Who would have thought that anthropology could be so contentious?

A journal editor’s comments have angered biological anthropologists, and offers an intriguing insight into debates that have been occurring within that discipline.

In 2010, when the word “science” was left out of a plan for the American Anthropological Association, many in the discipline’s biological wing fumed that their work was being treated as second class by the cultural anthropologists in the field. Association leaders later affirmed that science was indeed part of their mission and the discipline’s — and various meetings have attempted to find common ground among the diverse wings of anthropology.

Now some biological anthropologists are again upset — this time over a letter suggesting that they needed to do a better job of explaining their work. Some of these biologists charge that it’s the cultural anthropologists who are hard to understand.

The controversy concerns a portion of a letter in an anthropology newsletter by Michael Chibnik, a University of Iowa professor who is editor in chief of American Anthropologist, the discipline’s flagship journal, which some biological anthropologists have said does not seem interested in their work. In the letter, Chibnik said he wanted to include more biological anthropology in the journal, but suggested that those who work in that subfield need to think about their writing.

“[T}he main ideas of pieces in AA should be understandable to nonspecialists and discouraged the extensive use of terms unfamiliar to most of our readers,” he wrote. “This poses particular problems for biological anthropologists, whose work often entails specialized techniques about which most sociocultural anthropologists and archaeologists know little. Biological anthropologists therefore need to be particularly careful to write in a way that is comprehensible to the generalized readership of the journal. In many cases, biological anthropology articles fit best in AA if the research reported can be clearly related to topics of interest to readers in other subfields.”

To many biological anthropologists, that language suggested that cultural anthropologists think they define what’s commonly understood and what’s not in the discipline. Julienne Rutherford, a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, took to the pages of Anthropology News (an AAA publication) to express her distress over the Chibnik letter.

“I think it’s fair to assume that the techniques used by many sociocultural anthropologists and archaeologists are very specialized. And I would further argue that the terminology and writing used by sociocultural anthropologists and archaeologists are often very obscure and sometimes even incomprehensible to specialists in other subdisciplines. To put the onus only on one subfield to be intelligible may be part of the reason some of our colleagues don’t feel particularly welcome within AAA or excited about publishing their most thoughtful work in AA,” she wrote.