Critics during the post modern times of ethnography

1. Postmodernism and its
Critics
Subtitle

2. Objective
Identify the leading figures of postmodernism
Identify the critics of the postmodernism

3. Leading Figures

4. Jean Baudrillard (1929 – 2007)
Baudrillard was a sociologist who began
his career exploring the Marxist critique of
capitalism (Sarup 1993: 161). During this phase
of his work he argued that, “consumer objects
constitute a system of signs that differentiate
the population” (Sarup 1993: 162). Eventually,
however, Baudrillard felt that Marxist tenets did
not effectively evaluate commodities, so he
turned to postmodernism. Rosenau labels
Baudrillard as a skeptical postmodernist
because of statements like, “everything has
already happened….nothing new can occur,”
and “there is no real world” (Rosenau 1992: 64,
110).

5. Baudrillard breaks down modernity and postmodernity in an
effort to explain the world as a set of models. He identifies early
modernity as the period between the Renaissance and the Industrial
Revolution, modernity as the period at the start of the Industrial
Revolution, and postmodernity as the period of mass media (cinema
and photography). Baudrillard states that we live in a world of
images, but images that are only simulations. Baudrillard implies that
many people fail to understand this concept that, “we have now moved
into an epoch…where truth is entirely a product of consensus values,
and where ‘science’ itself is just the name we attach to certain modes of
explanation,” (Norris 1990: 169).

6. Jacques Derrida (1930 – 2004)
is identified as a poststructuralist
and a skeptical postmodernist. Much of
his writing is concerned with the
deconstruction of texts and probing the
relationship of meaning between texts
(Bishop 1996: 1270). He observes that “a
text employs its own stratagems against
it, producing a force of dislocation that
spreads itself through an entire system.”
(Rosenau 1993: 120). Derrida directly
attacks Western philosophy’s
understanding of reason. He sees reason
as dominated by “a metaphysics of
presence.”

7. Jacques Derrida (1930 – 2004)
Derrida agrees with structuralism’s insight, that meaning is
not inherent in signs, but he proposes that it is incorrect to infer
that anything reasoned can be used as a stable and timeless
model (Appignanesi 1995: 77). According to Norris, “He tries to
problematize the grounds of reason, truth, and knowledge…he
questions the highest point by demanding reasoning for
reasoning itself,” (1990: 199).

8. Michel Foucault (1926 – 1984)
Foucault was a French philosopher
who attempted to show that what most
people think of as the permanent truths
of human nature and society actually
change throughout the course of
history. While challenging the
influences of Marx and Freud, Foucault
postulated that everyday practices
enabled people to define their identities
and systemize knowledge. 2010: 272).

9. Michel Foucault (1926 – 1984)
Foucault is considered a postmodern theorist precisely because his work upset the
conventional understanding of history as a chronology of inevitable facts.
Alternatively, he depicted history as existing under layers of suppressed and
unconscious knowledge in and throughout history. These under layers are the codes
and assumptions of order, the structures of exclusion that legitimate the epistemes
by which societies achieve identities (Appignanesi 1995: 83). In addition to these
insights, Foucault’s study of power and its shifting patterns is one of the foundations
of postmodernism. Foucault believed that power was inscribed in everyday life to
the extent that many social roles and institutions bore the stamp of power,
specifically as it could be used to regulate social hierarchies and structures. These
could be regulated though control of the conditions in which “knowledge,” “truth,”
and socially accepted “reality” were produced (Erikson and Murphy 2010: 272).

10. Clifford Geertz (1926 – 2006)
was a prominent anthropologist
best known for his work with religion.
Closely identified with interpretive
anthropology, he was somewhat
ambivalent about anthropological
postmodernism. He divided it into two
movements that both came to fruition in
the 1980s.

11. Clifford Geertz (1926 – 2006)
The first movement revolved around essentially literary matters: authorship,
genre, style, narrative, metaphor, representation, discourse, fiction, figuration,
persuasion; the second, essentially entailed adopting political stances: the social
foundations of anthropological authority, the modes of power inscribed in its
practices, its ideological assumptions, its complicity with colonialism, racism,
exploitation, and exoticism, and its dependency on the master narratives of
Westerns self-understanding. These interlinked critiques of anthropology, the
one inward-looking and brooding, the other outward-looking and recriminatory,
may not have produced the ‘fully dialectical ethnography acting powerfully in the
postmodern world system,’ to quote that Writing Culture blast again, nor did they
exactly go unresisted. But they did induce a certain self-awareness and a certain
candor also, into a discipline not without need of them.. [Geertz 2002: 11]

12. Ian Hodder (1948 – )
is a founder of postprocessualism
and is generally considered one of the
most influential archaeologists of the last
thirty years. The postprocessual
movement arose out of an attempt to
apply insights gained from French Marxist
anthropology to the study of material
culture and was heavily influenced by a
postmodern epistemology.

13. Ian Hodder (1948 – )
Working in sub-Sahara Africa, Hodder and his students
documented how material culture was not merely a reflection of
sociopolitical organization, but was also an active element that
could be used to disguise, invert, and distort social relations.
Bruce Trigger (2006:481) has argued that perhaps the most
successful “law” developed in recent archaeology was
this demonstration that material culture plays an active role in
social strategies and hence can alter as well as reflect social
reality.

14. Nancy Scheper-Hughes (1944-)
Scheper-Hughes is a professor of
Anthropology at the University of
California, Berkeley. In her work “Primacy
of the Ethical” Scheper-Hughes argues
that, “If we cannot begin to think about
social institutions and practices in moral or
ethical terms, then anthropology strikes
me as quite weak and useless.” (1995:
410). She advocates that ethnographies be
used as tools for critical reflection and
human liberation because she feels that
“ethics” make culture possible.

15. Nancy Scheper-Hughes (1944-)
 Since culture is preceded by ethics, therefore ethics cannot be
culturally bound as argued by anthropologists in the past. These
philosophies are evident in her other works such as, Death Without
Weeping. The crux of her postmodern perspective is that,
“Anthropologists, no less than any other professionals, should be held
accountable for how we have used and how we have failed to use
anthropology as a critical tool at crucial historical moments. It is the
act of “witnessing” that lends our word its moral, at times almost
theological, character” (1995: 419).

16. Jean-Francois Lyotard (1924 – 1998)
was the author of a highly
influential work on postmodern
society called, The Postmodern
Condition (1984). This book was a
critique of the current state of
knowledge among modern
postindustrial nations such as those
found in the United States and
much of Western Europe.

17. Jean-Francois Lyotard (1924 – 1998)
 In The Postmodern Condition (1984), Lyotard made a number of notable
arguments, one of which was that the postmodern world suffered
from a crisis of “representation,” in which older modes of writing
about the objects of artistic, philosophical, literary, and social scientific
languages were no longer credible. Lyotard suggests that: The
Postmodern would be that which …that which refuses the consolation
of correct forms, refuses the consensus of taste permitting a common
experience of nostalgia for the impossible, and inquires into new
presentations–not to take pleasure in them, but to better produce the
feeling that there is something unpresentable.[Lyotard 1984]

18. Principal Concepts

19. Principal Concepts
1. Culture in Peril
“Culture is becoming a dangerously unfocused term, increasingly
lacking in scientific credentials” (Pasquinelli 1996). The concept of Culture
as a whole was tied not only to modernity, but to evolutionary theory (and,
implicitly, to eurocentrism). In the postmodernist view, if “culture” existed
it had to be totally relativistic without any suggestion of “progress.” While
postmodernists did have a greater respect for later revisions of cultural
theory by Franz Boas and his followers, who attempted to shift from a
single path of human “culture” to many varied “cultures,” they found even
this unsatisfactory because it still required the use of a Western concept to
define non-Western people.

20. Principal Concepts
2. Lament
Lament is a practice of ritualized weeping (Wilce 2005). In the view of
Wilce, the traditional means of laments in many cultures were being forced
out by modernity due to many claiming that ritualized displays of
discontent, particularly discontent with the lost of traditional culture, was a
“backwards” custom that needed to be stopped.
3. Metanarrative
Lawrence Kuznar describes metanarratives as grand narratives such
as the Enlightenment, Marxism or the American dream. Postmodernists see
metanarratives as unfairly totalizing or naturalizing in their generalizations
about the state of humanity and historical process (2008:83).

21. Principal Concepts
4. Polyvocality
Paralleling the generally relatativst and skeptical attitudes towards
scientific authority, many postmodernists advocate polyvocality, which
maintains that there exists multiple, legitimate versions of reality or truths
as seen from different perspectives. Postmodernists construe
Enlightenment rationalism and scientific positivism as an effort to impose
hegemonic values and political control on the world. By challenging the
authority of anthropologists and other Western intellectuals,
postmodernists see themselves as defending the integrity of local cultures
and helping weaker peoples to oppose their oppressors (Trigger 2006:446-
447)

22. Principal Concepts
5. Power
Foucault was a prominent critic of the idea of “culture,” preferring
instead to wield the concept of “power” as the major focus of
anthropological research (Barrett 2001). Foucault felt that it was through
the dynamics of power that “a human being turns himself into a subject”
(Foucault 1982). This is not only true of political power, but also includes
people recognizing things such as sexuality as forces to which they are
subject. “The exercise of power is not simply a relationship between
partners, individual or collective; it is a way in which certain actions modify
others. Which is to say, of course, that something called Power, with or
without a capital letter, which is assumed to exist universally in a
concentrated or diffused form, does not exist” (Foucault 1982: 788).

23. Principal Concepts
6. Radical Skepticism
The systematic skepticism of grounded theoretical perspectives
and objective truths espoused by many postmodernists had a
profound effect on anthropology. This skepticism has shifted focus
from the observation of a particular society to a reflexive
consideration of the (anthropological) observer (Bishop 1996).
According to Rosenau (1992), postmodernists can be divided into two
very broad camps, Skeptics and Affirmatives.

24. Principal Concepts
7. Affirmative Postmodernists
Affirmatives also reject Theory by denying claims of truth. They
do not, however, feel that Theory needs to be abolished but merely
transformed. Affirmatives are less rigid than Skeptics. They support
movements organized around peace, environment, and feminism
(Rosenau 1993: 42).

25. Principal Concepts
8. Realism
is the platonic doctrine that universals or abstractions have being
independently of mind” (Gellner 1980: 60). Marcus and Fischer note
that: “Realism is a mode of writing that seeks to represent the reality of
the whole world or form of life. Realist ethnographies are written to
allude to a whole by means of parts or foci of analytical attention which
can constantly evoke a social and cultural totality (1986: 2323).

26. Principal Concepts
9. Relativism
relativism is the notion that different perspectives have no absolute truth or
validity, but rather possess only relative, subjective value according to distinctions in
perception and consideration. Gellner writes about the relativistic-functionalist view
of thought that goes back to the Enlightenment: “The (unresolved) dilemma, which
the thought of the Enlightenment faced, was between a relativistic-functionalist
view of thought, and the absolutist claims of enlightened Reason. Viewing man as
part of nature…requires (us) to see cognitive and evaluative activities as part of
nature too, and hence varying from organism to organism and context to context.
(Gellner in [Asad 1986: 147]). Anthropological theory of the 1960s may be best
understood as the heir of relativism. Contemporary interpretative anthropology is
the essence of relativism as a mode of inquiry about communication in and
between cultures (Marcus & Fischer, 1986:32).R

27. Principal Concepts
10. Self-Reflexivity
In anthropology, self-reflexivity refers to the process by which
anthropologists question themselves and their work, both theoretically and
practically. Bishop notes that, “The scientific observer’s objectification of
structure as well as strategy was seen as placing the actors in a framework not
of their own making but one produced by the observer, “ (1996: 1270). Self-
Reflexivity therefore leads to a consciousness of the process of knowledge
creation (1996: 995). There is an increased awareness of the collection of data
and the limitation of methodological systems. This idea underlies the
postmodernist affinity for studying the culture of anthropology and
ethnography.

28. Criticisms

29. Roy D’Andrade (1931-2016)
In the article “Moral Models in Anthropology,” D’Andrade critiques
postmodernism’s definition of objectivity and subjectivity by examining the moral
nature of their models. He argues that these moral models are purely subjective.
D’Andrade argues that despite the fact that utterly value-free objectivity is
impossible, it is the goal of the anthropologist to get as close as possible to that
ideal. He argues that there must be a separation between moral and objective
models because “they are counterproductive in discovering how the world
works.” (D’Andrade 1995: 402). From there he takes issue with the postmodernist
attack on objectivity. He states that objectivity is in no way dehumanizing nor is
objectivity impossible. He states, “Science works not because it produces
unbiased accounts but because its accounts are objective enough to be proved or
disproved no matter what anyone wants to be true.” (D’Andrade 1995: 404).

30. Ryan Bishop
“The Postmodernist genre of ethnography has
been criticized for fostering a self-indulgent subjectivity,
and for exaggerating the esoteric and unique aspects of
a culture at the expense of more prosaic but significant
questions.” (Bishop 1996: 58)

31. Patricia M. Greenfield
Greenfield believes that postmodernism’s complete lack of
objectivity, and its tendency to push political agendas, makes it
virtually useless in any scientific investigation (Greenfield 2005).
Greenfield suggests using resources in the field of psychology to
help anthropologists gain a better grasp on cultural relativism,
while still maintaining their objectivity.

32. Bob McKinley
McKinley believes that postmodernism is more of a religion
than a science (McKinley 2000). He argues that the origin of
postmodernism is the Western emphasis on individualism, which
makes postmodernists reluctant to acknowledge the existence of
distinct multi-individual cultures.

33. Christopher Norris
Norris believes that Lyotard, Foucault, and
Baudrillard are too preoccupied with the idea of the
primacy of moral judgments (Norris 1990: 50).

34. Pauline Rosenau
Rosenau identifies seven contradictions in Postmodernism:
1.Its anti-theoretical position is essentially a theoretical stand.
2.While postmodernism stresses the irrational, instruments of reason are freely employed
to advance its perspective.
3.The postmodern prescription to focus on the marginal is itself an evaluative emphasis of
precisely the sort that it otherwise attacks.
4.Postmodernism stress intertextuality but often treats text in isolation.
5.By adamantly rejecting modern criteria for assessing theory, postmodernists cannot
argue that there are no valid criteria for judgment.
6.Postmodernism criticizes the inconsistency of modernism but refuses to be held to
norms of consistency itself.
7.Postmodernists contradict themselves by relinquishing truth claims in their own writings.

35. Marshall Sahlins
criticizes the postmodern preoccupation with
power. “The current Foucauldian-Gramscian-Nietzschean
obsession with power is the latest incarnation of
anthropology’s incurable functionalism. . . Now ‘power’
is the intellectual black hole into which all kinds of
cultural contents get sucked, if before it was social
solidarity or material advantage.” (Sahlins, 1993: 15).

36. Melford Spiro (1920 – 2014)
 argues that postmodern anthropologists do not convincingly dismiss
the scientific method (1996). Further, he suggests that if
anthropology turns away from the scientific method then
anthropology will become the study of meanings and not the
discovery of causes that shape what it is to be human. Spiro further
states that, “the causal account of culture refers to ecological niches,
modes of production, subsistence techniques, and so forth, just as a
causal account of mind refers to the firing of neurons, the secretions
of hormones, the action of neurotransmitters . . .” (1996: 765). Spiro
critically addresses six interrelated propositions from John Searle’s
1993 work, “Rationality and Realism

37. End