The Paradoxical Legacy of Postmodernism

Anthropologists, paradoxically including those most often identified by others as postmodernists, persistently have refused to identify themselves as such. The label usually is applied by detractors as dismissal without nuance; it attributes to the adherents of so-called postmodernism demonic efforts to undermine the authority and credibility of their own discipline, especially in its aspirations. Despite such uncompromising critiques, however, the mainstream tenor of anthropology is not as it was before the advent of postmodernism, usually arbitrarily dated to the twin bibles of George Marcus, James Clifford and Michael Fischer and their associates in 1986 (Clifford and Marcus 1986; Marcus and Fischer 1986). Many, perhaps the majority, of us are grateful for some for the changes while lamenting others and declining to buy fully into the new dispensation. Like TS. Eliot's Magi, many of the partial converts are not entirely sure what to do with themselves when they return home - has the world really changed or has it not?A quarter century has passed, perhaps time for the dust to settle, sufficient time and distance that we can now begin to take stock. What have we gained? Has the gain come with too great a cost? Was it a scientific revolution offering a new paradigm statement? If so, has it evolved into what Thomas Kuhn called normal science? My own reflections run along the lines of there is this. ..but then there is that... It seems clear that we need to question our interpretations and that we should not expect internal consensus; but this is a very postmodernist approach and perhaps a prejudgment. Whereas many of us are challenged by some of this stuff, others very definitely and vocally are not. There is minimal agreement about the exemplars of postmodernist anthropology or about the value of particular ethnographies and theoretical works. I am inclined to think that this is healthy, that the debates enrich our work regardless of our ultimate judgments about postmodernism, whatever that may mean to different people.The 1986 prophets of the new era, primarily contributors to Writing Culture: The Politics and Poetics of Ethnography, called for innovative methods of conceptualizing the work of anthropologists as writers of ethnography that would foreground the agency and dialogic capacity of the ethnographer. They called for new experimental forms of interpretation drawn from literary studies that would create new genres of writing, as though no anthropologist had ever considered such issues before. Although the exemplars cited in 1986 were few in number, thin in actual experimentation and oblivious to work published before the 1980s, the core contributors must have been onto something because there are far more experimental ethnographies that one could cite now. Many take up the challenge to incorporate politics and poetics into the ethnographic enterprise. As a frequent adjudicator for the Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing of the Society for Humanistic Anthropology, a constituent section of the very mainstream American Anthropological Association, I can attest to the literary quality as well ethnographic depth of much of the writing being done by Canadian and American colleagues. Much of this work could not have been done in the same way without the postmodern turn.Nonetheless, methods of qualitative analysis have been conventional in the writing of ethnography since Malinowski, with postmodernism's much favoured history taking prize of place among them. Malinowski's imponderabilia of everyday life and even Franz Boas' native point of view may be weighed differently today within the anthropologist's toolkit, but they have been there all along. Despite continuities, however, ethnographies look different these days: we put words in quotation marks to problematize the absence of shared meaning underlying their usage; we invent new words or hyphenate old ones to emphasize their etymologies or simultaneous but alternative senses; we attribute parity of analytic thought to consultants - promoted at least in rhetoric from being merely research subjects - who use quite different terms to express concepts that we choose to reword in anthropological theory. …

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