Exam 15: The Contemporary Anthropological Moment

Clifford Geertz used the approach of deconstruction to show how past anthropologists employed rhetorical devices in their writing to enhance their ethnographic authority.

Mac Marshall employed the approach of deconstruction to show how Derek Freeman's rhetorical techniques served to undermine his rival Margaret Mead's ethnographic authority on Samoa while enhancing his own.

Anthropologist Roy D'Andrade is critical of those who would "just tell stories" in place of scientific generalization, noting that such anecdotes serve as disguised generalizations anyway.

Hermeneutic philosophers such as Paul De Man and Martin Heidegger are known to have had strongly pro-Nazi sympathies prior to and during World War II.

Scientific anthropologists claim that postmodern assertions about the subjectivity of all knowledge are self-refuting and therefore cannot be logically sustained.

Deconstruction is an interpretive approach that examines how the language, metaphor, or imagery employed in a text reveal an author's unstated assumptions or meanings.

Michel Foucault argues that the claim to command scientific knowledge on the part of bureaucracies, the state and corporations allows them to exercise power over other groups in society.

Some postmodern anthropologists reject ethnographic research entirely in Third World settings because they believe such endeavors recreate colonial hierarchies of power and privilege.

The hermeneutic perspective holds that an individual's knowledge of the world is always conditioned by his or her culture, identity, and social position.

Anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod rejects ethnographic generalizations because, in her view, they "privilege" the anthropologist's claims to knowledge over those of the people they study.