As an anthropologist (trained at a notoriously post-modern school) who now works as a planner in the ad world, I agree with some of Grant’s points. It took me a few years to learn keep the post-modern side of me in check (one of my former professors aptly referred to this inner-monologue as, “the deconstructionist in the basement.”) I resisted at first, feeling like I was compromising some higher value by presenting ideas and strategy without the post-colonial check-lists included.

In the end though, simplicity won out. My stance now is that if we have to include Adorno and Lacan in every work we will only come off as irrelevant elitists. And that’s a shame, because the work being done today in anthropology (pomo and otherwise) is incredibly important. It falls on deaf ears because it is couched within so many post-colonial concerns that the message is muddled, if heard at all.

I disagree with Grant in some ways: I think throwing out all of PoMo Anthropology is throwing the baby out with the bath water. It’s irrelevant to present to clients, but the learnings from post-modern works are invaluable to help you recognize trends (especially for a Canadian media co!)

We have a similar phenomenon in economics, although the “modernist” position is the mainstream one there. The post-Keynesians and Austrians and others who decry monolithic positivism end up saying essentially the same thing about every topic–”all is flux”–while the “neoclassical” pragmatic positivists come up with zillions of diverse stories about different aspects of the economic world.

I love you.

Per “mannerist anthropology” divorcing itself from broader real world applicability — I’m reminded of the recent “Design For the Other 90%” initiative in the design world.

Some designers got disgusted that Design (with a capital D) was seen (at best) as making insanely expensive toys for rich people or (at worst) as putting lipstick on pigs. The “Other 90%” group encouraged designers to focus on problems faced by 90% of people in the world: the need for affordable, functional, sanitary — and yes well-designed — housing, clothing, water, food, etc.

Sometimes I think we need an “anthropology for the other 90%” — a Plain Style, practical anthropology for people who aren’t focused on the intellectual esoterica, but who are working with organizations to develop an improved understanding of the world, with the goal of more effective decisions and informed action.

Each line of Shakespeare’s Sonnet #20 contains the four letters h, e (or u), w and s. Clearly, this was a deliberate signal, since writing to achieve this took effort. We don’t know for certain what the signal meant, or who Shakespeare intended the receiver of the signal to be. (Perhaps it referred to HEnry WriotheSley, his patron in the 1590s.) Is the quality of the poetry or the extent of our apprecation of Shakespeare’s artistry reduced by noticing this signal? No, the reverse is true.

But, how we view mannerism in art depends on what we think art is for. Perhaps the same is true for anthropology. What is anthropology for? If the main function of anthropology is to support better marketing or to perceive the likely intentions of our enemies in a war, then perhaps mannerism gets in the way.

Or, perhaps not. During WW II, the US Federal Communications Commission expended enormous efforts to monitor and understand the news broadcasts of the enemy. If the Nazi leadership broadcast some message X, did they mean just “X”, or did they mean, “We want the German people to believe X”, or, “We want our enemies to believe X”, or, “We want our enemies to believe that we believe X”, or, “We want our agents in enemy territory to believe X”, or, “We want our agents in enemy territory to believe Y”, and so on.

Getting to the bottom of these signals would not be possible without a deep understanding of the culture of the enemy, right down to and including, their use of irony, sarcasm, metaphor, euphemism, euphuism, and all those other mannerist tropes known to literary criticism. (See: Alexander L. George [1959]: “Propaganda Analysis: A Study of Inferences Made from Nazi Propaganda in World War II”. Row, Peterson and Company, Evanston, IL). I think it no coincidence that the CIA’s long-term chief of counter-intelligence during the Cold War was James J. Angleton, someone who had studied poetry.

First, there are zero definitive conclusions that can emerge from ethnography because it is a translation, and in every translation there is something lost and something added. Observing languaged action in one culture and translating it to the language of the ethnographer alone does this.

Second, it would seem that someone who is doing ethnography for the sake of solving a problem that a reflexive, systems-aware approach would be NECESSARY.

As for the comment above mine, I find it amazing that we even cling to any sense of modernism, given the nature of culture worldwide. How one can assume a static, measurable sense of self in a hypermediated culture blows my mind.

Granted, this isn’t how postmodernism has worked out in academia. But that’s because academia would manage to fuck anything up. Modernism wasn’t any more functional when it was the dominant research paradigm.