Sources on Contemporary Anthropology - 3

From an anthropologist in the United States:

Steven, I don't know those sources or anything about “worldview.” It's been common since the early 1990s to criticize “anti-essentialism” very strongly, for numerous reasons. I've heard Jonathan Friedman do it most flamboyantly. But the critique is not usually performed by anthropologists in their own right (in a technical sense), but rather by anthropologists on behalf of others who make essentialist claims. This seems most common among anthropologists who work with indigenous “Fourth World” peoples like native Australians and native Americans. The term I've seen most often is “strategic essentialism” or, in the case of Maximilian Forte, “anti-anti-essentialism”: http://openanthropology.wordpress.com/2007/10/20/anti-anti-essentialism-1/ So far as I know, Forte takes the term from Paul Gilroy's Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1992): http://www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/Gilroy.htm

Point 1 of Forte’s essay: Do not meet the essentialist claim that “My people have been living here for thousands of years” with the evidence that “your people” by their own admission and by the historical record came here in 1750. To do so would be anti-essentialist. But we shouldn't ignore facts, merely defer their application. Instead of ridiculing the speaker, try to figure out what he means when he makes that statement. Maybe we can learn how such essentialist statements serve in a strategy for gaining a more powerful voice.

Point 2: Two wrongs don't make a right, and strategic essentialism cannot be equated with essentialism.

Sources on Contemporary Anthropology - 2

From Steven Ybarrola, Professor of Cultural Anthropology, Asbury Theological Seminary:

Thanks, Edwin, for the thorough reply. I think you've nicely laid out some of the main criticisms of the “worldview” concept in modern anthropology. Indeed, one way to dismiss the work of an anthropologist today is to label him or her an “essentialist.” However, I'm not sure the concept has been totally abandoned in the discipline, and in fact there has been some critiques of the criticisms of worldview and “culture” more generally. My colleague here at Asbury Seminary, Mike Rynkiewich, examined a recent issue of Anthropology News, the monthly newsletter of the American Anthropological Association, and found several references in the articles to worldview (I don't recall off hand which issue it was) [Steven later clarified that Mike related this observation orally]. Also, one of the last books to be published by the eminent Christian anthropologist Paul Hiebert is entitled Transforming Worldviews: An Anthropological Understanding of How People Change, where Hiebert addresses various characteristics and types of worldviews (Bob Priest may have already mentioned this book in his post. For some reason I didn't receive it). An article I've found helpful on this subject is by the anthropologist William Douglass, “In Search of Juan de Onate: Confessions of a Cryptoessentialist,” Journal of Anthropological Research 56 (2): 137-163, 2000.