2.5 Post-Modernism and Anthropology

Claim: the anthropologist does not report a culture but writes it — ethnography is literature and power, not a mirror; the grand theories (evolution, function, structure, even "culture" itself) are suspect meta-narratives.The canonical moment:Writing Culture (Clifford & Marcus, 1986) — ethnography's crisis ofrepresentation: the classic monographs' "view from nowhere" (the omniscient fieldworker) unmasked as rhetoric; the discipline's complicity with colonialism interrogated (anthropology as the colonial office's science? — the debate of the 1970s–80s). The moves that follow:reflexivity (the observer inside the account — gender, class, nationality of the fieldworker as data); dialogic and polyvocal ethnography (informants as co-authors; native voices); multi-sited ethnography (Marcus: follow the people/thing/story — the migrant, the yarsagumba, the remittance — not the bounded village); the native anthropology reversal (Nepalis studying Nepal — Unit 1.3's generation); and the honest doubts: can one represent another at all? (the poetics-and-politics answer: partially, positionally, humbly). Nepal application: Nepal-studies itself turned — from the foreign monograph on "the Gurungs" to Nepali scholars' reflexive work on their own communities and on the development industry itself (Unit 7's anthropology of development — the postmodern child); the study of Kathmandu's NGO world, trekking tourism and diaspora as multi-sited fields. Critique of the critics: infinite reflexivity paralyzes research; "everything is text" forgets poverty and power's realities (the materialist retort); the discipline's settlement — moderate postmodernism:…