ABSTRACT
If the “Enlightenment-modernist” project was characterized by an abiding commitment to rationality, science, and progress, many anthropologists since the advent of postmodernity have expressed a profound skepticism toward claims of objectivity in the understanding of culture. The roots of this approach in anthropology are associated with European (mostly French) philosophers and social theorists, although, as we’ve seen, they were also anticipated to some extent by the interpretive anthropology of Clifford Geertz and even earlier linguistic anthropologists. Hermeneutics is the basis of many of the recent critiques of scientific anthropology as it has been traditionally practiced. It is the branch of philosophy that studies the interpretation of meaning; in this sense, hermeneutics is a philosophical counterpart to literary theory, which involves the interpretation of texts for their symbolic and substantive content. Following the claims of German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), the hermeneutic perspective holds that an individual’s knowledge of the world is always conditioned by his or her culture, identity, and social position. Heidegger explicitly rejected the western cultural tradition that emphasizes reason and objectivity as means of understanding the world. Above all, for Heidegger, language and the culture in which it is rooted are the key elements guiding our interpretation of the world. We have already encountered a variant of this argument independently in the linguistic relativity hypothesis of American linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf. In a sense, European postmodern philosophers carried the Sapir-Whorf argument to its logical conclusion.
