Out of Context: The Persuasive Fictions of Anthropology [and Comments and Reply]

The history of British social anthropology indicates a dramatic gulf between Frazer and Malinowski. The way in which that gulf is constructed is illuminated by analysis of a subsequent gulf between so-called modernist and postmodern epochs in anthropological writing. Each generation creates its own sense of history, and thus its disjunctions: modernists regard Frazer as failing to deal with the technical problem of elucidating alien concepts by putting them into their social context; postmoderns recover from the past diverse ironies in the writings of anthropologists, including Frazer, stimulated by their own play with contexts. I argue that Frazer is out of context in both cases, on the technical-literary grounds of the kinds of books he wrote. He did not organise his texts in a modernist way, but neither did his pastiche develop out of those contextualising exercises of Malinowskian anthropology which postmoderns attempt o overcome. Present-day concern with fiction in anthropology addresses new problems in the writer/reader/subject relationship which highlight issues to do with communication. Postmodems have to live the paradox of self-representation. A attempt is made to separate out the intentions of pastiche and juxtaposition from the images of jumble and confusion, asking what social world is fantasised by those images and whether we really would wish to return to Frazer.

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