Supreme Fictions: Is it Time to Choose?

Abstract

"Always Historicize!" Thus begins Frederick Jameson's book, The Political Unconscious. It is also the call to arms in the debates about poststructuralism and postmodern anthropology, at least in those led by the proponents of a more classically conceived Critical Anthropology. As though to fulfil Evans-Pritchard's prophecy that anthropology will become history or nothing at all, our practitioners seem extraordinarily concerned with the problem of history these days: our own disciplinary history (Jarvie, 1989); the history of those previously labelled, in Wolf's (1982) poetic terms, "the people without history"; the problem of historiography itself (de Certeau, 1988).