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 *reflexivity 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 post-modernist 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 post-modernism 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 pre-postmodern 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 *Lévi-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 post-modernism 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.
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