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Journal article
To Be or Not to Be a Humanist?: Anthropological Stage Fright in the Age of Cultural Relativism
Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature (SPELL), Vol.19(2007: Cultures in Contact), pp.59-74
2007
Abstract
The strange centrality of Hamlet in Laura Bohannan's Shakespeare in the Bush (1966) and Clifford Geertz's From the Native's point of view (1974) effectively hides from interpretive anthropology in its formative years its own anxieties about the consequences of relativism for ethnographic authority. By returning to Shakespeare's Hamlet, Bohannan's and Geertz's essays return, ironically, to the universalist paradigm they each ostensibly reject. Hamlet, then, becomes the contested site wherein each essay discovers its inability to authorize the agenda it has set for itself. Specifically, the Shakespearean text becomes the site wherein cultural relativism as an epistemological stance fails to authorize the ethnographic subjects who have, however unwittingly, come to its defense. It is precisely because of the anxieties it provokes that interpretive anthropology's paradigm of cultural relativism continues to haunt even our most contemporary theories of cross-cultural contact.
Details
- Title
- To Be or Not to Be a Humanist?
- Publication Details
- Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature (SPELL), Vol.19(2007: Cultures in Contact), pp.59-74
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Publisher
- Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH und Co. KG
- Identifiers
- 99381304971906600
- Academic Unit
- College of Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities; English
- Language
- English