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The Death and Rebirth of Anthropology

Sherry B. Ortner

To cite this article: Sherry B. Ortner (2002) The Death and Rebirth of Anthropology, , 67:1, 7-8,
DOI: 10.1080/00141840220122995

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00141840220122995

Published online: 02 Dec 2010.

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 7

The Death and Rebirth

of Anthropology

Sherry B. Ortner
Columbia University, USA

T
he field of anthropology has gone through
a period of profound (self-)criticism for
the last two, even three, decades. The criti-
cisms have left virtually no stone unturned: theo-
ries and methods, fieldwork and writing, the poli-
tics of particular kinds of projects and of the an-
thropological enterprise as a w hole.
In response to those critiques, and in response
as well to a radically changing w orld, anthropol-
ogy has virtually reinvented itself as a field over
that period of time. There has been an enormous
Photo: Dan Dry reconceptualization of the objects of study, as well
as the forms and modes of carrying out anthro-
pological research. Indeed, the reconfiguration of anthropological objects,
subjects, methods, and languages has gone much further than perhaps any-
one has noticed. The anthropology contained in most of today’s journals would
be almost unrecognizable to Franz Boas or Bronislaw Malinowski. The new
foci of anthropological inquiry, the new topics and entities and groups and
formations under consideration, the new research designs that delocalize
ethnography and that conjoin ethnographic research with all sorts of other
methods, have by now been almost normalized.
The four papers that follow are meant to illustrate some of the many changes
in anthropological theory and practice under way. My own paper tackles the
question of class in the would-be classless United States, and I use my high
school graduating class as the ethnographic population. Akhil Gupta exam-
ines notions of reincarnation, and considers the way s in which taking these

ethnos, vol. 67 :1 , 2 002 (pp. 7 – 8 )

© Routledge Journals, Taylor and Francis Ltd, on behalf of the National Museum of Ethnography
iss n 001 4 -1 8 4 4 pr int/ iss n 1 4 69-5 8 8 x online. doi: 1 0.1 08 0/001 41 8 402 2 01 2 2 995
8 s herry b o rtner

ideas seriously would force us to reconceptualize theories of developmental

psy chology and social learning. Ulf Hannerz asks us to consider the anthro-
pological enterprise in light of the kinds of work done by foreign correspondents
in the world of public journalism. And Purnima Mankekar asks, by way of
examining Indian grocery stores in San Francisco, how one does an anthro-
pology of transnationality.
There is little left here of the stereotyped anthropological project. (I say
stereotyped because of course not all anthropology in the past fit the con-
ventional molds either.) In these projects ‘the field’ is no longer a single, pref-
erably far aw ay , place, but has become a much more complex configuration
of both time and space. The object of study is no longer someone’s ‘culture’
as an inert object, but rather the understanding of interconnected and changing
worlds of experience. Ethnography is still central to these projects, but it takes
many different forms, and is linked with a wide range of other way s of know-
ing. And finally , and most profoundly , the construction of the relationship
between anthropologists and those they study has been radically transformed.
This is so in part because anthropologists and ‘natives’ are increasingly one
and the same. But it is also so because, even when they are not, the work of
ethnographic research is no longer predicated on the otherness of the ‘na-
tive,’ but rather on what George Marcus has called ‘complicity ,’ the sense
that we are all subjects implicated in one another’s lives.

ethnos , vol. 67 :1 , 2 002 (pp. 7 – 8 )