Vassos Argyrou. Anthropology and the Will to Meaning: A Postcolonial Critique. London: Pluto Press, 2002. Vi + 129 pp., notes, references, index.

Extract

Working ethnographers know that cultural contradictions often hide in plain sight. We may represent such contradictions in our monographs as deep, dark secrets it has taken an expert to unveil, but such nods to the demands of academic theatre tend to violate the sense in which they are very much visible on the surface of daily life. Argyrou's argument focuses on one such contradiction in the culture of anthropology itself: quite obviously, anthropologists both make a living out of claiming that cultures and people shaped by cultures are different from one another while at the same time attacking those who propound racist and ethnocentric arguments by asserting that at bottom people and cultures are in the most important respects all the same. The burden of Argyrou's short, impressively well-argued monograph is to show that this contradiction is present in all versions of anthropology (Victorian, modern, post-modern) and that it dooms the discipline to a kind of incoherence, at least in theoretical and political terms, if not ethnographic ones.