Criticism
Many of those who constitute the publication's contributors, Board of Directors, and publishers are connected to the academic hereditarian tradition. The journal has been criticized by some as being political and strongly right-leaning. The publisher counters that much of Anthropology is 'politicised' in the opposite way and that those who count amongst the most vocal critics of the journal often identify with the Radical tradition in Anthropology.
During the "Bell Curve wars" of the 1990s, the journal received attention when opponents of The Bell Curve publicized the fact that some of the works cited by Bell Curve authors Herrnstein and Murray had first been published in Mankind Quarterly. In the New York Review of Books, Charles Lane referred to The Bell Curve's "tainted sources," noting that seventeen researchers cited in the book's bibliography had contributed articles to, and ten of these seventeen had also been editors of, Mankind Quarterly, "a notorious journal of 'racial history' founded, and funded, by men who believe in the genetic superiority of the white race." The journal stands by its tradition of publishing hereditarian perspective articles to this day, stating that "...this science has stood the test of time, and MQ is still prepared to publish controversial findings and theories". Pearson received over a million dollars in grants from the Pioneer Fund in the eighties and the nineties.
Read more about this topic: Mankind Quarterly
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“A friend of mine spoke of books that are dedicated like this: “To my wife, by whose helpful criticism ...” and so on. He said the dedication should really read: “To my wife. If it had not been for her continual criticism and persistent nagging doubt as to my ability, this book would have appeared in Harper’s instead of The Hardware Age.””
—Brenda Ueland (1891–1985)
“However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but a spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men’s genius. By virtue of style, criticism can itself become literature. But usually this occurs only when the writer is acting as critic of his own work or as outrider to his own poetics, when the criticism of Coleridge is work in progress or that of T.S. Eliot propaganda.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)