In and Out of the West: Reconstructing anthropology

Is anthropology simply a continuation of colonial domination and cultural imperialism by other means, or has it—since its nineteenth-century rebirth as a purportedly scientific discipline—produced reliable knowledge about the cultures it studies? Is anthropology a mirror—which reflects only the preoccupations of the (Western) anthropologist—or a window, through which it is possible to see, though not with the same eyes as their members, other cultures? Deriving from the 2002 Page-Barbour Lectures delivered by the French anthropologist Maurice Godelier at the University of Virginia, and supplemented by additional lectures and articles by the author