Replacement anxieties: White power speculation and anthropology’s ancestral dramas

Anthropologists disowned their race-science roots one hundred years ago and the field has been a charade since—according to today’s White power activists. Those activists do not spurn anthropology, but they do spurn ancestor worship of Franz Boas, charged with fabricating data to advance a “woke” agenda and “perverting” a once-noble occupation. This article explores the ancestral angst that irks the field’s self-styled defenders and their efforts to revive what they figure as a White man’s discipline. In my analysis, the “Boas conspiracy” transposes old obsessions with blood purity onto the anthro-family tree and points to Boas as an illegitimate father whose bad seed must be purged if blood or knowledge is to be reclaimed. Mapping this degradation plot alongside its counterpart within the discipline, born from a Boasian romance, I then ask: what other plots are possible for anthropologists who wish to see their work deployed against the very White supremacists who claim it?