From Anthropology to Meta-ethnography. Around the Problem of Changing the Paradigm in Reflection on Contemporary Culture

Abstract

The article discusses the problem of textualization of culture and shows the process of moving anthropology towards ethnography. The author looks for the answer to the question about the final shape that anthropology assumed today, and also about the significance of this kind of change for the “science” of culture itself. The starting point of the considerations is the assumption that if deconstructivism in postmodernism undermined the legitimacy and sense of reading the text (reading the text of culture is not a sense and meaning reading, but its production), perhaps anthropology is going in a similar direction today. The article consists of two main parts. The first discusses the issue of postmodernist reconstruction of culture, including changes occurring within the subject and the object of anthropological cognition. The second part talks about a new way of “researching” culture, which takes on the character of the meta-reflection of ethnography. Three main but different interpretations of culture as a text have been discussed here: interpretive anthropology, meta-ethnography and “theory” of G. Steiner’s translation.