Modernity, Interculturality and the Project of Anthropology
Joel S. Kahn, La Trobe University
This paper explores some of the theoretical dilemmas that have emerged within the discipline of cultural anthropology from the time of the formation of the 'modern' discipline in the United States in the period between the two world wars. From that time cultural anthropologists have tended to see their project as involving the more or less faithful 'documentation', 'translation or 'interpretation' of non-modern cultural meanings for a modern readership.
Beginning in the 1970s and 1980s, however, the view that anthropology produces unmediated knowledge of cultural others came under attack from feminist, Marxist, postcolonial, postmodern and multicultural scholars, all of whom in one way or another pointed to the 'constructedness' of anthropological accounts.
In this paper I argue that, far form being problematic, this constructed character of anthropological meaning represents the discipline's greatest potential strength. But this means abandoning realist assumptions about the transparency of anthropological knowledge, and recognising that it is part of the intercultural heritage of modernity itself.