Whereas many American and British a

Whereas many American and British anthropologists
who grew up during the Great Depression were inclined
toward socialism and Marxism, they still believed in anthropology
as a science. But now even the truths of Marxism
are in doubt. The hoped-for revolution has not come
about, and the many governments that claimed inspiration
and guidance from Marx and his heirs were dismal failures.
Today, for many of those who counted on the imminent
coming of the great transformation, the hold of capitalism and patriarchal hegemony is seen as so great and so
corrupting that they no longer hope for anything better.
And the whole Enlightenment ideal, humanism, and all
that went with it are condemned as nothing but lies-a system
of domination through which European and American
males control all others.


For inspiration, some members of the generation now at
the center of influence looked to other sources outside anthropology,
to such philosophers as Nietzsche and
Heidegger, to the critical theory of the Frankfurt school,
to Gramsci, and to more recent French writers: Foucault,
Derrida, and Lacan. A common theme of the new anthropology,
derived from these writers, is an obsession with
power and domination, which must be unmasked in all human
discourse and intercourse. Many seem to agree with
Nietzsche that "life itself is essentially appropriation,in -
jUIy, overpowering of the strange and weaker, suppression,
severity, imposition of one's own forms, incorporation
and, at the least and mildest, exploitation . . ." ([1886]
1973:175; emphasis in original). The apparent positives
such as love, altruism, justice, equality, consideration
for others, order, harmony, peace, sanity, health, community,
knowledge, science-are but the tricky words
used to befuddle and benumb the critical faculties of the
dominated in order for the dominant to achieve and maintain
control. They are elements in Nietzsche's "slave morality"
and "herd morality" ( [ 1 886] 1 973: 1 78).


Here, for example, is a prominent anthropological example
of this approach from Johannes Fabian's widely
cited Time and the Other (1983:1). Speaking of"Anthropology's claim to power" (which, he says, is part of its "essence"
and "not a matter of accidental misuse") and of its
"alliance with the forces of oppression," Fabian says,
"Nowhere is [it] more clearly visible . . . than in the uses of
Time anthropology makes when it strives to constitute its
own object-the savage, the primitive, the Other. It is by
diagnosing anthropology's temporal discourse that one
rediscovers the obvious, namely that there is no knowledge
of the Other which is not also a temporal, a historical,
a political act."


The postmodernist condernnation of the "Enlightenment
project" has been harnessed to the dissatisfactions,
the pain, the struggles, of the oppressed and powerless.
Anthropology, dealing as it does with the most intimate,as well as the most public, of behaviors-of all people in all parts of the world therefore lives very close to the front lines. By our very involvement with all peoples we are engaged
with those folks that our critics call "the Other." We
are therefore vulnerable to criticism and attack on many
grounds. As a result, an atmosphere of intolerance and
generalized condemnation of anthropology and anthropologists
has become more than fashionable; indeed, it is
virtually obligatory, both among anthropologists themselves
as well as among a widening group of critics outside
the field. For example, the general complicity of anthropology
and anthropologists with "the project of colonialism"
seems now to be accepted as a fact rather than as a
question requiring investigation and demonstration. On
the other hand, the political and intellectual roots of this
critique itself, very much the product of the Cold War, are
left uninterrogate.


But this mood shall pass, because all intellectual moods
and fashions do. The problem is, where will anthropologists
turn when the current fashions have been set aside? In
such cases it is common practice to take another look at
earlier ideas, but anthropologists who might want to do
this will face unusual difficulties.


A terrible gap has opened up-an awesome chasm, in
fact separating this generation of students and younger
anthropologists from the knowledge, data, theories, and
understandings developed in the field up to about 1965.
The current generation has been told many things about
the anthropology of the past, things that cast doubt upon
the writings produced by the practitioners of all older anthropology.
These anthropologists were not only wrong;
they were probably sinful as well. (Thus George Marcus
speaks of iithe positivist sins of the past" [the back cover,
Taussig 1987].) It would seem that the only reason to read
them is to produce devastating deconstructions and critical
readings. That there may be ideas that could be of use
today, or bodies of data that can be appreciated and built
upon, seems out of the question. This is very troubling because
the intellectual problems that are at the heart of our
field have not been solved by the hermeneuticists, the
postmodernists,the poststructuralists, the postcolonialists.
To quote Santayana's warning once more, with dismaying pertinence:" Those who cannot remember the past
are condemned to repeat it." The basic questions that our
predecessors struggled with 100 years ago are still with us,
but the hard-won lessons they taught us are being forgotten.
(Roseberry makes a similar point [1995:155, 173-
174].) This is a potentially serious problem, and it is time
for us to begin taking a new look at the realities of anthropology's
past before it is too late, before too much is forgotten.