ABSTRACT
In the arts and humanities, which introduced postmodernism to academic audiences a generation ago, some authors believe that the movement had run its course by the dawn of the new century. This chapter explores the ways in which the arguments within the humanities about post-postmodernism have influenced contemporary anthropology. Hermeneutics forms the basis of many of the critiques of scientific anthropology as it was traditionally practiced in most of the twentieth century. During the 1980s and 90s, approaches from hermeneutics and deconstruction and the notion of knowledge as power joined to critically re-assess the way in which past anthropologists have represented other cultures. In the modernist tradition, anthropologists assumed a complete and authoritative knowledge of the societies in which they conducted their research. Critics of traditional anthropology have noted that past ethnographies were usually written as if the fieldworker were an all-seeing (omniscient) and objective observer.
