Postmodernism

Postmodernism

With the end of colonialism and the emergence of a seemingly new world order, there raised a demand that research be useful and relevant, indicating that knowledge for its own sake was insufficient. As a result of this, what emerged was a new focus on 'development' and 'modernization' in the form of postmodernism. In these changing times, anthropology has come into contact with a variety of evolving concepts, including hybridity, montage, fluidity, and deconstruction. The question remains, how these concepts reflect the social, cultural and political changes that are occurring in study of anthropology today. Postmodernism is an intellectual movement that promotes itself as the 'antithesis' of modernism, resulting from the intensification, radicalization, or transformation of the processes of modernity. (Barfield, 368) The term was introduced in the late 1940's, however, the turn towards, if not the origin of postmodernism in anthropology, can be traced to a single publ...