The Nihilistic Turn
This essay explores what one might call the “nihilistic turn”: the structures of intellectual self-destruction that seem to have become embedded in social anthropology. Using the author’s long-term fieldwork in Greenland as a backdrop and from the point of view of the ethnographer in the field, it f...
| Published in: | Anthropos |
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| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Article in Journal/Newspaper |
| Language: | unknown |
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Nomos Verlag
2023
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| Online Access: | http://dx.doi.org/10.5771/0257-9774-2023-1-1 |
| Summary: | This essay explores what one might call the “nihilistic turn”: the structures of intellectual self-destruction that seem to have become embedded in social anthropology. Using the author’s long-term fieldwork in Greenland as a backdrop and from the point of view of the ethnographer in the field, it finds that much of the nihilistic navel-gazing that has come to characterise the subject is to be found wanting. The ethnographer is seldom in the superordinate position vis-à-vis his or her interlocutors that so many assume, and if we stopped insisting on framing questions of representation through the post-modernist lens of power differentials we would see that the supposed “power” that a western ethnographer has is often grossly exaggerated. [ethnography; entanglements; nihilism; Greenland] |
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