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Postmodernism

Much characterizes the postmodern agenda. Of particular relevance to anthropology is the rejection by postmodernism of modernist assumptions of singular, universal truths, issues of 'otherness', and elaborations of culture. It challenges the kinds of metanarratives popular in all branches of academia for explaining the way the world works. In the context of anthropology, this means the rejection of paradigms, such as structuralism, functionalism, evolutionism, etc. that inform a particular way of looking at the world. In postmodern terms truth is interpretable, multiple, and contingent across perspectives. While modernist writing assumes detachment, scientific neutrality, and rationalism, postmodernism assumes interpretation.

Cultural anthropology was most influenced by the postmodernism developed in literature and philosophy. Two principle components of this approach were self-reflexivity and the construction of knowledge. Such concerns continue to play themselves out at all levels of the anthropological enterprise: question formation, data collection, data interpretation, research techniques, and the production of ethnography. From a postmodernist stance, all are argued to be value-laden processes and a product of cultural biases. Postmodernism was a call, in essence, to do the anthropology of anthropology. Only a minority of anthropologists would identify themselves as post-modernist but a moderate post-modern position has offered significant insights and theoretical developments into contemporary anthropology.

Consequently, anthropology is said to have gone through a "crisis of representation." Anthropologists are in a problematic role acting as authorities on "others" and "otherness". Ethnography has a tradition of claiming to be holistic and "emic" (written from the natives point of view). Postmodern-based critiques have shed reflexive light on the production of ethnography (writing culture) as something based on a given set of experiences by a particular ethnographer, at a given moment in time, and stressing the selection process inherent in ethnographic texts which determines who speaks, who gets heard and in whose words. Postmodernism argues that the objective and neutral study of the Other is impossible, as the other is always in relation to the self. The postmodern stance pushes us to ask questions about how and why certain forms of knowledge are generated and legitimated and questions how particular forms of knowledge become norm. Much of this is related to the politics of research as activities that are not free of self-interest nor pursued in an objective vaccuum. Research is always a part of particular socio-political-economic contexts that act on both our questions and answers. As this related to notions of culture, anthropology has witnessed a growing literature on the politics of culture and the utility of concept of culture.

Today, aside from providing an important "anthropology of anthropology" and generating various experimental texts/ethnographies, the postmodern movement has also pushed some important theoretical approaches having to do with notions of power distribution and representation. In particular, discourse analysis (most widely associated with Michel Foucault's work) and the exploration of constructed identities and histories (tied to postcolonial literature, sub-altern studies, nationalism, ethnicity, and even more recently, globalization). It should not go without saying that postmodernism has been very controversial in anthropology and has certainly produced some critics, with some anthropologists still defending anthropology as a science.

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