ABSTRACT
These claims are now muted. Today the very character of the social sciences is in question. Disciplines have polarized between a natural science wing and an opposing tendency that would prefer to be counted in with philosophy and literary theory, or that would be content to merge into cultural studies. As to the particular claims that used to be made for the identity of social or cultural anthropology, all these are now widely regarded as problematic. From one flank, participant observation is attacked for its subjectivity. From another, it is denounced for dehumanizing its subjects, making them into objects. Claims about the value of exoticism are also suspect. The difference between what Sahlins called the West and the Rest is now illusory, according to one school of thought, globalization the one super-narrative of the age. Alternatively, according to a slightly different story, globalization has set off cosmic culture wars so ferocious that only those untainted by the privileges of the West can be
trusted to study the Rest, and then only for a political purpose. Finally, the very possibility of comparison has been placed in question. If there is no generalizing social science, if objectivity is an illusion, then comparison must be abandoned as a relic of an obsolete positivism.
