Tristees tropes: post-modern anthropologists encounter the other and discover themselves

Abstract

This essay presents a critical review of recent work in postmodern anthropology, especially that published in Clifford and Marcus' Writing Culture and Marcus and Fischer's Anthropology as Cultural Critique. The essay concentrates on three problems in particular: the postmodernists conflation of ethnography and fiction in their critique of ‘realism’ their conceptualisation of ‘dialogic’ writing; and their construction of ethnographic ‘collages’. In our view the postmodern preoccupation with genres of representation has obstructed a serious consideration of the social, political, cultural and individual contexts in which ethnographic knowledge is produced and consumed. If anthropological interpretation is constructing a reading of what happens, then to divorce it from what happens-from what, in this time or that place, specific people say, what they do, what is done to them, from the whole vast business of the world-is to divorce it from its applications and render it vacant. A good interpretation of anything-a poem, a person, a history, a ritual, an institution, a society-takes us into the heart of that of which it is an interpretation. When it does not do that, but leads us instead somewhere else-into an admiration of its own elegance, of its author’s cleverness, or of the beauties of Euclidean order-it may have its intrinsic charms; but it is something else than what the task at hand… calls for. (Geertz, 1973a: 18) To comment, to reflect, to meditate-we conjoin them easily-is etymologically to remember, think, imagine, study, to edit something, to bend back on it, perhaps to become interwined with it in some (shall I say?) healing fashion. To comment then-to reflect or meditate-is to adopt a particular vantage point on something, to create it through remembrance, imagination, thought, and study, to intertwine with, to bend back on, to measure it, to look after it, to edit it, therapeutically. (Crapanzano, 1987:179)

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