Postmodern Anthropology Research Articles

Epistemology Contextualized: Social-Scientific Knowledge in a Postpositivist Era

In the production of knowledge about social life, two social contexts come together: the context of investigation, consisting of the social world of the investigator, and the context of explanation, consisting of the social world of the actors who are the subject of study. The nature of, and relationship between, these contexts is imagined in philosophy; managed, rewarded, and sanctioned in graduate seminars, journal reviews, and tenure cases; and practiced in research. Positivism proposed to produce objective knowledge by suppressing the nonlogical and nonobservational aspects of the contexts. Attacks on positivism disputed the effectiveness and rationality of this strategy. Thus “postpositivism” can be understood as a series of attempts to reconstitute the relation between the contexts as the basis for accurate social knowledge. Two of the most important of these attempts—grounded theory and postmodern anthropology—are considered, and a synthesis, which draws from the insights of cultural sociology, is proposed.

The Influence of Johannes Fabian on Claude Lévi-Strauss

In his explicitly theoretical works, Johannes Fabian, one of the key intradisciplinary "affinities" of the author-founder of postmodern anthropology, constructed a specific view of Claude Lévi-Strauss's structuralism, which, as reinterpreted by critical anthropologists, was to fundamentally shape the history of anthropological post-structuralism. In order to explain that the constitution of the subject of research through research itself – i.e. "the invention of the subject of anthropology" – should be accorded the status of the crucial problem of anthropological methodology, Fabian imputed to Lévi-Strauss a rigid and amateurish preconception of research in the natural sciences as inherently positivist. The opposition structuralism/poststructuralism = positivism/postpositivism thus implied was to permanently reshape discussions on realism in critical anthropology, with absurd consequences. The most important of these was the supposedly "antirealist" character of postmodern anthropology, as a direct derivative of critical anthroplogy, which, being aware that reality is created by research, was now seen to play a somehow more ethical and less repressive part in knowledge/power games. The delight at the discovery of this methodological commonplace – that the subject of research is constituted by research itself – might have been but a matter of passing interest, being itself a common enough phenomenon, had not this particular intradisciplinary exchange led to the discrediting of the entire methodological package associated with structuralism. Paradoxically, the retaining of a realistic, radically antipositivist structural method would have made possible the achievement of the cultural-critical ambitions of postmodern anthropology's research program, had not the method been ineptly contaminated by this chain of activist reinterpretation which eventually frustrated the aims it had set out to accomplish.

The Intradisciplinary Affinities of Postmodern Anthropology Part I

The paper offers an alternative interpretation of the genesis of the literary turn in anthropology, as an "interim solution" in the context of the ideological incorrectness of radical anti-colonial theories in a liberal democracy. Critical anthropology in the 1960s and 1970s drew considerable inspiration from reformational currents in neo-Marxist sociology and social philosophy, arousing ideological opposition among the numerous participants of methodological debates. This opposition would prove crucial for their subsequent modest development. This activistic ideological ballast actually slowed down the development of potent externalist analyses of the social determination of anthropology and academe in general, leaving room for studies of ethnographic writing. Anticipating, in terms of themes and trends, "nonmethodological" solutions to methodological problems, it had a direct effect on the substitution of poetics and contextual reflection for methodological regulation. Thus, paradoxically, extremely externalistically oriented analyses, which attempted to merge ethical, political and methodological debates, reduced the methodological focus of the disciplinary community from issues of research objectivity and the reliability of ethnographic records to issues concerning style and the writing of anthropology. In this context, debates on relativism, realism, representation, authority and reflexivity, typical of 1980s postmodern anthropology, have become a socially acceptable alternative to the critical and neo-Marxist anthropology of Afro-Americans, feminists or of the otherwise oppressed/studied when they in turn become nativistic anthropologists. The "literary turn" in postmodern anthropology is generally interpreted as an externalist critique of traditional ethnographic realism, offering an ethical and political interpretation of reflexivity as per se more correct than traditional positivist ethnography.

James Clifford's Influence on Bronislaw Malinowski

Drawing on the explanation already offered for the confusion of positivism with realism in the epistemological imagination of the author and founder of postmodern anthropology, the paper analyzes the moral implications of dealing with problems characteristic of the philosophy of science by literary-theoretical means. The transdisciplinary migration of "realism" from literary theory to social science methodology has produced a whole new history of anthropology. The history of pre-postmodern anthropology constructed in this manner can be said to fit the register of some sort of comparative-cultural theory of retroactive moral judgement, complementing postmodern anthropology as a general theory of writing by political subjects, so that the theoretical-methodological dilemmas of postmodern anthropology do not constitute proof of the legitimacy of a holistic interpretation of the discipline’s founders’ intentions, but rather lead to neo-pyrrhonic, formalistic endeavours to uphold, by respecting academic trappings, the academic authority of the discipline whose subject, method and purpose, as a rule, even colleagues from adjacent departments for various reasons fail to understand. In the paper, evidence for this is derived from Clifford's writing of Malinowski, and the moral implications of the unfortunate analogy between the writing of political subjects and the writing of disciplinary founders are followed through. The paper then goes on to explain that the critique of the possibilities of misuse, particularly through political instrumentalization, of anthropological fictions as evidence of Others did not have to come at the cost of sacrificing the semblance of continuity in the establishment of anthropology as a proper academic discipline.

If only Derrida missed that flight...

Taking into account recent critiques of “underdevelopment”, “positivism”, “methodological backwardness” and other failings attributed to so-called “American Anthropology” by some of the authors from the Belgrade Structural-semiotic School of Anthropology of Folklore, I analyse the context in which colleagues and students may be tempted to explain common sense political connection between polyphone ethnography, neo-romanticism and nationalism as counter-intuitive history of the discipline.
 I already pointed that the important transformative differences in the attitudes towards structuralism between European anthropologists, especially Belgrade Structural-semiotic School of Anthropology of Folklore and so called “American Anthropology”, are the consequence of a pure coincidence – the fact that French structuralism and French poststructuralism were launched simultaneously at the American interdisciplinary intellectual scene (“Theory”) at the same conference. This ironic concurrence would not be much more than one entertaining episode for students, historians of anthropology and historians of ideas, if there were no attempts (more and more frequent and increasingly fluently articulated) to compare different intellectual traditions as they were elements of the same unilineal evolution of the discipline. Belgrade Structural-semiotic School (further called only SS) and especially its spiritus movens and most prominent representative Prof. Kovačević started in recent years to criticise some “American Anthropology” measuring its academic “achievement” (the author’s term) in comparative perspective and taking as an analytical unit uncritically generalized traditions marked with a single term of “postmodern anthropology” on the one hand, and “anthropology” on the other.
 Belgrade SS School did develop globally original, although badly promoted and never fully used, battery for the synchronic analysis of the folklore phenomena, but this was done only after Leach, Needham, Schneider and representatives of ethnoscience and cognitive anthropology had already adapted Levi-Strauss’s ideas about mind and science to ethnographic phenomenology. Transformation of Levi-Strauss’s analysis and limited success of its adaptation to the analysis of phenomena that usually concern anthropology happened simultaneously with the development of the critique of structuralism as a theory of culture in the American academic scene. This proves a theory that there is at least one “Atlantic split”, analogue to that in philosophy, more than it makes a relevant context for measuring of the comparative ’academic achievements’ of the specific and unconnected disciplinary traditions.
 Indirectly, this paper explains that Levi-Strauss’s work has contradictory functions in the history of ideas in anthropology, serving as a starting point for ‘postmodern’ neo-romantic and positivistic critique of imperial realism (in USA), as well as ‘enlightened’, realistic and anti-tribal critique of ethnology as positivistic, nationalistic and national science (in Serbia). In this paper, special emphasis is placed on the local context in which structuralism as a founding discourse of anthropology is opposed to ethnology as national prose. As such it had completely different role in comparison to structuralism in a) the history of American anthropology and b) in the history of interdisciplinary/postmodern Theory.

Postmodern Anthropology and Its Educational Implications

Postmodern Anthropology and Its Educational Implications

Writing in the San/d: Autoethnography among Indigenous Southern Africans (review)

Reviewed by: Writing in the San/d: Autoethnography among Indigenous Southern Africans Megan Biesele (bio) and Robert K. Hitchcock (bio) Keyan G. Tomaselli , ed. Writing in the San/d: Autoethnography among Indigenous Southern Africans. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2007. 190 pp. Paper, $29.95. The Writing in the San/d anthology is an intriguing experiment in collaborative methods and so is quite apt for inclusion in this first volume of Collaborative Anthropologies. It is important both as a device to raise consciousness about the human side of anthropological research and as a challenge to some of the more traditional modes of ethnographic writing. Editor Keyan Tomaselli has been for some years gathering his students in Culture, Communication, and Media Studies (CCMS) at the University of Kwazulu Natal (Durban, South Africa) and taking them, along with members of his own family, to research sites in South Africa, Botswana, and Namibia to interact with San people. The interactions of this loosely defined research group with San communities and individuals have been more or less informal, but at the same time they have been concerned quite fixedly with the mediation, representation, and phenomenology of Ethnographic Encounter, writ large. Thus the activity of this group of researchers sits squarely [End Page 201] within postmodern anthropology. Many readers of this new journal will know that Kalahari research has been one of the major loci where the postmodern and earlier approaches to ethnography have gone head to head. The "Great Kalahari Debate" is still going on, and Tomaselli's group of collaborators is carrying some of the current salient strands of argument. The offerings in the book stem from trips to two San areas in South Africa and one each in Namibia and Botswana. They range across journeys of personal discovery, methodological experiments and refinements, and the conundrums of cross-cultural representation. The writers vary from a student of sheltered background making her first trip out of town, through more experienced students, to Tomaselli himself, who has traveled the Kalahari roads for decades and has thought deeply about representations of, by, and with San people in media ranging from film to oral poetry. Fresh insights abound in the collection, touching on the role of anthropologists, development workers, and other outsiders as they may affect myth reinforcement about the San; exploring the role of market relations in the commodification of culture; and asking hard questions about ways in which grassroots critique may reach and influence the larger structures in which San communities, often feeling voiceless and powerless, are embedded today. This said, we want to make a few suggestions for the anthology authors to consider. We assume the main purpose of Writing in the San/d is to improve communication among several stakeholders in the San's future, including, beyond the San themselves, relevant nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and government entities, academics, and a public wishing to get beyond romantic stereotypes. If so, it would seem that attention to the cultures of communication of the various parties to the desired amelioration would be the best avenue to progress. Yet it must be said that many of the articles in the anthology neglect scholarly conventions—even on the level of spelling and grammar—in a way that is bound to make scholars feel disregarded. Each author also seems to find it necessary to criticize the "hundreds of " previous researchers and NGO workers with indiscriminate assurance, many times in ignorance of the facts of various situations. Worst, the lively San themselves, and their often heroic efforts to make their communities sustainable, are too often given short shrift in this book and emerge as passive recipients of both aid and oppression. [End Page 202] We do not for a moment think that it was the intention of this group of authors to thwart the purpose of furthering communication. Perhaps it was their very focus on their own encounter experiences that caused them to do so in many ways with this book. For one thing, the ethnographic term clan is quite loosely used, which does not seem a good decision for a book whose title claims to valorize autoethnography. For another, the awkward "San/d" in the title is only awkwardly...

What Anthropological Reflexivity Is/Was All About? A Methodological Formalization

In this study, I suggest that reflexivity in anthropology can be viewed as a coordinative definition that helped anthropology survive its three crises – the crisis of ethnographic representation, the crisis of scientific realism, and the crisis of anthropological authority. In addition, reflexivity, in a specific sense, can be taken as a substitute for experiment, a subsititute even better than com­parative studies, and can thus help fulfill the long dream of consolidating an­thropology on firm scientific grounds (a dream I believe is, though, no longer necessary).
 This text should be understood as a part of a series of studies that strive towards the methodological formalization of supposedly formalization-resis­tant concepts of postmodern anthropology. In reality, reflexive anthropology became postmodern science only by admitting to be experimental art, but the question is who would understand and, more importantly, finance and apply this concept? The incorporation of reflexivity into the core of anthropology enabled it to finally achieve the status of science, in the most conservative and general methodological sense. Therefore, the anti-postmodern frustration pre­sent in some relatively recent debates, examples of which we can see in this volume, is neither methodologically nor pragmatically founded. Reflexivity can only be useful, not harmful to the discipline, even from the standpoint of traditional, problem-applicative concepts of method. The only remaining as­signment is to reformulate it so it could be applied by methodological tradi­tionalists as well.

Pilgrims of Love

Pnina Werbner’s Pilgrims of Love, a truly exceptional book in several importantways, is the result of some eleven years of fieldwork in Britain andPakistan. While the topic, understanding a transnational Sufi cult, is quiteconventional within the discipline of anthropology, the time span in which theresearch was conceived and conducted is perhaps one wherein anthropology began to question seriously even its most taken-for-granted truths. Thismakes the final product anything but conventional.The author makes very clear her position as an anthropologist and thedifficulties she experienced as a western Jewish female academic writingabout a Pakistani, or second-generation Pakistani, predominantly Muslimmale practitioner’s perspective. Her honesty about the nature of her fieldexperience, the classic nature of the research itself within the canon ofanthropological literature, and her assessment of what she calls “the limitsof postmodern anthropology” (pp. 14-15, 291-302) add a certain depth ofsubstance to the discipline’s ongoing discussion of the subject-object relationship.This text is an important contribution to the body of literaturewithin the anthropology of religion and Islam, comparative studies of Islamicmovements, transnationalism, and, in general, to students and scholars ofPakistan and South Asia ...

Workers in the New Economy: Transformation as Border Crossing

In this article, I seek to make an intervention in debates between psycho‐logical and postmodern anthropology by engaging with the theme of border crossing. I argue that the theme of the border is one that fundamentally instantiates a separation between interior and exterior with respect to subjectivity, itself a funda‐mental transformation and a painful and difficult border. This is related to a Cartesian distinction critiqued in this article. How the distinction between interior and exterior may be transcended is discussed in relation to examples of transformation from the crossing of class borders to the production and regulation of workers in a globalized and neoliberal economy. I begin with reference to postwar transformations of class with its anxious borders and go on to think about changes in the labor market and how these demand huge transformations that tear apart communities, destroy work‐places, and sunder the sense of safety and stability that those gave. Advanced liberalism or neoliberalism brings with it a speeding up of the transformations of liberalism in which subjects are constantly invoked as self‐contained, with a trans‐portable self that must be produced through the developmental processes of personality and rationality. This self must be carried like a snail carries a shell. It must be coherent yet mutable, fixed yet multiple and flexible. But this view of the subject covers over the many connections that make subjectivity possible. I conclude by ask‐ing what it would mean to rethink this issue of the production of safe spaces beyond an essentialist psychological conception of only one mother child space, separated from the social world, as having the power to produce feelings of safety? I end the article with an argument for a relational approach to subjectivity and sociality. [subjectivity, relationality, neoliberalism, workers, class]

Surviving the dragnet: ‘special interest’ detainees in the US after 9/11

Following the 9/11 attacks in the US, thousands of Muslim, South Asian and Middle Eastern men were detained by the FBI, police and immigration officers and held in various prisons in New York and New Jersey. The effect of these detentions on individuals, their families and the wider community is here documented. The purpose of this incarceration, which often endured for months without charges being brought, was not to ensure greater security, but to carry out surveillance on and intimidate what had been designated, via an official and popular discourse of anti-Muslim racism, a ‘suspect community’. While postmodern anthropology may consider human rights part of an ‘outmoded’ discourse, the experience of these detainees proves its continued relevance.

"The ideal ethnographer"

This article is conceived within the scientific project "Anthropology in the 20th Century: Theoretical and Methodological Achievements". Focusing on the the disciplinary debates and critique around Millennium, this first article in a series offers a preliminary redefinition of some of the basic anthropological concepts: ethnography, ethnographer and informant, as used in pre-postmodern theory of ethnography. Critics interpreted postmodern anthropology as a strong form of relativism that is both epistemologically self-refuting and socially irresponsible. Much credit for the resulting turmoil goes to "postmodernists" themselves, as they failed to articulate precisely in what way their project rejects the traditional concept of regulative methodology, and what their reinterpretation of relativist conceptions of truth, authority, reflexivity, objectivity, interpretation and representation is. The critics dwelled heavily on the notion of incompleteness, vagueness and methodological irrelevance of postmodern criticism in anthropology, largely due to the fact that it never put forward clear definitions of the basic concepts it aims to pursue or to relinquish. As opposed to this received view, the article argues that at least one of the basic concepts used by postmodernists can be methodologically formalized: it is that of "traditional" or the "realist ethnographer". By construing hypothetical "ideal ethnographer", the article formalizes background theory of ethnography against which the postmodern project raised.

Semiotics of culture and New Polish Ethnology

The paper deals with the contemporary state of semiotic ethnology in Poland (connected with New Polish Ethnology group), its internal and external influences, its specifics, subjects and its reaction to the other theoretical propositions. The “neotribe” of New Polish Ethnology was established by few younger scholars, ethnologists in the early 1980s, in an opposition to the dominant stream of positivistic ethnology. Today they have become classics of Polish anthropology, masters that have educated a new generation of their students, and lead some anthropological institutes. The most inspiring set of theories that influenced the group and its heirs was taken from Soviet semiotics of culture (Lotman, Uspensky, Toporov, Ivanov), and French structural-semiotics (Levi-Strauss, Barthes), but there are some individual differences also. On that basis they have developed a specific scope, aim and methods of interpretation with as its key terms myth and mythical thinking. They have explained many cultural events (relation we-others, body image, commercials, and anthropology itself) within the framework of mythical thinking, making it the most productive and attractive frame of interpretation within Polish humanities and social sciences. In the 1990s they had to face critical ethnography, deconstruction and postmodern anthropology and they did it with perfect flexibility that even strengthened their project, because the potential of reflexivity and self-consciousness lied within semiotics from its beginning.

Participant Objectivation*

Scientific reflexivity stands opposed to the narcissistic reflexivity of postmodern anthropology as well as to the egological reflexivity of phenomenology in that it endeavours to increase scientificity by turning the most objectivist tools of social science not only onto the private person of the enquirer but also, and more decisively, onto the anthropological field itself and onto the scholastic dispositions and biases it fosters and rewards in its members. ‘Participant objectivation’, as the objectivation of the subject and operations of objectivation, and of the latter's conditions of possibility, produces real cognitive effects as it enables the social analyst to grasp and master the pre‐reflexive social and academic experiences of the social world that he tends to project unconsciously onto ordinary social agents. This does not mean that anthropologists must put nothing of themselves into their work, quite the contrary. Examples drawn from the author's own research (with special focus on field enquiries carried out concurrently in the far‐away colony of Kabylia and in his home village in Béarn) show how idiosyncratic personal experiences methodically subjected to sociological control constitute irreplaceable analytic resources, and that mobilizing one's social past through self‐socio‐analysis can and does produce epistemic as well as existential benefits.

Entering into Otherness: The Postmodern Critique of the Subject and Karl Rahner's Theological Anthropology

AbstractThe critique of the subject and subjectivity in postmodern theory serves also as as critique of the modern turn to the subject in theology. After reviewing that critique in contemporary literary and rhetorical theory, this article examines the concept of the subject in Karl Rahner's theological anthropology. This article argues that both postmodern theory and Rahner's anthropology suggest alternatives to the autonomous subject, and that Rahner's view can provide a description of an authentic, semi-permeable, and historically mediated subject.

Essays in Refusal: Pre-Theoretical Commitments in Postmodern Anthropology and Critical Race Theory

Essays in Refusal: Pre-Theoretical Commitments in Postmodern Anthropology and Critical Race Theory

Representation and Postmodern Anthropology

Representation and Postmodern Anthropology

On postmodern liberal conservatism

In his most recent works, John Gray attempts to achieve two things: to refute the universalist tendencies of modern liberalism and to propose an alternative in the form of postmodern liberal conservatism. While largely supportive of the first, this paper is critical of the second undertaking, which seems a dubious attempt to synthesize postmodern liberal anthropology with a conservative conception of the social order.

From Postmodern Anthropology to Deconstructive Ethnography

The social sciences have recently exhibited renewed interest in ethnography while traditional anthropology has been struggling with the challenges of postmodernism. This paper considers the theoretical implications of the potential convergence of these strands, with particular reference to the ethnography of organizations. Postmodernism is seen to affect ethnography by problematizing the processes of description, reference, and the establishment of authority in ethnographic texts. It offers, rather than a "scientific" model, a "literary" model of such texts in which description is an active construction rather than a neutral recording of the other's world. Ostensive reference becomes displaced by evocation, the single authorial voice by the "heteroglossia" of many contributing voices. Unfortunately, there is a tendency for the processes of interpretation to be abandoned to a free play of unlimited signification in which any and all meanings are possible, which jettisons rigor and with it critical acerbity. This paper argues for the development of deconstructive ethnography grounded in the work of Jacques Derrida. This ethnographic praxis would demystify social and organizational actions by revealing their inevitable and ever-present internal contradictions without resorting to an externally contrived theoretical or moral standard. It would realize its emancipatory potential through "self-deconstruction."

On the Possibility of a Post-Modern Anthropology

On the Possibility of a Post-Modern Anthropology