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Sherry B. Ortner
To cite this article: Sherry B. Ortner (2002) The Death and Rebirth of Anthropology, , 67:1, 7-8,
DOI: 10.1080/00141840220122995
Sherry B. Ortner
Columbia University, USA
T
he field of anthropology has gone through
a period of profound (self-)criticism for
the last two, even three, decades. The criti-
cisms have left virtually no stone unturned: theo-
ries and methods, fieldwork and writing, the poli-
tics of particular kinds of projects and of the an-
thropological enterprise as a w hole.
In response to those critiques, and in response
as well to a radically changing w orld, anthropol-
ogy has virtually reinvented itself as a field over
that period of time. There has been an enormous
Photo: Dan Dry reconceptualization of the objects of study, as well
as the forms and modes of carrying out anthro-
pological research. Indeed, the reconfiguration of anthropological objects,
subjects, methods, and languages has gone much further than perhaps any-
one has noticed. The anthropology contained in most of today’s journals would
be almost unrecognizable to Franz Boas or Bronislaw Malinowski. The new
foci of anthropological inquiry, the new topics and entities and groups and
formations under consideration, the new research designs that delocalize
ethnography and that conjoin ethnographic research with all sorts of other
methods, have by now been almost normalized.
The four papers that follow are meant to illustrate some of the many changes
in anthropological theory and practice under way. My own paper tackles the
question of class in the would-be classless United States, and I use my high
school graduating class as the ethnographic population. Akhil Gupta exam-
ines notions of reincarnation, and considers the way s in which taking these