ConclusionsThe followers of Foucaul

Conclusions
The followers of Foucault, Edward Said, and Johannes
Fabian have managed to do to anthropology what Said
says Westerners have done to the Orient or to the Other:
invent something that never existed in order to dominate
it. Their version of anthropology their invented anthropology
has served to "otherize" and marginalize anthropologists
and anthropological knowledge. (I might say
that it had dis empowered anthropology, but since when
did it have power [pace Fabian 1983]?) The result of this,
unless the process is arrested, will be a serious loss of a
large part of an important field of knowledge, to the detriment
of those who want to learn about human behavior.
Ironically, there is probably much less disagreement
about certain basic values and principles between the old time
practitioners of anthropology and many of their critics
than the critics have led us to believe. Both groups
would say that they believe in the importance and validity
of viewing and treating all peoples equally and with dignity;
there is explicit belief in the need to include history;
neither group sees cultures as isolated and unique; many
want to avoid reifying, homogenizing, and totalizing ';culture."
(See Brightman 1995 on "the imminent demise of
culture.") The problem is that the critics are either ignorant
of the common ground we share or are willfully distorting
the past for their own advantage. By making it
seem that an earlier anthropology regularly violated these
principles, the critics have delegitimized the field and discouraged
newcomers from benefiting from the many lessons
it has to teach about the world.
Perhaps there is nothing that can be done. Perhaps we
old-time anthropologists will simply have to accept what
seems to us as the inevitable decline of the world, or at
least of our world. But intellectual perspectives and fashions
come and go, and this current fashion will also soon
pass. There are already signs of fatigue and a coming reevaluation.
And when this happens there will still be a
need to deal with the most basic questions of human nature
and culture.
It is likely that there will be a return to many of the same
topics and approaches that marked our discipline in earlier
periods, and that the experiences and ideas of earlier generations
will still have a vital role to play. Those of us who
remember a time when a more or less unified field made
the sympathetic study of human behavior, in all its local
manifestations, the center of our holistic discipline have
an obligation to speak out to correct the distortions of the
record. Even more important, however, is to let the next
generation know of the value of the great corpus of anthropological
work that is available to them when the time
comes that they are once again interested in these problems
and approaches.
Those of us who studied anthropology before 1960
learned respect for other peoples and cultures. We learned
of the need to look at history and to consider the connections
among peoples, cultures, and institutions. But we
were also taught respect for the pragmatic, pluralistic, and
communal quest for knowledge, including that form we
call ;'science" (cf. Bernstein 1992:323-340). I believe it is
time for a reorientation of the dominant intellectual style
of the past three decades in anthropology. It is time to turn
away from a view of humanity that sees everything in
terms of a Nietzschean will-to-power, to return to our true
roots in both humanism and science. We might begin by
taking a fresh look into the ideas and substantive accomplishments of our fallible struggling predecessors in the field of anthropology.