Aside from archaeology,
anthropology, the other discipline typically concerned with knowledge of alterity and ‘the other’, has produced much literature in attempting to re-configure conceptual tools to accurately investigate and describe these new (post-) conditions of global existence (e.g. Appadurai 1990; Appadurai 1996; Clifford 1986; Gupta 1997; Rosaldo 1989). Of relevance has been the
recent anthropological criticism (Robertson 2002; Salzman 2002)
of ‘reflexive’, ‘positional’, approaches, such as those exemplified by Renato Rosaldo’s (1989) of ‘positionality epistemology’ and Jean Briggs (1970) ‘self-experiential ethnography’. The concern is that an ‘egoistic’ positioning and self-concern in situating personal biases and assumptions results in a myopic, essentialist idea of identity which delimits concern with inter-subjective understanding (Robertson 2002:790, Salzman 2002:809). Arguably, with the ‘un-bundling’ of meta-narratives, particularly positivist science, to ground and justify supra-individual knowledge claims, a
reaction has been the ‘retreat’ to an individual-based interpretive platform, which, if limited in its consensual acceptance, nonetheless ‘does what it can’ in avoiding imposing a thinly justified and even exploitative knowledge regimes.
Return to Home
Return to [link]
