The development of postmodernism in anthropology since the early 1980s has provided a major focus of debate and commentary. While few anthropologists as such have been regarded as seminal in the larger postmodernist field, anthropology in general has been viewed as a particularly sympathetic arena of the human sciences within which to pursue the postmodernist agenda, especially with regard to issues of ‘otherness’, critiques of the programmes of the Enlightenment and elaborations of the notion of culture. Postmodernism has been incorporated in anthropological discourse, yet a ‘postmodern anthropology’ is still inchoate, represented more by critiques of traditional disciplinary shortcomings (and critiques of such critiques) than by a new kind of anthropological praxis (although there is a growing corpus of ‘postmodernist ethnography’; see Marcus 1992).
By some accounts, postmodern anthropology is the culmination of a series of internal critiques (e.g. feminist anthropology, "structural-Marxism, ethnoscience) which — however germane—failed to confront with sufficient reflex-ivity the dilemmas of a field torn between affiliation to the Enlightenment project (science, rationalism, universalism) and affiliation to the diverse constituencies represented in the ethnographic record (Clifford in Clifford and Marcus 1986; di Leonardo 1991). According to this view, a postmodernist critique represents an overdue -and swingeing — reassessment of anthropology tout court, one in which the filtering of exotic otherness through the constructions of social theory is exposed as a literary excursion disguised as scientific reportage. By this reading, anthropology is a representational genre rather than a clearly bounded scientific domain and the rise of postmodernism in general has made possible a more critical self-awareness in the field without necessarily effecting more wide-reaching transformations.
While the postmodern shift in anthropology is part of a larger tendency in cultural criticism, a number of specifically anthropological antecedents are widely cited — the interpretive (Clifford Geertz) and symbolic (David Schneider) approaches, for example — approaches whose continuity from prepostmodern to postmodern phases both validates a traditional anti-scientific strain within anthropology and also — uncomfortably — subverts the idea of ‘postparadigm’ break. Similarly, issues of reflexivity and political positioning raised in critiques of colonialism and Orientalism are no less compelling for having laid down markers before postmodernism came to be viewed as a decisive break.
While there is acknowledgement of some precursors, citation is selective: the contribution of Levi-Strauss (especially with regard to The Savage Mind) is slighted, and the so-called ‘rationality’ debate — which could lay strong claim to having mapped the philosophical parameters of postmodernism within anthropology — is rarely invoked. Significantly, the most unapologetically postmodernist anthropological position is occupied by a major contributor to the now largely discarded ethnoscience approach of the late 1960s, Stephen Tyler.
Part of the reason for the differential visibility of anthropological postmodernist antecedents is — paradoxically, given the frequent claims for a postmodernist Zeitgeist — that within the national traditions mainly represented in the debates — French, British, US — the relationship between anthropology and cultural criticism in general varies significantly. In the US, anthropological postmodernism has been directly implicated in national debates about multiculturalism and the ‘Western civilization’ canon; in France, the anthropological contribution — filtered through structuralism and poststructuralism — has been largely overshadowed by explicitly literary and philosophical debates (although anthropology does not go unmentioned; cf. Lyotard 1984); in Britain, postmodernist debate has fallen within the fiefdoms of social theory and cultural studies. As a result, postmodernism as a pan-anthropological phenomenon is internally differentiated, the different terms of reference being shaped not by anthropology itself, but by its varying roles in national cultural traditions.
The literature
Writing Culture (Clifford and Marcus 1986) was a benchmark publication indicating several possible trajectories for a postmodernist (or critical) anthropology. A major theme in the collection is that anthropology has moved (or should move) from the espousal of scientific ethnography to the study of ethnographic texts themselves. According to Marcus and Fischer (1986) this shift is not only in accord with general tendencies toward a ‘reassessment of dominant ideas across the human sciences’ (1986: 7) (the so-called ‘postparadigm’), but in the specific case of anthropology, the shift marks an increasing preoccupation with issues of contextualization and reflexivity in the face of the declining coherence of metanarrative and grand theory. Where anthropological approaches significantly part company with the general tendencies of ‘post-paradigm’ cultural criticism is in the continued affiliation with peoples and traditions outside the ‘Western’ nexus. The tension generated by anthropology’s dual allegiance has thwarted a hegemonic postmodern outlook: if the field were to relinquish ‘the other’ in the name of a Bau-drillardian ‘implosion of the the hyperreal’ it would have little role to play, except as provider of ethnographic detail.
Marcus and Fischer (1986) and Clifford (1988) also outline the possibilities of a postmodern anthropology and confirm not only the view of the maturing of the expressive qualities of anthropological writing, but also that postmodernism is a synthesis of previous critical postures constrained by their misguided adherence to the certainty of the notion of explanation. Significantly, in a recent collection Marcus (1992) explicitly situates these new tendencies within anthropology as openings into the field of cultural studies.
Postmodernist ethnography
A relatively small number of ethnographies are frequently cited as informed by a postmodernist sensibility ("Taussig, Crapanzano, Shostak, "Rabinow, etc.), yet as Pool has observed (1991), the claims made for an experimental, postmodernist ethnography are often so broad as to include many ‘traditional’ ethnographies (from The Nuer to Naven). Pratt (in Clifford and Marcus 1986) has drawn attention to the traditional use of literary devices in ethnographic writing, drawing particular attention to the restricted use of narrative, a failing which is directly addressed in the ‘experimental’ emphasis on polyvocality. Taussig’s Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man (1987) is among the most celebrated efforts so far, but while invoking the anti-aesthetic markers of a literary postmodernism, he also displays a strong interest in questions of history which are quite in keeping with pre-postmodernist, critical traditions (see Fabian 1983).
Critiques of postmodernist ethnography have largely focused on the way in which attention has shifted from examination of the power relations according to which ‘the other’ has been constructed, to examination of the rhetorical devices and preoccupations of ethnographers themselves. In keeping with this shift toward the examination of anthropological discourse itself, ethnographic attention has also shifted to a new arena, namely cultural domains in the centre (cf. Marcus 1992). The work of members of the Birmingham Centre for Cultural Studies has been particularly influential in this regard, especially that of Paul Willis and Dick Hebdige.
The future of postmodernism in anthropology
Given the strong continuities between pre-post-modern critical anthropology and postmodern anthropology, it could be argued that the ‘post-paradigm’ shift is more imagined than real. The most intense arena of debate, for example, concerning the central (or perhaps only heightened) role of postmodernism in anthropology, is a traditional one: the status of economic and political determinants of anthropological discourse. The critiques of ultra-relativism within postmodern tendencies are similar to those levelled against ‘value-free’ social science decades ago (cf. Hymes 1969) and underscore the political agnosticism which has characterized debates about texts wrenched free from their socio-historical determinants.
In other ways, however, postmodernism in anthropology has established an institutional base which ensures the durability of debates about postmodernism for some time to come. The journal Cultural Anthropology is both ‘the property of a long-established professional society (the AAA)’ (Marcus 1992: ix), and also part of a new constituency represented by such like-minded (if not necessarily anthropological) journals as Representations, Semiotext(e) and Cultural Critique. At the macro-level, the programmatic claims for a new kind of anthropology are emboldened by the nascent field of cultural studies, one which in many ways represents a shift away from the ethnography of exotic others (the historical role of anthropology) to the ethnography of adjacent others (the lumpen and marginal in the core). In this light, postmodernism in anthropology does not merely provide a new theoretical focus in the linear development of the field, but may also be perceived as a threat of larger dimensions, with both traditional and critical concerns of the field gradually dismantled in the name of finding a position in the intellectual division of labour of the ‘postmodern cultural condition’.
Unlike other fields in which postmodernist discussions have set the pace in recent years, anthropological postmodernism has laboured under a distinctive tension, namely that between the ethnographic texts and the fieldwork experiences upon which those texts are based. The strategies according to which the truth of texts is endlessly negotiable — in certain literary versions of poststructuralism and postmodernism, for example — are to some degree blocked by an anthropological praxis in which the (most often disguised) naivety of fieldwork has entailed at least a nod toward a ‘truthful’ rendition in the resulting ethnographic texts.
