ABSTRACT
Practitioners of anthropology and the arts have encountered each other on a number of occasions over the history of the various modernities and modernisms of the twentieth century. Anthropologists, to their credit, were open to this critique of writing and were relieved that it was hermetically textual and did not touch the near-religious fellowship of their fieldwork itself – the core of a craft expressing and regulating their professional culture. The shared intellectual tool and doctrine that defined the Writing Culture collaboration and then proliferated as a signature style in theoretical discourse, interpretative writing and artworks, was the exercise of an acute and sometimes unrelenting critical reflexivity. Only momentarily flirting with avant-gardist circles of expression and reception during the 1980s fashion of postmodernism, anthropology, in its strength, appeal, and effectiveness, depends on retaining realist expression in novel and critical forms.
