Anthropology Is Dead, Long Live Anthro(a)pology: Poststructuralism, Literary Studies, and Anthropology's "Nervous Present"

Writing Media Culture: Representation and Experience in Media Ethnography

“…But it was via Writing Culture that ethnography took a decidedly “postmodern” turn. Armed with the poststructuralist assertion that “there are no transcendental truths, no absolute grounds on which one can stand to make judgment, no metanarratives” (Moore, 1994, p. 348), postmodern ethnographers rejected the idea that there was a knowable reality to be seen, studied, captured, and simply reproduced via description. Challenged was the notion that by simply taking good field notes and establishing genealogies, ethnographers could readily tap into the reality of any cultural community for ethnographic analysis.…”

International Communication, Ethnography, and the Challenge of Globalization

“…It is with some irony, perhaps, that it is in precisely those areas that have been so epistemologically and politically hobbling to anthropology and other areas of humanistic inquiry (Moore, 1994)-the colonial encounter, imperial relationships, the textualization of experience, social and cultural description-that ethnography finds its potential to reinvigorate international communication theory. For this potential to be realized, though, the objective of intervention should be to articulate the relationship between globality and locality in dialogue with the politics and poetics of fieldwork.…”

Models and Methods in Social-Scientific Interpretation: a Response To Philip Esler

“…Descola seeks ways beyond what he sees as an unscientific subjection to relativism and ethnography on the part of anthropology. He seeks 'an explanatory theory of the variability of cultural phenomena, the goal being the elucidation of the deep structures that regulate ideologies and behaviours' (Descola 1992: 109 Rubel and Rosman 1994;Moore 1994;Barrett 1996: 5, 30-32, etc. Esler draws a contrast between 'model-users' and 'interpretivists' (1998a: 254; cf. 1995a: 4-8) suggesting that interpretivism -the approach of immersion in a culture, resulting in a 'thick description' (Clifford Geertz) -is far more difficult to use in the face of the partial and fragmentary data from the New Testament world, compared with models, 'with their distillation and accentuation of empirical data ' (1998a: 254).…”