ABSTRACT
Edwin Ardener, in an essay entitled ‘Social Anthropology and the Decline of Modernism’ presented before the 1984 ASA conference (Ardener 1985, 1989), pointed out that anthropology was then traversing an ‘epistemological break’ opened by a growing awareness among practitioners in the field of the inappropriateness of modernist categories of ‘self’ and ‘other’ to their experiences of other peoples and other places. The symptoms of the crisis of confidence he noted there, as in much of the work he produced in the 1970s and 1980s (see Chapman 1989), have been elaborated throughout the past fifteen years in a wide range of writings by other anthropologists investigating the production of anthropological knowledge (see Fabian 1983; Asad 1986; Sperber 1985a; Appadurai 1992 and Thornton 1992). Pre-eminent among these symptoms are a questioning (1) of traditional anthropology’s conception of the ‘native’ as ‘fixed’ in a time and a place which renders his or her practices and beliefs representative of the entirety of those of a distinct and holistically conceived ‘people’, (2) of how the anthropologist is ‘located’ in the cultural and social field of those he or she studies, and (3) of the way the anthropologist ‘translates’ the particularities of field experiences into a language of anthropological discourse.
