Anthropological perspectives: Disturbing the structures of power and knowledge

Abstract

Social and cultural anthropology has developed into a pragmatic discipline, rejecting both the colonial and nationalist power paradigms with which it shares a common history and the extremes of a morally isolationist cultural relativism. It has instead developed into a pragmatic critique of universalist ideology, especially insofar as that ideology threatens to impose a single, often repressive cultural paradigm - sometimes represented as a monolithic image of 'modernity' - on the world at large. Its practitioners - represented in this second special issue of the ISSJ on anthropology by a series of articles on themes ranging from the aesthetic and the cosmological to questions of ecology and..