Free Term Paper on Anthropology as Cultural Critique

The authors of the book Anthropology as Cultural Critique, George E. Marcus and Michael M. J. Fischer look closely at anthropology of cultural as past accomplishments, its current dilemma and conditions in this line of thought, its future point of the compass and management, and the perceptiveness and insights it has to extend to the other domain of study. The book’s representation of the above perspectives results in a provocative work that is crucial for scholars engaged in a captious approach to social science, art, literature, and history, as well as anthropology, and also those who want to find out the real meaning of the critique in the field of study of anthropology. The second edition of the book under analysis also takes in to consideration new and unique challenges to the field, which have arisen since the book's original publication.

Anthropologists George Marcus and Michael Fischer argue that, since the 1960s, anthropological writing has evolved into a critical function for the aim of using information of other cultures to explore concealed or secret conjecture about our own. The authors give us a fascinating sweep across the whole history of 20th-century anthropology in surveying this development of anthropological writing,

To begin with, the authors have hoped to take into account and utilize anthropology as a tool for social analysis, which will help create social theories of resistance, by looking in to the issues of power, exploitation, and resistance in the realms of economics, political and intellectual authority. The authors have used the anthropological theory as a social critique and have further explored the intellectual authority within anthropology, and spread out the reader’s exploration into prevalent culture as a parkway of both creation of modern culture and antagonistic to cultural dominance.

This book gives an argument of contemporaneous theoretical and methodological issues and trends in American cultural anthropology. The initial four chapters center on experimental anthropological approaches such as interpretive anthropology and an interest with political economy as they explore modern research. The chapters on anthropological cultural critique are intended as an investigation of possibilities for a main part of work that does not fully exist yet in anthropology. The author’s objective is to define a peculiar function for anthropology within the contemporary customs and comprehensive intellectual heritage of cultural critique that do subsist, notably those that instituted in the1920s and 1930s. It is therefore a book in which the authors have presented the current state of anthropology, establishing that state in its recent history and in relation to other social sciences-economics, politics, sociology, history-and, most importantly, to the major features of the social and intellectual scene.
 

Marcus and Fischer talk about the examples of experimental ethnography and have tried to indicate how to accomplish an interpretive anthropology that will carry through within the culture of relativism. In addition, this methodology would carry the greater political and economic context of native cultures while using the cultural concepts in its fundamental construct. The book undertakes to signify both the deficiencies and possibilities of recent work. In the whole of the narration, there is an understanding and direction pointing to a future in which ethnographic develops balanced methods of communication with various preferences revealed within them, as well as with multiple readers categorically in mind.

Marcus and Fischer stated ethnography as cultural critique – of “our” society. As in their review, in recent years anthropologists and sociologists have become much more conscious of the intricacies and innuendo of symbolizing a culture to both inconnu and insiders and have given insights of the power and contested nature of these representations as well. They argue that ideologies of gender, race, and development interweave with individual experiences to make the practice of development and its outcomes a multi-layered process, with negotiated and unintended consequences.

Through the example of the project life cycle, the authors argue that though categories may be important for analysis, their identification only bounds our comprehension of their upbeat nature. Their thinking reveals that in the practice of development, categories are not permanent, nor is their membership fixed. The authors take in to consideration the obscure nature of categories and the uncongealed nature of their boundaries. This relational exploration of the issue they state, "a move from a simple interests in the description of cultural others to a more balanced purpose of cultural critique, which plays off other cultural realities against our own," is a valuable contribution of this work.

In the recent commotion of literature in anthropology and sociology on impervious and the art of erecting text from wisdom. Marcus and Fischer argues that anthropology has never really had scientifically compelling victory by revealing the insider's knowledge through conventional texts created by outsiders, then possibly it is time to let insiders speak for themselves. In this stance, the work of the ethnographer shifts radically. The relationship of the ethnographer to the storyteller parallels the relationship between the reader and the text, though there is still a bridge between cultures. By clarifying how culture presents and changes itself through the fieldwork dialogue, the ethnographer assists the reader in interpreting and relating to the text. Very precisely, anthropologists tend to be criticizing or even abandoning "culture" just as many other practices, and public policy, have begun assenting it. They have asked the question as to how do the anthropologists want to redefine this basic concept, or what do they suggest as an alternative?

In short, anthropologists seem to be using a hard, rather as some might say "ill-starred" new language to talk about culture. The cleft between this language and plain English suggests just how difficult it is turning out to be for anthropologists to "take back" a concept that has now been "taken up" by the world at large. Many historians of anthropology have noticed that over the past century or so anthropological theory has gone through cycles or oscillations between two general approaches, emphasizing coherence or creativity, interdependence or independence, holism or differentiation, continuity or change.

As one of these panoramas has come to rule other anthropologists' approaches to culture, it has created a theoretical reaction, sometimes conferred as an abiding criterion change, towards the opposing content. But in overall sequence, these shifts look more like a series of strategic phases, each of which criticized its predecessor and paved the way for its own critics.

The writer’s points out that relatively few of the early evolutionists relied heavily on the concept of culture. However, they set the stage for that concept by classifying most of the non-European peoples encountered by European explorers and colonizers as simpler or less evolved, socially and technologically if not biologically, compared to Europeans and that if we had the knowledge and endurance to examine a culture retrospectively, every element of it would be found to have had its beginning in the creative act of an individual mind.

There is a strong association with cultural relativism and states that the idea that each culture should be evaluated on its own terms, rather than against a single standard of human excellence or achievement. On the other hand, seeing cultures as aesthetic, self-justifying systems also had a dark side. The noteworthy fact, which the authors say is that, the American symbolic anthropology, and French and British structuralism appeared more or less simultaneously. Both have relied strongly on comparison between culture and language, or culture and literature, and strongly emphasized coherence over change. However, in the last tow decades of the twentieth century, literary critics and intellectual historians began applying the strategies of literary interpretation.
 

Marcus and Fischer argue about the interpretive approaches of being apolitical. To the extent that literary criticism involves commenting on texts without rewriting them, then an anthropology modeled on literary criticism probably does not aim directly either to create or constrain culture change. They have stressed strongly on a coherent cultures so as to be used for political harm that they would rather abandon or disarm the term than redefine it. They have also given an insight in to the practical limits of evolutionary theory. In the beginning of the twentieth century, the accentuation on coherence associated with both cultural relativism and functionalism had some vital impacts on public policy, in part because that emphasis suggested practical, short-term ways of protecting or manipulating cultural systems. In contrast, theories of cultural evolution stressed the grounds and effects of culture change, but only at a scale that was largely beyond the conscious influence of either individuals or governments. From that point of consideration, entertaining culture as a kind of text was one way of assenting that, in looking back, better accounts of the culture concept, which catered culture as a reason of behavior, may have done more systematic harm than good.

Another point of view is the emphasis on coherence in symbolic and structural anthropology was to refocus attention on culture change at a time scale shorter than that of evolution. Being better informed, we may also decide not to go to war over any one meaning of culture, but to choose our words and meanings for their practical effects, as part of an expected conversation among disciplines, or between researchers and the public.
It is also possible to impute the anthropologists as having skewed their science for political purposes. From this strategic perspective, cultural anthropology is not a fund of culture expertise, a cumulative, time- and place-independent knowledge of how culture works. Unlike most historians and ecologists, ethnographers work with data that is self-conscious, proactive, and talks back to us. The people whose cultures we analyze, including ourselves, change and contest that culture, read our work, and produce their own competing analyses, for their own purposes. From the viewpoint of traditional theories of scholarly objectivity, it is a serious handicap to have nowhere to stand outside our data. But in the search for forms of accountability that can evolve in response to new knowledge, this position may actually be an advantage. Anthropologists, willingly or not, are slowly learning to see our data as our community, of both analysis and action.

Talking about the rapid and dramatic changes, now taking place in the world, that have glowed an interest in how life in traditional cultures provides an insight into the quality of life of modern western societies, anthropology has often been defined by its adherence to fieldwork and the study of the exotic. But it also not only provides a rigorous and systematic analysis of the structures, processes and cultures of traditional societies, but a methodological approach to modern societies which makes the present strange. This ability to the present taken for granted world through the conceptual grids of traditional society raises the reader’s power to think theoretically and conceptually. Thus the aspects mentioned in the book are used to make sense of a wide range of evidence, and to compare modern western common sense understandings with those in traditional societies.
The added support that is gained through stretching indication from the educated to the ancient is carefully thought about in a number of ways. Anthropology has been built via a sequence of distinctly contrasting theories, and these theories see the world in different ways. At the venture of clarifying, evolutionary and ecological theory, functionalist ethnography, structuralism and symbolic anthropology, and anthropology as cultural critique, all are associated with their own distinctive methodologies ranging from direct observation to speculative abstraction. This approach, more related to an American definition, sees anthropology as an over-arching standard which makes reason of and promotes the power of these other disciplines when they are face to face with the cultural domain.

 

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