The term ‘modernism’ has its intellectual foundations in the study of literature and the visual arts. There it usually refers to a broad cultural movement characterized by a spirit of constant challenge to received forms—modernism opposes itself to the figurative tradition in the visual arts and to realism and naturalism in literature. It is the source of the ‘modern’ in ‘modern art’, and its exemplars are Picasso and T.S.Eliot, Schoenberg and Le Corbusier, Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein, Charlie Parker and Ornette Coleman. As some of these names suggest, modernism in this sense is a movement of a relatively small avant-garde, usually working in the rarified atmosphere of elite *culture. Moreover, its proponents were far from unanimous in their celebrations of the modern: many were politically conservative, nostalgic for a lost world of tradition, although some (like Le Corbusier) saw their own work as a positive force for social change.
It is fair to say that no adequate account exists of anthropology’s relationship with modernism in this sense (although Manganaro 1990 provides the beginnings of such an account). On the one hand, the empirical concerns of the founding giants (*Malinowski, *Boas and his circle) overlap with a wider interest in ‘primitivism’ among modernist writers and artists of the time: Picasso’s use of African masks, D.H.Lawrence’s interest in the Native American rituals of the American Southwest, Max Ernst’s collection of Hopi dolls (Torgovnick 1990).
On the other hand, anthropology’s own cultural productions—*ethnographies—were characterized by stylistic conventions such as naturalism and realism, modes usually associated with modernism’s nineteenth-century predecessors. Formal experimentation in modes of representation, the defining feature of literary modernism, is usually taken to be the defining feature of anthropological postmodernism. (As all this probably indicates, this is not the most coherent field in the history of ideas.)
Without postmodernism, it is quite likely that these problems of definition and periodization would never have arisen. But from the point of view of the most grandiose accounts of post-modernism, modernism has a much broader meaning than that discussed so far. It is no longer merely a particular phase in Western high culture, but can be taken to denote the whole era of grandes histoires (or †metanarratives in the clumsy translator’s rendition of †Lyotard’s ‘big stories’), what has come to be known as the ‘Enlightenment project’. This version of modernism would collect together all attempts at the application of universal reason to the understanding of human affairs, along with all attempts at planned intervention in the cause of human emancipation. It may be difficult to think of modernism in this sense as an ethnographic problem, but there are signs of a new anthropology of modernism (as apart from a modernist anthropology) in recent studies of architecture and urban space in colonial Morocco (Rabinow 1989) and contemporary Brazil (Holston 1989).
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