Postmodernism and Reflexive Anthropology

The idea of postmodernism arrived in the social sciences relatively late compared with other fields such as architecture, music, and literary studies, where most often it expressed itself as a series of artistic responses to the canons of modernist aesthetics. By the time postmodernist critiques came to anthropology and other critical social sciences, researchers had already begun an analysis of the social transformation that characterized the post–World War II period, and many of these observations were inspired by the critiques of postmodernism: the breakdown of large-scale metanarratives, a growing awareness of the links between Western science and colonial expansion, and a falling out with the Enlightenment notion of objectivity. Thus, in some areas of academic research, the postmodern condition refers to a set of practices ...