Category:The Critical Turn 1968-1990

It's a bit hard to put a date on when the Critical Turn happened in Anthropology, but many people think of the student protests of May 1968 in France as a key moment, and the disciplinary shifts were focused on France and the US. During this era, Anthropology was dominated by theories that critiqued and dismantled earlier theories, primarily because they were not attentive enough to historical change, to social complexity or to power dynamics. This had meant, among other things, that anthropology was complicit in perpetuating colonial power relations.

Post-Structuralism in France was one of the early, dramatic breaks, happening at the end of the 1960s, but by 1979 it had been joined by Post-Colonialism, Feminism, Post-Marxism and, in the US, the Critique of Representation (associated with Cultural Studies and Post-Modernism). A lot of this work was iconoclastic, beginning from the position that everything that came before needed to be turned on its head, and that entirely new ways of writing needed to be invented. Theorists in this period began reading much more widely, revisiting philosophy and literary theories, and authors such as Antonio Gramsci and Walter Benjamin (minor Marxists from the 1920s and 1930s) came into vogue.

One of the key effects of this, particularly in North American anthropology, is what became known as the "reflexive turn," in which anthropologists were expected to be much more aware and explicit about their own positions in research, including the political consequences of their work and the way that their own identities figured into research.

Some of the more prominent authors in this period include: Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Edward Said, Pierre Bourdieu, Talal Asad, James Clifford, George Marcus, Paul Rabinow, Vincent Crapanzano, Marilyn Strathern, Renato Rosaldo, Eric Wolf, Adam Kuper, Christopher Gregory, Nancy Munn, Marshall Sahlins, Michael Taussig, Louise Lamphere, Sherry Ortner, Jonathan Parry.