Revision summary
Postmodernism treats ethnography as a written, situated account. Writing Culture named the crisis of representation. Reflexivity, polyphony, and partial truths are the kit. Foucault and Said tied knowledge to power and empire. The limit is paralysis; the gain is honest voice and better ethics.
Model answer
Introduction
Postmodernism in anthropology is a late-twentieth-century doubt about the omniscient ethnographer. It treats the field text as a made, power-laden account, not a glass window on ‘the native’.
Body
Core features
- Crisis of representation: after Clifford and Marcus in Writing Culture, ethnography is writing, with tropes and authority moves.
- Reflexivity: the observer’s race, gender, and funding belong in the account, as Rabinow showed in Morocco.
- Polyphony: more than one voice should appear. The monograph should not speak as a single colonial ‘we’.
- Partial truths: Clifford Geertz already called description interpretation. Postmodernists pushed further: no complete culture-out-there.
- Power/knowledge: Foucault’s influence made culture theory watch the state, the clinic, and the museum.
Method and style
- Dialogue, confessional openings, and blurred genres replaced the silent third-person tribe.
- Crapanzano, Tyler, and Fischer experimented with form. Said’s Orientalism named the imperial archive behind older pictures.
Critique of postmodernism
- Spiro, Sangren, and many Indian fieldworkers said endless doubt can paralyse comparison and policy.
- Bourdieu kept reflexivity without dropping structure. Feminist and Dalit ethnography used the crisis to demand better evidence, not no evidence.
- A fair use is humility about voice, not the claim that villages are only text.
Flow diagram
flowchart TD PM[Postmodern anthropology] --> W[Writing Culture] PM --> R[Reflexivity polyphony] PM --> K[Power knowledge] C[Critique] --> E[Evidence still needed]
Conclusion
Postmodern anthropology made ethnography confess its making and its power. Its lasting features are reflexivity, partiality, and suspicion of the imperial monograph, not a ban on doing fieldwork.
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Does postmodernism say nothing is true?
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Is Geertz postmodern?
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2025 · Q8(a) · Anthropology GS 1 · 20 marks
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