Page 113 - Prathima Volume 12

A Review of Postcolonial Scholarship: Conducting Research on Culture and Society
at how human culture and social structure are changing over time, and he has also not
thought about the diversity in human culture and social structure. I should mention
here that Leach's work in Pul Eliya (1961) was in reaction to Radcliffe-Brown style
anthropological concerns.

This is all very different than Geertz (1973). For him, as for most cultural
anthropologists, the best way to understand the meaning of a cultural activity or even a
social structure (like marriage) is by seeing in the context of its daily use. Hence, if
anyone wants to know what marriage is in Sri Lanka, or purity in Jaffna, then he or she
had better do so by looking at how people actually do and act within marriages in Sri
Lanka, or at how people use notions of purity in Jaffna. Now it happens that this idea
that Geertz (1973) best way to observe the meaning of something is by seeing it in its
context of use (e.g., to know what a chair "means", sit in it like everyone else does), is
also found in the work of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1974). That is why
Geertz takes so much from Wittgenstein's "common language" philosophy, and why I
do too. But, really, its basic cultural anthropology too. Eventually, anthropologists
realized that there was a problem of representation in anthropology. The next section
will discuss this issue in detail.

4.2. The problem of Representation in Anthropology

The research undertaken through structural-functionalism framework reflected a kind
of continuation of colonial ethnographic tradition and the British social
anthropological tradition that came to dominate the anthropological research about
society and culture. As Cesaire (2013) mentions, the colonized can never recover from
the colonial wound as long as he or she is living with his or her colonizer. This indicates
the relationship between colonizers and colonized as a relation of domination and
submission in which the colonized is simply objectified. Further, this situation shows
how things are objectified and how culture, society and humans are depicted in a
particular way (Cesaire 2013). Such domination and objectification have caused an
issue of representation, positionality, and reflexivity, which anthropologists have
taken into account (Abu-Lughold, 2002; Du Bois, 1994; Trouillot, 2003; Marcus and
Fisher, 1999). For instance, Abu-Lughold (2002) disagrees with the Western notion of
female liberation that is as being inadequate to understand the veiling practice in
Afghanistan. Her argument makes claims about veiling without looking first at what
women who veil say about it being ethnocentric. She further critiques the people who
have overemphasized Islam as the key factor shaping gender relations in Afghanistan.
Ultimately, Abu-Lughold (2002) examines how resorting to cultural depictions and
explanations of behavior as reasons for taking certain action can lead to
misrecognition of the meaning of these practices.

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