Ebook: Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences

Anthropology as Cultural Critique takes the pulse of contemporary social science as it adapts its theories and techniques to an increasingly complex social reality. Using cultural anthropology as an exemplar par excellence for analyzing debates that reverberate throughout the human sciences, George E. Marcus and Michael M. J. Fischer look closely at its past accomplishments, its current predicaments, its future direction, and the insights it has to offer other fields of study.

Marcus and Fischer argue that, since the 1960s, anthropology has been in a phase of experimental ethnographic writing that has brought renewed attention to anthropology's critical function, which is to use knowledge of other cultures to examine the unconscious assumptions of our own. They compare the continuing experimentation with descriptive techniques to a similar moment in the 1920s and 1930s, not- ing that both eras were marked by hyperawareness of the limitations of traditional theories of society, of culture, and of the nature of reality in general. They show ethnography, the descriptive foundation for anthropological theory, as a crucible for theoretical play, reconceptualization, and rebuilding social theory; and they argue against those who would precipitously bring the current experimental era to a close. In surveying the developments of anthropological writing as it has moved toward cultural critique, the authors sweep across the whole history of twentieth-century anthropology, from British social anthropology, functionalism, and naive realism through structuralism, interpretive and psychoanalytic anthropology to more literary ethnography and finally to cultural critique. The result is a work that is extraordinarily useful and provocative for scholars concerned with a critical approach to social science, art, literature, and history, as well as anthropology.