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Cultural Anthropology must address ethical stances concerning the limits of market survival in the name of career sustaining praxis:
http://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/a-thousand-kinds-of-life-culture-nature-and-anthropolgy
A Thousand Kinds of Life: Culture, Nature, and Anthropology
(Excerpt)
By David Moberg - March 21, 2013
Dissent
"In the latest twist in an unusually public academic dispute, one of the world’s most influential and highly regarded anthropologists resigned in protest from the prestigious National Academy of Sciences in late February. In quitting the academy, Marshall Sahlins took aim in part at the work of fellow anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon, whose contentious memoir, Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes—The Yanamamö and the Anthropologists, was recently published by Simon & Schuster. But his action is also a skirmish in a much longer and very important debate over what it means to be human—a debate with consequences for the broader public discussion.
Sahlins, the Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of Chicago, said that he was leaving the 150-year-old academy for two reasons: the election of Chagnon to the NAS last year and the involvement of the NAS in research for the military. His action prompted an outpouring of petitions and statements of support from colleagues, including several hundred in Brazil.
The academy says that principled resignations like Sahlins’ are “rare”—so rare that the only precedent anyone could identify was famed Harvard biologist and geneticist Richard Lewontin’s 1971 departure in protest against NAS military work related to the war in Vietnam. In the 1960s Sahlins himself was helping to launch campus teach-ins against the Vietnam War and to raise issues about the relationship of anthropology to the military.
Sahlins initially tried to resign last year in May, after Chagnon was named to the NAS, then again in October, when he received a request sent to all eighty-four anthropologists at the academy for advice on two research projects aimed at making the military more effective. The request arrived at a time when a controversy was already smoldering in the field about anthropologists’ involvement in implementing the Human Terrain Systems counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq (the October request for help appears unrelated to HTS). The academy had indirectly been involved in military research since the allied National Research Council was established in 1916 specifically for military research. But Sahlins objected to any NAS involvement in projects such as the two proposed in October. One focused on “contextual factors that influence individual and small unit behavior,” and the other sought scientifically valid methods, including any suggested by neuroscience, for improving individual and group military performance."
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[see, for example]:
(http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2011/12/submit-questions-about-new-army-mental-resilience-program.html)
[and]
(http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/03/24/the-dark-side-of-comprehensive-soldier-fitness/)
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