Postmodernism
Postmodernism
¡§There is a sense in which if one sees modernism as the culture of modernity, postmodernism is the culture of postmodernity¡¨ (Sarup 1993).
¡§Modern, overloaded individuals, desperately trying to maintain rootedness and integrity...ultimately are pushed to the point where there is little reason not to believe that all value-orientations are equally well-founded. Therefore, increasingly, choice becomes meaningless. According to Baudrillard (1984: 38-9), we must now come to terms with the second revolution, ¡§that of the Twentieth Century, of postmodernity, which is the immense process of the destruction of meaning equal to the earlier destruction of appearances. Whoever lives by meaning dies by meaning" (Ashley 1990).
Ryan Bishop, in a concise article in the Encyclopedia of Cultural Anthropology (1996), defines post-modernism as an eclectic movement, originating in aesthetics, architecture and philosophy. Postmodernism espouses a systematic skepticism of grounded theoretical perspectives. Applied to anthropology, this skepticism has shifted focus from the observation of a particular society to the observation of the (anthropological) observer.
Postmodernity concentrates on the tensions of difference and similarity erupting from processes of globalization: the the accelerating circulation of people, the increasingly dense and frequent cross-cultural interactions, and the unavoidable intersections of local and global knowledge.
"Postmodernists are suspicious of authoritative definitions and singular narratives of any trajectory of events.¡¨ (Bishop 1996: 993). Post-modern attacks on ethnography are based on the belief that there is no true objectivity. The authentic implementation of the scientific method is impossible.
According to Rosenau, postmodernists can be divided into two very broad camps, Skeptics and Affirmatives.
h Skeptical Postmodernists- They are extremely critical of the modern subject. They consider the subject to be a
¡§There is a sense in which if one sees modernism as the culture of modernity, postmodernism is the culture of postmodernity¡¨ (Sarup 1993).
¡§Modern, overloaded individuals, desperately trying to maintain rootedness and integrity...ultimately are pushed to the point where there is little reason not to believe that all value-orientations are equally well-founded. Therefore, increasingly, choice becomes meaningless. According to Baudrillard (1984: 38-9), we must now come to terms with the second revolution, ¡§that of the Twentieth Century, of postmodernity, which is the immense process of the destruction of meaning equal to the earlier destruction of appearances. Whoever lives by meaning dies by meaning" (Ashley 1990).
Ryan Bishop, in a concise article in the Encyclopedia of Cultural Anthropology (1996), defines post-modernism as an eclectic movement, originating in aesthetics, architecture and philosophy. Postmodernism espouses a systematic skepticism of grounded theoretical perspectives. Applied to anthropology, this skepticism has shifted focus from the observation of a particular society to the observation of the (anthropological) observer.
Postmodernity concentrates on the tensions of difference and similarity erupting from processes of globalization: the the accelerating circulation of people, the increasingly dense and frequent cross-cultural interactions, and the unavoidable intersections of local and global knowledge.
"Postmodernists are suspicious of authoritative definitions and singular narratives of any trajectory of events.¡¨ (Bishop 1996: 993). Post-modern attacks on ethnography are based on the belief that there is no true objectivity. The authentic implementation of the scientific method is impossible.
According to Rosenau, postmodernists can be divided into two very broad camps, Skeptics and Affirmatives.
h Skeptical Postmodernists- They are extremely critical of the modern subject. They consider the subject to be a