ABSTRACT
Cluttered with pretentious jargon, postmodern anthropology can be seen as a bizarre, scholasticized, and institutionalized variation of the romantic primitivism which originated with Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It signals the triumph of the litterateur. In the nineteenth century this expressed itself in the form of a narcissistic concern with self-realization and self-expression, fused with a romantic admiration for other times and places. Much the same takes place in the genre of academicized travel writing one finds today. The conversion of many anthropology departments into refuges for the bohemian counterculture is unfortunate, though it needs to be emphasized that academic anthropology holds no campus monopoly in this. It is also a development which is very far from the ideals of the man—Franz Boas—who helped to bring it about. When he opened the doors of Columbia University's anthropology department to would-be writers like Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead, he did so with the best of intentions.
