Question to Radio Yerevan: Is it correct that Grigori Grigorievich Grigoriev won a luxury car at the All-Union Championship in Moscow?

Answer: In principle, yes. But first of all it was not Grigori Grigorievich Grigoriev, but Vassili Vassilievich Vassiliev; second, it was not at the All-Union Championship in Moscow, but at a Collective Farm Sports Festival in Smolensk; third, it was not a car, but a bicycle; and fourth he didn’t win it, but rather it was stolen from him.

http://www.arthurversluis.com/Antimodernism.pdf
“Antimodernism,” in Telos 137 (2006): 96-130.

“the only intervention I’d make — other than going back and making sure I spell Tyler’s name correctly! ”

Haraway deserves the same courtesy.

Your point about the posturing is well-taken!

For Hitler and Boas at least one of the points of divergence would seem to be the definition of that which constitutes benefit or injury to the community.

This is a wise and important observation. It reminds me of Richard Rorty’s observation that the theories of language articulated by John Dewey, an American social democrat, and Martin Heidegger, a German Nazi, are very similar. Rorty’s larger point is that there is no necessary connection between theories of this or that and the political positions of those who propose them.

“There is no such thing as truth. Science is a social phenomenon and like every other social phenomenon is limited by the benefit or injury it confers on the community.”

Hmmm… There must be a German Romantic thing going on here. My understanding of the Boasians’ take on science is that good science and good for the community were of a piece. The original post that got caught in the spam filters amounted to this: If moral certainty and empirical confidence are where National Socialism and Critical Anthropology meet where do they diverge? For Hitler and Boas at least one of the points of divergence would seem to be the definition of that which constitutes benefit or injury to the community.

I was curious about Soja’s book Postmodern Geographies, and found this comment in a review: “If postmodernism is a rejection of the metanarratives of modernism (as it is in part according to Lyotard) then the type of geography that Soja is describing is not very postmodern. “Postmodern Geographies” questions but ultimately deifies Marx, and in doing so celebrates the inter-era significance of one of the most rigid and deterministic metanaritives [sic].”

Up-dated marxism is about as far from postmodernism as one can get.

“There is no such thing as truth. Science is a social phenomenon and like every other social phenomenon is limited by the benefit or injury it confers on the community.”

I got this from Glyn Daniel (1962). The Idea of Prehistory, p. 147.

@Barbara Piper – on poststructuralism vs. postmodernism. As a theory-challenged materialist archaeologist, I hesitate to get involved in such rarified topics (that I really don’t understand), but hey this is just a blog: According to postmodernist geographer Edward Soja, poststructuralism is merely a “safer sounding label” for postmodernism. (Soja, “Postmodernism in Geography, 2001, Int. Encycl Soc. Behav Sciences, p. 11863).

She is incorrect. It happens.

153

source of insight and promise of innocence — is undermined, probably fatally. The transcendent authorization of interpretation is lost, and with it the ontology grounding ‘Western’ epistemology. But the alternative is not cynicism or faithlessness, that is, some version of abstract existence, like the accounts of technological determinism destroying ‘man’ by the ‘machine’ or ‘meaningful political action’ by the ‘text’. Who cyborgs will be is a radical question; the answers are a matter of survival. Both chimpanzees and artefacts have politics, so why shouldn’t we (de Waal, 1982; Winner, 1980)?

I labor under the assumption that post-structuralist thought is defined as such by way of its origin as a direct challenge to the underpinnings of structuralism. I have long taken postmodernism to be a term identifying either the black hats or white hats of the Science Wars. YMMV.

Postmodernists in fields such as architecture – where our contemporary use of the term began – first rejected the possibility of judging among the positions from which observations are made, and thus adopted that famous stance of incredulity toward master narratives, and explored the possibilities of mixing genres in building design. If we decline to say that this position or that position is somehow better, more valid, more true, then all positions are equally acceptable, even when mixed and blended. This is the point of the HRAF-as-postmodern-text argument. By jumbling together any and all mentions of ethnographic ‘data’ regardless of the source – missionaries, travelers, explorers, anthropologists, colonial officials, et al – HRAF suspends any judgment about the relative merit of these positions. My earlier point was that most anthropologists have been reluctant to adopt this come-what-may postmodernism, though the very few experiments that I know of, like Taussig’s “Shamanism…” have been interesting.

Poststructuralists, one the other hand, beginning with the same recognition of the positionality of observations, adopted a more critical stance toward the merits or value of positions, deconstructing (I use the term pointedly) the often implicit politics of the position. Malinowski’s Trobriand observations were male-centric, and were thus incomplete, even flawed until Weiner provided a female-centric position from which to make a new set of observations. Evans-Pritchard’s colonialism and primitivism led him to excise material from his Nuer ethnography, and his choice of photographs was driven in part by his homosexuality. And so on. When Donna Haraway developed her proposal that a racist colonial agenda in Africa was being recast as “primate studies”, I seriously doubt that she regarded this as merely a shift in positionality with no political consequences. By asking what is at stake in this or that conception of ‘gender’, Butler was not trivializing any and all positions.

Consequently, it’s hard to imagine that activism and postmodernism in the sense in which Lyotard explicated it – in his “report” to the Academy – are especially compatible, but human beings have great talent at managing cognitive dissonance. On the other hand, activism and poststructuralism are a close fit, and most anthropologists would be happy to side-step the criticisms that are often leveled against postmodernism.

As for you, I’ll adopt that wonderfully postmodern expression that my kids use so often: whatever.