Doing the Right Thing in Cross-Cultural RepresentationThe Predicament of Culture.James CliffordWriting Culture.James Clifford , George E. MarcusWorks and Lives.Clifford GeertzAnthropology as Cultural Critique.George E. Marcus , Michael M. J. Fischer

Abstract

Looking back at the and debates that have surrounded anthropology in recent decades, one cannot but notice that the distinctively philosophical contributions have tended to lag behind developments in the discipline itself. There too, it seems, the Owl of Minerva takes flight only at dusk. Thus in the 1960s, as the classical realist paradigm was giving way to structuralist approches inspired by linguistics and interpretive approaches drawing on hermeneutics, the philosophical debate centered on questions of epistemic and instrumental rationality-questions concerning the truth and objectivity of beliefs and the efficacy and efficiency of practices. Comparisons of myth with science and of magic with technology, for example, supplied the principal arguments that Popperians brought against Peter Winch's early efforts to steer the discussion toward questions of meaning and intelligibility.' The emphasis on logical, epistemological, and methodological questions continued into the 1970s but was increasingly combined with a concern for problems of translating and interpreting across different languages, systems of belief, and styles of reasoning.2 In the 1980s problems of interpretation, particularly in the form given them by Quine and Davidson, finally came to dominate the philosphical side of the rationality and relativism debates as well.3 But this was happening just as developments in anthropology were