The faces of social and cultural anthropology after Writing Culture : challenges, perspectives and dilemmas : an introduction

"Writing Culture. The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography" is a significant contribution to anthropological literature and its publication date (1986) seems to be a conventional turning point in contemporary anthropology. However, the book’s academic reception usually includes only a one-dimensional reflections on anthropology’s entanglement in the contexts of language, rhetoric and representations. Although, they are significant aspects of anthropological knowledge, they do not deplete the discussion about the condition of contemporary anthropology. The authors, by indicating the realms of ontology, epistemology and self-descriptive nature of the fieldwork - as similarly important aspects of anthropological practice - open the discussion that concerns: the specific contexts in which anthropological knowledge is produced and distributed; the questions of anthropological theory and its pragmatics; and, the transformations and usefulness of analytical concepts in anthropological cognition