Question

Do you think that a scholar's political and cultural background can affect how he or she interprets archaeological and literary evidence? How could background biases have affected the way that people have viewed the history of India, Africa, or the Americas?

Answer 1

Only if he or she is incompetent. It would be as bad as a judge ruling more often for lawyers who had come from his own law school, or a doctor treating patients differently depending on whether they spoke with a familiar accent from where he grew up.

Why good historians put up with this modern slander, that they are prisoners of their cultural and personal backgrounds, unable to judge and report objectively, I do not know. Maybe he sociologists (who promulgate these ideas) have it in for them, because the historians could memorize the dates of the Civil War battles in high school, and the sociologists couldn't.