. And so I say, you know, I'm not for the burial of bones. I do understand that there are nuances and therefore we can have a compromise, but that compromise needs to be very narrow and very clear cut. And, and I do think that that's what NACA tried to do, but it has fallen apart now, but I've also would, I would never tell somebody, oh, this book about that's in favor of repatriation should be taken off the shelves. And when I taught the topic in my classes, I always assigned something that I had written, and somebody who completely disagreed with me and I never graded students on whether they disagreed or agreed with me because that's not a gradable, topic. It's more like, it's more like we had the discussion and, you know, I graded them on whether they knew what a femur is or not.

John Tomasi: Right. So, right. And, you no longer will be working at San Jose state and that very near future, I think officially.

Elizabeth Weiss: That's correct.

John Tomasi: How did that come to be?

Elizabeth Weiss: So I'm going to retire, at the end of next month.

John Tomasi: So I sued my university, the first round, they were denying you access to remains, they were making claims about not written, not teaching your own book in your own class. They were also, even in an open, in an open-minded way, that was not enough.

Elizabeth Weiss: They were also keeping me away from materials that were not native American, like the Carthage collection, which is a collection, a skeleton collection from Tunisia. and they were, trying to keep away resources for me. They were also trying to put a ban on all photography of skeletal remains and much of my research requires photography. And so I basically, sued the university.

John Tomasi: So they hadn't fired you from your job, but they were removing, the research and teaching, privileges. Let's call them, let's call them privileges together for, for fun. Maybe they're removing those teaching prerogatives in a way that made it very difficult for you to continue being an anthropologist at that university.

Elizabeth Weiss: And so I was never taken out of the classroom. I think because I filed before they did that, I fought against every change. So I, I spent 10 months fighting for the Carthage collection and finally got it. Having access to those remains. I fought against the, photo ban and I, they, that did not pass. I also,

John Tomasi: I'm sorry, but there are widespread photo bands now, right? And that's a lot of remains. This is sweeping the whole field.

Elizabeth Weiss: I believe.

John Tomasi: So again, just for our listeners, the idea is that, photographs of skeletal remains also now fall within the sweep of this ruling or this act and are considered should be removed from study and removed from textbooks.

Elizabeth Weiss: And even, and some journals don't allow them any allow photos anymore. There's been a real attack against photography, but not only photography, x-rays, data. And this is part of that erosion of NAGPRA where they're, they're re trying to redefine human remains to include things like that.

John Tomasi: Interesting. Interesting.

Elizabeth Weiss: The last set of rules have not done that, but they are right on the edge of that. And many museums have taken it upon, taken it upon themselves to do it, to put in photo ban.

John Tomasi: Was your decision to retire part of an agreement for the settlement?

Elizabeth Weiss: It was, I, if I had not retired, I could have gone on. I mean, like they were, I don't think they would have fired me. the last ruling was, in my favor in the sense that it, the first ruling was a, an order to dismiss my case, which the judge allowed with an amendment. And the, the requirement was that I take off everything in my case that revolves around native Americans, because you cannot sue native Americans, but they must be a party to the suit. They're kind of catching me in a catch 22. But then, we, we went back with everything like that stripped out and we were able to move forward. But at that point I was like, what am I going to get from the suit? And I realized that it was nothing I wanted. and so I settled, and what the settlement allowed me to do.

John Tomasi: I've heard, I've heard you describe the settlement as a victory.

Elizabeth Weiss: I do think it was a victory. I think it was a victory because I never apologized. The settlement did, did not require me to apologize, to take anything back, to, to issue any statement of, incorrect doing, anything. And I don't have anything to apologize for, but I, but it's also a victory because I was never taken out of the classroom. I did succeed in overturning that, order to dismiss. I did get the menstrual taboo taken off of the protocols. I was able to get, access to Carthage. So it, it was a settlement that I do think that the university was happy to, to do as well. So I do, I don't think it was like, oh, I won and they lost. I think it actually, both sides came away with things that they wanted. I'm still emeritus, I will be an emeritus professor, so I'll keep my title. I'll keep my, connection to the university in that way. But the other thing is, you know, with, without having access to the large skeletal collection of the Native American remains, there was just no reason for me to be in San Jose because I felt like that was such a big part of my job. And finally, the other thing is, you know, I was able to come here, which I wouldn't have been necessarily able to do had I continued with the loss.

John Tomasi: So let's talk a bit about that. So you're, you're one of our visiting fellows in the first cohort of visiting fellows here in the Segal Center for Academic Pluralism. When you arrived, you arrived in August or September?

Elizabeth Weiss: Yes, in August.

John Tomasi: So you arrived. And of course, we were delighted to have you because of who you are and the kind of work you've done. And if I may just say the exemplary way, in my view, in which you are so principled on these positions about open inquiry, but you do it in a way with, with a kind of gracefulness that's just really remarkable, which doesn't make you bend in any way. You don't bend. You're like one of the, one of the most principled people who I know. And yet you do that in a way that is accord with the HXA way, making your case with evidence, leading by example, showing what a better way is. Doesn't mean everything will come out our way when we proceed this way, but there's power in that, I think in the longer run, but you had barely arrived here with us, when another controversy, started whirling up and it goes back now to some of the things we talked about, about the importance, the long history of sex being an important analytical tool in anthropology. And so, I think I've just sort of briefly, if you, if you would, you and some colleagues, send it, send it, proposed a panel about the, about the, analytical importance of sex, the enduring analytical importance of sex and anthropology for the American Anthropological Association, co-meeting with CASCA with a Canadian Anthropological Society of...

Elizabeth Weiss: No, it's just Canadian.

John Tomasi: Okay, Canada, Canada. And then Canadian Anthropological Society. And then the, the other, the other part of that acronym is it in French. Okay. Okay. And the conference was to be held in Canada in November.

Elizabeth Weiss: Correct.

John Tomasi: And just briefly, what happened?

Elizabeth Weiss: So basically Kathleen Lowrey, who is a cultural anthropologist, she and I have been in communication about the issue about, with, about sex and the issue of buying sex being binary. That means it's male and, or female. It's not on the spectrum. And so, ..

John Tomasi: And there can be, there can be exceptions and margin, but they're the, the broad categories are male versus female. Sex is binary.

Elizabeth Weiss: I would say that gender is bimodal, where it's almost all male or female, woman or man, but there are a few exceptions. gender is the expression of sex. So, like, you'll have cultural expression of sex, but it doesn't, so it's not biological from, and this would be like the definition of an anthro 101, right?

John Tomasi: That would be like the classical.

Elizabeth Weiss: So a lot of people found sex and gender, but, ..

John Tomasi: And not just anthro, but other disciplines typically define sex and gender, and they use different terminology, but it's the same, it's the same structure.

Elizabeth Weiss: So we, we actually proposed a, and with Kathleen's idea, a, panel called, ..

John Tomasi: Let's talk about sex, baby.

Elizabeth Weiss: Let's talk about sex, baby. Like, why sex is an important analytical category in anthropology. And, and we talked about, you know, it was about sex being binary. And it was an all-woman panel.

John Tomasi: All-woman panel.

Elizabeth Weiss: Some of whom are very well-known, very strong feminists.

John Tomasi: Some of them, very strong feminists. Including one, I think, feminist separatist, as I remember.

Elizabeth Weiss: Yes, yes.

John Tomasi: But go on, tell us more.

Elizabeth Weiss: So, like, in some ways, these, these women, and I were likely to have had disagreements amongst each other about all sorts of things. But we agreed that sex is binary and that that's important to keep in anthropology. and so...

John Tomasi: Or can I say it a little more precisely? You, you all agreed that sex is an important analytical concept or tool.

Elizabeth Weiss: Yes.

John Tomasi: And that it is binary. And that it is binary in the field of anthropology.

Elizabeth Weiss: Yes. And so, so we put together a panel, submitted our abstracts, everything. we got our, you know, congratulations letter in June.

John Tomasi: Because it had passed a kind of peer review. The usual thing that you can't just send any panel and a panel has to be selected out of all the applications they get as being worthy in terms of knowledge of production in this field at this time.

Elizabeth Weiss: And then, and I think it was October, so about a month before the actual conference, maybe it was late September, but, that time, I was already here. we get a letter from the two presidents, the American Anthropological Association and the Canadian Anthropology Society, saying that they're retracting the, our acceptance first time in their 122 year history. And because we were putting forth the panel in a way that was harmful to the LGBTQIA community and, and anthropologists in general, they argued that, you know, sex is on the spectrum. I would say that sex is not on the spectrum and they also, I would say nitpick that, I used the term sex identification instead of sex estimation in my abstract. How'd they come back to me and said, look, most people now talk about estimation, and not identification. I would have changed that. That was not, it wouldn't have changed my argument. I was, you know, but, but estimation, excuse me, but estimation suggests that the, the best scientific tools we have not allow us to identify what the sex is, but sex identification would say that the best tools we have do allow us to identify. So estimation is a much weaker concept. I would say that, even if we're not a hundred percent right with our sex identification, oftentimes the reason why we're wrong is not, is in part, you know, we don't have the perfect tools, but the other thing is skeletons are not always perfectly preserved.

John Tomasi: Right. And, But taking that, taking that estimation, that, that little shift, which is a small thing, that that little shift though, sounds really important to me because if you follow the same logic, any scientific claim in anthropology and elsewhere should always be described as an, as an estimation.

Elizabeth Weiss: Yeah.

John Tomasi: And that's no matter what it is.

Elizabeth Weiss: Exactly. And that uncertainty is not way science works. So we can't make progress. And so like, I would say you, it's not honest. In fact, it's, I would say you estimate age, you know, but, but that we're good enough at sex identification that we identify sex. And, but, but they didn't reach out to me about that.

John Tomasi: But I'm sorry, but it seems like an attack on the very concept of identification, which is an attack on the idea of knowledge, being able to track things in the world. It's sort of, it sort of pushes back on a point that has some moral allies behind it to weaken that principle, the principle that we can know some things.

Elizabeth Weiss: I, and I think that that's why they want estimate because their, their thing is like, you never can know there's no real truth there.

John Tomasi: and this is one of the, you know, one of that, those anti-science pro-ideology movements in my mind, which is an example about, a moment in this very technical field and this panel you're on an anthropologist out there among many other things going on in the academy that month, it became a focal point of a culture war to some degree with one side piling on and you're, and you and a few of us here sort of standing up against it, but they, they canceled the panel.

Elizabeth Weiss: They canceled the panel. and, thanks to Heterodox, we had it anyway on online. We uncanceled it. We uncanceled it. and it got like worldwide attention. And I think that.

John Tomasi: And it was, if I may say, I was privileged to be on that panel as a, as a discussion as the moderator, it was a great conversation.

Elizabeth Weiss: Yeah. Those women were fabulous. I, I really wish that, that it could have been done in person because I want to meet these, all of these women in person and I haven't done yet.

John Tomasi: And you were, it was clear that you were, had very different views on so many interesting topics and, you know, there were some strongly held views being expressed on that panel and there was a, a, a combat of ideas. And yet all of you were in this position of having been pushed out of the professional norms because you didn't accept the idea that you have to back off from truth claims.

Elizabeth Weiss: Yeah. And, and it, and it's interesting sometimes how, when you are canceled, how other people who are canceled might never have been your ally become an ally because they realize how harmful cancellation can become. So one of the things is that a lot of people think that, oh, you know, all the camp people who are canceled are these right wingers or right. And if you look at it, it's like, we are a very diverse group of people who are being treated this way, whether it's about sex, and anthropology, whether it's about repatriation, whether it's about some of the other issues on, surrounding, identity politics, or, or even topics that seem like why, why would somebody be canceled about that when it comes to certain aspects of, you know, issues about, AI or, you know, it suggests, it suggests I, we follow those patterns pretty closely and it suggests to me that there is a deeper level of conflict going on. There's a battle over deeper concepts like the battle over, a science and knowledge or not knowing, being hesitant about our claims or being stronger in our claims. Those are the, those are the underlying conceptions about, do we know anything? Is it all up for grabs? Are there, are there truths? Those are the things that oddly enough, because it's very abstract concepts, but those are what animates a lot of these cancellation attempts.

John Tomasi: Yeah.

Elizabeth Weiss: And I, I do think that that's in some ways that the whole, that is the umbrella for, so to speak, is like the difference between this kind of postmodern view of there is no truth and that the only thing that's important is who's telling the story and strong positionality.

John Tomasi: Yeah.

Elizabeth Weiss: And, and a kind of a, a, a desire for an objective knowledge, objective truth, a field of study to find out what, what I would say was what really happened. And I think science is the search for the truth. You may never get to it, right? You may always be like, I think I'm there, but then it falls apart. But that is what, what we're trying to do is really explain it. Not, I want to know what that child's life was 5,000 years ago. What, what it really was like, I don't want to say, well, it must've been like mine because this is how I feel or that there is no way of knowing how that child's life was like. I want to know what it was like. And I think that we can figure those things out. If we are, if we use science, you want to know what it was like in some sense on its own terms, not on the terms that we want to impose on it or to take it and make that, make that skeletal child, a warrior and a current army or a campaign.

John Tomasi: Right. Right. I want to ask you, we're, we're, we're at the, we're reaching the end of our, of our conversation, at least the recorded, recorded part of the conversation. just say a word about, about your future plans. You have a new book.

Elizabeth Weiss: Yes.

John Tomasi: You're working on a book.

Elizabeth Weiss: Yes. Well, it is written. it, it'll come out mid July from, from Academica Press. Academica Press, for those who don't know is a, is the publisher that rescued Jim Flynn's book. And Jim Flynn is a psychologist, who passed away fairly recently, who wrote on, who's, who found the Flynn effect, which is a rise in IQ over time. But his last book was about cancel culture. And I think it's called something like a book too dangerous to publish. And then his publisher, bailed and Academica Press saved it. So, and my book is coming out in, mid July is called on the war path, my battles with Indians, pretendians, and woke warriors.

John Tomasi: And, we're looking forward to that, of course. And, you also have a STEM grant from HXA.

Elizabeth Weiss: I do. I have a STEM grant, from, I had docs looking at, the protocol, how protocols to access skeletal remains has changed both in universities and in museums and how this then shapes the research.

John Tomasi: Nice. And let's just, let's just conclude by a couple, a couple of questions. I want to ask you about, how anthropology can be reformed. Do you, do you have any thoughts about that that you want to share? And do you, I mean, what, what is one, so one thing I think that we're, that I'm hearing from you that I've heard from other guests too, is that the central lines of conflict are not so much between registered Democrats and registered Republicans with the Republicans, let's say being canceled by the Democrats. I'm not going to ask your political affiliation that I can probably gasp, but I'm not, I'm not normal, I guess. There seems to be a different divide. There's a divide between, you said postmodern before, a divide between people have certain views about whether the inquiry should happen in needless work may, or whether we should be thinking about the world in terms of oppressed versus oppressors. Is that how you see it?

Elizabeth Weiss: Yes, that's how I see it.

John Tomasi: And that people often say that just generally, but, but I want to, I want to invite you just to say something about anthropology. If you can, is there something unique about anthropology? Is it just, it's a strong instance of this?

Elizabeth Weiss: I think it is. I think it is.

John Tomasi: What I really want to ask you is, excuse me, I'm sorry to interrupt. I really want to ask you is your, your story seems so incredibly important to me and I'm trying to understand why it's important. Can you say something about why this, this, this thing that's happened in anthropology with you at the very center of it? Why is that important? How does that always understand what's going on more, more, more broadly across the academy and society too, if you like?

Elizabeth Weiss: Well, I think that anthropology is an incredibly important field from the perspective of one, it, you know, so many people take anthropology classes, but it's also a field that when you tell people that you're an anthropologist, their eyes light up and they all like it, when they've taken a class, they'll remember it, but they'll talk about, you know, what they've seen or read or, you know, whether it's something like the Neanderthals or the, or the Egyptian mummies. And it, it's this kind of unifying field in the sense that we all kind of want to know what happened in the past and the prehistoric past before we have written records. And that unites us looking for common humanity. you know, it's wondrous. And I think that that's one of the things that, that is why anthropology is so important is because it is such a fantastic field. And it's sad that the, that there's this kind of movement to really take away the wonder of anthropology and replace it with modern presentism and, you know, identity politics. I hope that, you know, the next cohort of anthropology students will be able to see how wonderful the field really is. And like, when I was teaching, one of the things I really liked to do is to use a lot of images. I think that that's another aspect that anthropology so excelled at is bringing those past people in the past cultures to life by using images, images of artifacts, images of skeletal remains and images of mummies. and then, and, you know, several years before this happened, and I was teaching a class on mummies, it's called mummies. And, and, the, the then provost came to come to my class and we were talking about, the mummies in, in Italy, Italian mummies, like, the 15 to 1700s AD. And I was showing the mummy pictures and then I would go to like the pictures of disease and, you know, that are found in the mummies and so forth. And, you know, it was really great class. And this provost, he contacted me, you know, even a year later and he's like, I can't, I'm still thinking about your class. Because basically it's this kind of, humanizing the past and bringing it to life. And that's why I think anthropology is so important, but it also, it spills into forensics, helping, you know, crime victims. It spills into medicine. You know, one of the things that I've done multiple times is publish in medical journals. And it's just a field that unites all sorts of, areas of knowledge.

John Tomasi: Two words that you've said that really just jumped out at me describing anthropology, you described it as wondrous and also as unifying. And I think that's a really, a really, maybe we should close it with those, with those, with those, with those ideas of yours. So, Elizabeth, thank you so much for being heterodox on Heterodox Out Loud. Thank you for being a fellow here with us, at the first year of the Segal Center for Academic Pluralism. It's really been a pleasure talking with you.

Elizabeth Weiss: Thank you so much for having me on.