DECONSTRUCTING CRITICAL ANTHROPOLOGY: Transcendence and Subversion in Anthropology and Elsewhere

Abstract

In a review of Critical Anthropology, this paper argues that Critical Anthropology misinterprets 'deconstruction' because it continually aims to transcend Western metaphysical categories. Drawing on my fieldwork experience in Papua New Guinea, I propose instead a self-deconstructing ethnography that locates itself in inescapable interpretive paradoxes by considering the postmodern 'withdrawal of reality' through an examination of the difference between both our own and others' ideal concepts, and the historical enactment of those concepts, and how these ideals are subverted through the inimical historical interaction between Western and non-Western 'other' cultures.