Chapter 15:
The Contemporary Anthropological Moment
© 2014 Mark Moberg
• Since the postmodern turn in the 1980s, many anthropologists have grown
skeptical of claims of objectivity in understanding culture. This profound
skepticism toward the claims of science figured heavily in the work of the
European (mostly French) philosophers and social theorists that influenced
postmodern anthropologists. Their arguments were also anticipated in the work
of Clifford Geertz, who argued in Works and Lives that anthropological texts
are constructed in ways that convey the author’s ethnographic authority and
objectivity, notwithstanding the ethnographers’ biases and partial knowledge
of the cultures they set out to study.
• Many postmodern social theorists have worked within the field of
hermeneutics, the branch of philosophy that concerns itself with the
interpretation of meaning. Rejecting the Enlightenment notion that reason and
objectivity can guide our understanding of the world, German philosopher
Martin Heidegger claimed that the individual’s knowledge of the world is
always conditioned by his or her culture, identity and social position. Jacques
Derrida, a follower of Heidegger, claimed that all cultures construct worlds of
meaning that are impenetrable to outsiders. When anthropologists approach
culture from an “objective,” science-based tradition, they force native
meanings into essentially foreign conceptual categories that cannot capture
© 2014 Mark Moberg
their original intent.
• Few postmodern philosophers have had as great an influence in
anthropology as Michel Foucault, whose reformulation of the concept of
power has had widespread influence among contemporary ethnographers.
Unlike Marx, who conceived of power as differential control of economic
resources and the coercive force wielded by the state, Foucault argued that
power is also exercised through discourses of knowledge, specifically in
terms of claims to “truth.” In contemporary society, this takes the form of a
command of the language of science, which is deployed by corporations,
institutions, and bureaucracies to control those who lack a command of the
language of science or the requisite professional credentials. In Madness
and Civilization, Foucault showed how asylums, hospitals, prisons, and
other “total” institutions control and subjugate their residents through their
“expert” ability to diagnose, “treat,” and “rehabilitate” those under their
control, while punishing residents who resist the demands of bureaucracy.
Because western institutions have typically been controlled by white males,
their ability to deploy the language of science has tended to disempower
minorities, women, and colonized people. In short, it is power, wealth, and
privileged status, rather than “evidence,” that determines what is “true.”
When carried into anthropology, these arguments are reflected in
ethnographer Stephen Tyler’s claim that “reason is simply the means by
which we justify the lies we tell…”
© 2014 Mark Moberg
• There is no single “postmodern” school in anthropology, although it would
be safe to say that all anthropologists who identify with this approach share
a common skepticism toward claims of scientific objectivity. Most
postmodernists would also agree that ethnographic accounts must evidence
greater concern with how they represent the “Other,” the colonized people
and minorities traditionally studied by anthropologists. As a start toward
more sensitive rendering of anthropology’s traditional subjects, postmodern
ethnographers emphatically reject any “totalizing discourse” or
metanarrative that frames cultural practices in ways that are inconsistent
with local knowledge. This means that every theoretical perspective
adopted by past anthropologists, whether functionalism, cultural ecology,
Marxism, French structuralism, or Freudian psychological anthropology,
are seen as manifestations of privileged, western, scientific claims to
knowledge.
© 2014 Mark Moberg
• A second priority of many postmodern anthropologists has been to reject the
rhetorical strategies of past ethnographers who fashioned their writing to make
them appear as objective observers. Because anthropologists cannot attain a
complete understanding of a culture and every one of its members, they should
avoid the generalizing tendencies of the past. Lila Abu-Lughod claims that
ethnography should be about “telling stories,” relating only those events that
the anthropologist has personally seen or heard. Similarly, postmodernists
endorse a “reflexive” anthropology, foregrounding the experience and
perspectives of the fieldworker so that the reader knows which biases he or she
may encounter when reading the ethnographic account.
• Finally, postmodernists feel the need to confront the relationship between their
discipline and colonial hierarchies of power. Different anthropologists have
addressed this issue in different ways; indeed, this may be among the most
contentious issue among postmodernists. If the anthropologist originates from a
traditionally colonizing society (e.g. the US or UK), and they make the people
of a formerly colonized society their “subjects,” are they recreating a colonial
hierarchy? For such anthropologists, traditional ethnography is so fraught with
colonialist implications that they reject it altogether. Others, such as Nancy
Scheper-Hughes, contend that such beliefs prevent anthropologists from the
important work of bearing witness to the oppression and social suffering that
persist in such places.
© 2014 Mark Moberg
• The postmodern turn in anthropology has not been without its numerous
critics, many of whom regard postmodern assumptions and “solutions” to
the “crisis of representation” as ultimately nihilistic and damaging to
anthropology’s reputation within the social sciences.
• Roy D’Andrade offers a withering criticism of anthropologists who resist
generalization in favor of “telling stories.” This tactic, he says, deceptively
advances an argument and a generalization about a culture while denying
that that is its purpose. Why, he asks, would we choose to tell one story in
place of another if we did not feel that the anecdote reflects a broader social
process?
• Critics have also argued that postmodern assertions about the subjectivity
of all knowledge are self-refuting: if all claims to knowledge are culturally
constructed and science is but one of many discourses of knowledge, then
why should we accept postmodernists’ claims as valid? Acknowledging
that the anthropologist can attain only a partial knowledge of a culture,
Marvin Harris argued that “science is less skeptical than postmodernism
only in its refusal to concede that one partial truth is as good as any other.
Science…refuses to accept all partial truths as equally truthful.”
© 2014 Mark Moberg
• Marxist theorists David Harvey and Thomas Patterson raise concerns about
the disciplinary and diversionary politics arising from what have become
very divisive arguments among scholars. Harvey lauds the postmodern
concern about representation as its most liberating quality. Yet he also
notes that our relationships to the Other are mediated by colonial and
capitalist forms of labor control, necessitating the kind of political
economic analysis that postmodernists reject as a “metanarrative.”
Similarly, Patterson faults postmodernism for growing factional divisions
among anthropologists, who turn their critical gaze inward toward their
colleagues and away from the momentous changes taking place in the
global political economy in recent decades.
© 2014 Mark Moberg
• Finally, a number of scholars have pointed to the disturbingly amoral
positions adopted by major figures in postmodern philosophy as evidence
that when all “voices” are accorded equal respect, it necessarily implies
that noxious and repressive arguments will also be given their due. Hence,
Martin Heidegger, whose arguments were so influential in the field of
hermeneutics, joined the Nazi party and oversaw the expulsion of Jewish
faculty from his university. His rejection of science and reason led him to
embrace “the inner truth and greatness of Nazism.” Another influential
scholar, Paul De Man, not only broadcast anti-Semitic propaganda for the
Nazis, but concealed his wartime past from US immigration authorities and
his colleagues at Yale. It was the Italian fascist Benito Mussolini who best
expressed why a position of epistemological relativism lends itself to those
who embrace oppressive ideologies: “From the fact that all ideologies are
of equal value, the modern relativist deduces that everybody is free to
create for himself his own ideology and to attempt to carry it out with all
possible energy.”
© 2014 Mark Moberg
• In sum: postmodernism has raised some serious and important questions
about the ways in which anthropologists go about their work. There is no
question that it has had a huge impact on anthropological writing and the
degree to which anthropologists are concerned about representing those
whom they write about. Foucault’s arguments about knowledge also help
illuminate the inner workings of bureaucracy and other institutions.
Similarly, the concern of many postmodernists, such as Nancy Scheper
Hughes, with highlighting social suffering and oppression raises important
priorities that were all but impossible to discuss given the former
“objectivist” approach in anthropology. Yet before we can have a moral
impact on the world it is essential to have knowledge about it that is
accurate and evidence-based. In this way, perhaps the scientific concerns
of the past—with their attention to the careful and honest, if not objective,
collection of evidence and the liberating promises of some aspects of
postmodernism may find a fruitful merger in contemporary anthropology.
© 2014 Mark Moberg