Category:New Directions 2000-today

Because we are in it, this is the most difficult era to characterize. But for the sake of argument, and the class, I'll suggest that since about 2000, anthropology has slowly turned away from critique and the kind of defensive regrouping of the 1990s, and become increasingly focused on a few directions:

1) Science and Technology Studies. This current, though it began in the 1980s, has become increasingly influential in anthropology in this period. This goes hand in hand with other forms of highly theoretical approaches to "studying up" in the anthropology of law, regulation, finance and expert knowledge.

2) Post-Critical Ethnography, Assemblage Theory and Actor-Network Theory. These highly descriptive forms of ethnography that claim that we should try to "follow the actors and phenomena" that we are interested in rather than to "reveal the underlying logics" behind those phenomena (as structuralism, post-structuralism and political economy try to do). This includes a revisiting of earlier more marginal kinds of theory, including cybernetics and pragmatism.

3) The end of the social and the ontological turn. Along with the strong critique of the concept of culture during the critical turn, we have now arrived at a moment where the entire idea of "social" (as distinct from "natural") is up for question. Following Bruno Latour's critique of the construction of the separation between nature and society (a separation which gave rise to anthropology in the late 19th century), many anthropologists now claim that they are not talking about only "social" things but of "things" in general.

Key thinkers in this conversation include:

Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway, Gilles Deleuze, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Marisol de la Cadena, Isabelle Stengers, Martin Holbraad, John Law, Stephen Helmreich, Matei Candea, Annemarie Mol, Elizabeth Povinelli, Marilyn Strathern.