Category:Post-Cold War regrouping 1989-today

For many anthropologists, the Critical Turn created a major crisis in the discipline. With so much criticism floating around, it was difficult to know what one was able to say or do without being accused of being a patriarchal white colonialist humbug. The end of the Cold War in some ways increased this sense of crisis, as many Anthropologists who had understood their politics in terms of Communism and Capitalism no longer felt they understood the landscape they were operating in. During the early 1990s, a lot of work published in the discipline displays this anxiety, as authors tried to be hyper-vigilant about their positioning and the genealogies that they relied on.

Nonetheless, after the critical creativity of the 1980s, the post-Cold War saw a few new strands of thinking emerge and become dominant. One was an abiding concern with bodies of power, such as international development regimes, globalization and the state, and authors such as Michel Foucault and Antonio Gramsci became particularly influential in figuring this out. Somewhat later, this will give rise to the newly envigorated studies of Law and Science as cultures of power. A large debate about Structure and Agency emerged out of Post-Structuralism, in which people tried to figure out how much freedom individuals had within repressive systems. And a new style of activist or engaged anthropology rose to prominence in which authors insisted that their work be politically engaged and focused on advocacy even as the political field became more complicated.

Key thinkers in this era include: Lila Abu-Lughod, James Scott, Anna Tsing, Nancy Schepper-Hughes, James Ferguson, Akhil Gupta, Aiwah Ong, Paul Farmer, Arturo Escobar, Jean Comaroff, John Comaroff, Carla Freeman, Michel Rolph-Trouillot, Arjun Appadurai, Stephen Collier, Marilyn Strathern, Veena Das, Kim Fortun, Timothy Mitchell, Carolyn Humphries, Henrietta Moore.