Pina-Cabral, J.
(2010)
The door in the middle: six conditions for anthropology.
In:
Culture Wars: Context, Models and Anthropologists’ Accounts.
EASA Series
.
Berghahn, New York, pp. 152-169.
ISBN 9781845456412.
Abstract
Some of the best minds in anthropological theory over the past decades have been
warning us that modernist anthropological theory has come to a serious impasse. Modern
anthropological theory comprises the conceptual frameworks that emerged in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, reaching its peak in the 1930s and 1940s, and then
entered into a process of critical self-questioning around and after the 1960s. Fifty years after
the optimistic formulations of Parsons, Kroeber, Fortes and Gluckman, the central concepts that
laid the ground for the development of our discipline are viewed with suspicion by most
anthropologists today. In this paper, I argue that we can neither deny the value of the critique
nor resign ourselves to the air of gloom that results from it. I suggest some ways out of the
impasse.
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