Are you arguing that anthropology talk creates factions? Or does it just manifest factions that already exist?
It provides justifications for them. It allows existing factions to pretend they are fact-based, by creating a (possibly fictional) description of foreign people which confirms the map of the world used by the faction. This will make other people join the faction, even if they originally just wanted to see the territory as it is.
As an example, if I am part of a faction that worships unicorns, I can gain more followers by publishing a textbook describing a foreign society which worships unicorns and therefore has no wars and violence, and a lot of cookies. Now when you know how much happiness unicorn worship brings, you are more likely to join us. And you know it must be true, because it was taught at a university.
WEIRD may be weirder than you think. We Aren't The World writes of psychological experiments on non-Westerners that give vastly disparate results from results that have been assumed to be hardwired, and the implications of this:
Henrich used a “game”—along the lines of the famous prisoner’s dilemma—to see whether isolated cultures shared with the West the same basic instinct for fairness. In doing so, Henrich expected to confirm one of the foundational assumptions underlying such experiments, and indeed underpinning the entire fields of economics and psychology: that humans all share the same cognitive machinery—the same evolved rational and psychological hardwiring. The test that Henrich introduced to the Machiguenga was called the ultimatum game.
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To begin with, the offers from the first player were much lower. In addition, when on the receiving end of the game, the Machiguenga rarely refused even the lowest possible amount. “It just seemed ridiculous to the Machiguenga that you would reject an offer of free money,” says Henrich. “They just didn’t understand why anyone would sacrifice money to punish someone who had the good luck of getting to play the other role in the game.”
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At the heart of most of that research was the implicit assumption that the results revealed evolved psychological traits common to all humans, never mind that the test subjects were nearly always from the industrialized West.
Edit: The actual papers this article writes about are covered in this post by Ciphergoth from a few years ago.