Crisis of representation
Postmodern anthropology questions whether ethnography can deliver a single objective portrait of ‘a culture’, stressing power, authorship and partial truths.
- Emerges after confidence in scientific, totalising ethnography weakens; linked to wider postmodern doubt about master narratives.
- Writing Culture (Clifford and Marcus, 1986) spotlighted ethnography as a literary and political act of representation.
- Who has the authority to speak for whom? Fieldwork texts are positioned, selective and persuasive — not neutral mirrors.
- Partial truths: any account captures fragments; claiming completeness hides the author’s standpoint.
- Reflexivity: the ethnographer must put their own location, methods and power into the analysis.
Themes and consequences
- Polyvocality: include multiple native voices rather than one authoritative narrator.
- Critique of colonial and gendered hierarchies inside classical fieldwork.
- Blurred genres: dialogue, memoir and experimental forms enter ethnography.
- Suspicion toward grand theory (unilinear laws, total systems) without discarding careful local analysis.
Criticisms of the postmodern turn
- Can slide into relativism that blocks comparative or policy-relevant claims.
- Style may overshadow substance; readers still need clear empirical argument.
- Not a licence to abandon evidence — at its best it demands more honest evidence and voice.
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