ABSTRACT
Historians and students of literature have been dealing with these trends, too—in fact, the latter have often prospered within the post and critical discourses—but American anthropology has been shaken to its core, narrowed in scope and spirit, and left diminished and uncertain. An examination of a number of recent introductory anthropology texts reveals a telling fact. By giving high visibility to attacks on anthropology and anthropologists, they prejudice the student against what was arguably in the finest tradition of humanity's attempt to understand itself and increase appreciation for ways of being other than one's own. Insofar as leaders of the field of anthropology proudly reject cultural comparison, abandon the notion of science, adopt the pose that there are no discoverable truths but only positionalities and interests, engage in the hermeneutics of suspicion and build on the culture of complaint. Anthropology was once part of the colonial world, then the neocolonial, and the neoliberal world—not to mention the "Western" world.
