The door in the middle: six conditions for anthropology

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.