ABSTRACT
With the decline of support in the late 1980s for those many different enquiry procedures that, for some commentators, have gone under the name of postmodernism, the resultant vacuum has in encouraged a scramble for new theoretical territory. The attempt to essentialize postmodernism is like falling into the older essentialist traps set by such concepts as descent, kinship and incest. There is in fact no valid distinction to be drawn between the essentialization of concepts that constitute the objects of a supposed tradition of knowledge and of the tradition of knowledge itself. Of all the social sciences, anthropology is surely the most likely, through its fieldwork and ethnographic enquiries, continually to subvert the fiction of discrete intellectual traditions. That is to say, fine-grained ethnographic discoveries never quite fit the grand theory. This makes regional comparison the subject's strongest contribution to knowledge, for it is plausible only in terms of local transformations of geographically contiguous practices and ideas.
