ABSTRACT

In this chapter, the author outlines some of the work that has influenced many of the contributors. He focuses on ideas which, though still important, have been much less widely circulated. These ideas are mostly from or about anthropology and its written practice, ethnography. The fact of written representation is crucial: writing inscribes the unequal power relationship between the observer and the observed that has so marked the discipline. Indeed, on a larger scale, it might be said that a good deal of the introspection in anthropology over the past few decades marks a similar atonement for guilt over the past association of anthropology with imperialism. Much of the impetus for studies of race produced in the 1980s and 1990s has come from the work of colonial discourse theorists. Ambivalence towards colonial stereotypes arises not from some unchanging psychic split but in response to cultural conditions.