Quite a long time ago I had a little exchange with Clovis8 (an actual anthropologist) in the politics forum on this topic, which was basically just him saying something about how postmodernism sucked and me saying I thought it had some value. We briefly considered having a longer conversation about it in some other thread but never did. So when I started this playground I thought -- that would be fun to chat about.

I'm really more interested in hearing about his experiences in grad school for anthropology in the 90s (when all this was big) than saying too much myself, but very roughly the "some value" I meant is going to be along similar lines to the discussion about standpoint theory, translating for some cultural anthropology specific factors like

1) The traditional practice of western anthropologists doing field work among far-flung tribes with very different cultures (rather than studying their own), and the connection of that practice to European colonialism in history.

2) The emphasis on ethnography as the cultural anthropology method par excellence.

I'd guess the nature of ethnography as a practice made the the postmodern idea of culture-as-text seem very directly relevant -- anthropologists produce texts about cultures. I think you can get a good feel for the kind of influence postmodernism had on cultural anthropology by reading essays from James Clifford's Writing Culture, or at least you'll get a good idea of my exposure to postmodernism in anthropology. The criticisms of positivism are very similar to those described in the other thread.

I like the subsequent development in this essay of the idea of "partial truths", which is more or less how I described social science theories in general. As lenses which clarify some features while obscuring others. I like the discussion about ways to do ethnography that clarify the relationship between researcher and subjects and make more transparent the balance between presenting a culture's subjective self-understanding and the "objective" representation of the researcher, an outsider.

That said, I don't insist on postmodernism in general, and one of my favorite anthropologists is Marvin Harris, who I think it's fair to say takes a very different view. But I have plans to get to him soon in another thread, because he's a lot of fun.

Now, I'm curious to hear what Clovis thinks.

This is a classic sort of edited volume in that half of the essays are on point and really interesting, and half seem totally irrelephant, at least to me.

Also, it seems a bit plain vanilla/dated in terms of postmodernism - it seems pretty comprehensible, whereas in comparison, whenever I come into contact with some more recent theoretically minded anthropology I struggle to really understand much at all.

The use of the terms partial truths and putting objective in quotations is a good way to start because it goes to heart of my issue with postmodern thinking. It is also where the entire intellectual exercise got poisoned by its association with literary theory and people like Derrida and Foucault.

All sciences, social or otherwise, are trying to understand the world. This presumes the world is understandable. The mother philosophy is materialism. For the purposes of this debate, I am going to assume we agree on this, otherwise we are rudderless. We are not creating fiction, nor interpreting it, therefore there is no roll for literary theory anymore than it would make to sense analyze Macbeth through the prism of string theory.

In our original exchange, I blew off the entirety of postmodernism which is unfair. It absolutely brought to the forefront the idea of cultural bias in science. This had value. However, it’s obsessive focus on this one epistemological claim forced it to become increasingly obsessed with its value as a way of knowing. Everything became bias therefore nothing can be true. Relativism was the only logical exit.

This has led to a generation of academics who are masters at finding the bias in any kind of research but terrible at finding out about the world, which as we already stated, is the whole point of science.

The idea that facts are relative or there are multiple cultural realities is the monstrous offspring of the 90s debate. I am more and more convinced one can draw a straight line from Derrida to Trump.

Hey guy, welcome to my playground. Re: being vanilla, that may be fair. I wanted to hear from clovis because my knowledge is pretty limited (enthusiastic amateur!). And I'm not that into the hardcore postmodernist stuff anyway :P

I'm essentially a materialist, but I do tend to subscribe to the argument that it's methodological naturalism, and not ontological naturalism, that is the important commitment for the philosophy of science. But I don't think we'll get bogged down there. We agree that science takes as a premise that the world is understandable, and I presume that in particular we make similar assumptions about the value of empiricism in relation to knowledge.

I think there's potentially a bit to unpack here. I agree that the goal is not the creation of fiction in the sense that you mean (n.b. Clifford puts a different gloss on "fiction" in that essay). But cultural anthropologists very often are interpreting fictions. They are interpreting culture. I generally think that Geertz makes a valid point about this (in "Thick Description: Towards an interpretive theory of culture"), that an understanding of culture requires an understanding of the meanings people attach to things, and the way they understand the world. Insisting on that does not mean, in my view, understanding meaning as some ontologically privileged thing apart from the material world (I already said I love Marvin Harris' cultural materialism), but I think it's reasonable to think that investigating the "webs of meaning" which people construct will sometimes require different approaches than those used in physics.

I don't really know anything about literary theory and I'm not that excited about it in any case, so it's possible that I'm mostly over-analyzing your word choice without following your meaning. I'm not advocating for literary theory as a method, AFAIK.

Also there should be a crack here about physicists literally inventing fictions with string theory, so here it is

I agree with this criticism of postmodernism, and it may turn out we mostly agree about where the merits and problems with postmodernistic thinking lie, judging from this paragraph.

I tend to associate this kind of practice more with the humanities, but I suppose I don't have a great feel for the actual impact of postmodernist ideas on the fruitfulness of contemporary anthropological research. I don't read as much ethnography as I'd ideally like, and I tend to pick out examples which seem to me not to fit this description.

Here too, I think there is potentially a bit to unpack. What do you mean by "multiple cultural realities"? As I would parse it, such multiple realities clearly exist in a meaningful sense, especially given the way that enculturation processes work to make artificial elements of culture seem "natural" to members within the culture. Speaking of "realities" highlights that function in a useful way, I think.

What the phrase doesn't mean, to me, is that they are literally, in some physical sense, different realities, or that there were no possible comparisons between them. It's not an ontological claim. We're all human beings participating in the same material universe, and there are patterns of both material and cultural existence which are shared and may be discovered. And yet, processes like those I tried to describe in the sociology of knowledge, or processes of enculturation, really do create distinct "worlds" which people inhabit, and the analogy to a "world" captures something meaningful about how culturally distinctive knowledge and practices color everything and shape the horizons against which we all perceive and understand the world.

But all of that is still just a rich analogy in my mind, and not a literal claim, as if there were a multiverse theory of anthropology a la the interpretation of QM.

And while I'm taking about Clifford, here's an action shot.

hot.