ABSTRACT
Postmodernism (or what is often called poststructuralism1 in anthropology) is not a unitary phenomenon or point of view, and for that reason is not easily discussed in a succinct fashion. It is an altered way of viewing the world that has permeated the arts, philosophy, architecture, the social sciences, and even theology, medicine, and advertising, all of which have manifested postmodern assumptions in different ways. As a starting point for examining postmodernism, we need to understand its relationship to modernity; in other words, to that which preceded it. Despite all the differences and disputes that have occurred within western science and philosophy over the last several centuries, philosopher Jürgen Habermas contends that a unified set of underlying assumptions about knowledge characterized western thought from about 1600 (Habermas 1987). This set of assumptions is what he calls “the Project of Modernity.” This “project” developed during the Enlightenment, with the birth of the sciences at the beginning of the seventeenth century, and informed virtually all scientific and philosophical inquiry from then until the mid-1970s:
The project of modernity formulated in the eighteenth century by the philosophers of the Enlightenment consisted in their efforts to develop objective science, universal morality and law, and autonomous art according to their inner logic…The Enlightenment philosophers wanted to utilize this accumulation of specialized culture for the enrichment of everyday life-that is to say, for the rational organization of everyday social life.
