Clodbuster, peer-reviewing is necessary. Otherwise no ideas would have any reviewable validity. Peer-reviewing is not done on the basis of opinion, they are done on a scientific evaluation of fact. Other factors such as funding and critiques are what drive conformity and orthodoxy in academia. Without peer-review, there IS no academia.
Also, your definition of sociology isn't accurate. It is the role of sociologists to examine how people function within society. Very few, if any, sociologists view society as an ideal to which people should be expected to conform. Sociologists and Anthropologists (to a large extent, the two fields study the same thing) gave anarchists the idea of symbolic meaning, so ironically, it's because of sociologists and anthropologists that you have the philosophical foundation to claim that sociology and anthropology as legitimate fields are social constructions.
However, I can't say the same about psychologists. Social psychologists, like sociologists and anthropologists, view a person's thinking patterns as a result of being a member of society, but they don't compare that thinking to an ideal. However, other psychologists do develop ideas about mental illness that are used to make people conform, and so you are right about that one.
Overall, without social scientists, there would be no anarchists. This phobia of science and intellectualism that many anarchists have makes no sense to me. Anarchism was built on science and intellectualism. This hoity-toity extremist post-modernism is unproductive. If anarchist theory, along with all other approaches to knowledge, isn't based in reality, in the natural world, then it is just a useless mind experiment for people who have managed to convince themselves that there is no world outside of their minds.
Oh, and as for economics..... really? You really don't think that economic theory is important for anarchism? I would think that through.
Dot, I'm not sure what you mean about my citing previous anarchists as if they are the end of the argument. Kropotkin contributed greatly to anarchist theory, and he did so by operating on an anthropological framework. That doesn't mean he is the " inventor" of anarchy, but it shows that anthropology and anarchy are not mutually exclusive, as does my example of the Christian anarchists in the other thread.
As for your comment about Marxists, no two Marxists share the same ideas, even operating under its subsets, like Leninism, Maoism, etc.. It's a nice thought that anarchists are free from that kind of division, but realistically, anarcho-communism and anarcho-syndicalism are as much different fields of thought as Leninism and Maoism.
You take a very condescending attitude towards anthropology, as if you assume that a social science field which has seen all of the same epistemological arguments that anarchist theory has, would somehow fail to take bias into account. That's what Postmodern Anthropology, Middle Range Theory, and the Scientific Method are all about...
Also, I didn't say "unbiased researchers", I said researchers who go to great lengths to make sure that their work is as unbiased as possible, by using the scientific method and the ideas of falsifiability and replicability. By using that approach, anthropological research is as close to unbiased as it is possible to get, under any kind of political system (even if anthropologists were forced by the government to approach their research in a certain way, that research would not be scientific. Nazi Anthropologists proved that). It doesn't matter if I accept or don't accept the "bias" of anthropology, because my opinion doesn't matter, nor does anyone else's, all that matters is the data that can be collected and the testable statements that can be derived from the data. And for the data that can't be tested, that's where postmodern anthropology comes in, in that it works to reveal the most context as possible, and often works to let the people of the culture being studied speak as much as possible for themselves. To claim that the information gathered through these methods is "so out of context as to be almost irrelevant" is to do a huge disservice not only to your own understand of the people being studied, but to the people being studied themselves.
Even old ethnographic studies written by missionaries, some of the least scientific people of all time, when read with consideration for their bias, have yielded some very important information about native tribes of the past that has been very helpful to their descendants in the present.
Unfortunately, anthropology and anarchism DO have somewhat of a spotted relationship, not because of anthropological bias, but because of anarchist bias. For example, Kropotkin's idea of mutual evolution as natural justification for anarchism (as discussed in his book, Mutual Aid). That idea was rejected by anthropologists, because it wasn't grounded in fact and it relied on an unclear understanding of evolutionary theory (though he did call attention to the important ideas of cooperation and altruism). Anarchists however, disregarded the anthropological science, and accepted mutual evolution anyway, because it justified their own beliefs and anarchism doesn't have a system of rigorous epistemological testing of its ideas as anthropology does. Kropotkin, though he didn't use always use science well enough himself, stated that the biggest different between his theory of anarcho-communism, and Marxist theory, was that his theory was scientifically grounded, and therefore more valid than Marxist theory.
Finally, anthropology is the study of humans, and as such, it's far, far, far too complex to simply be considered a " reminder that we could be living differently." You can't just look at an anarchist tribe and assume that all anarchist communities could be based on that system, because that tribe's interaction with its environment, it's culture (culture is important, and can't be erased, despite what post-left anarchists say), its family structure, and every other aspect of itself is unique and adapted for the specific situation that tribe lives in. Cultures, like biological organisms, evolve in ways responsive to the environment. All this stuff isn't just a science fiction " prod" to the imagination, it's the real way the human world works. (I love science fiction though)
