Ethnicity, nationalism and the culture of the state: the 17th Edvard Westermarck Memorial Lecture

Abstract

[Extract] Since Westermarck, times have changed dramatically with regard to anthropology as a distinct academic subject. When he was working anthropology had barely established itself as a discipline. The boundaries between a variety of cognate approaches and interests had not yet been established. Moreover, anthropology had then not become bogged down in the methodologism and blinding professionalism that not infrequently resulted in a constrictive myopia and isolating exoticism. Anthropologists are still in the throes of methodologism. perhaps even more so now as there are strong attempts among anthropologists to Signal a paradigm shift which involves an urgency to break away from what is described as the cultural foundationalism, exoticism and single community-sited (rather than multi-sited) perspectives of earlier anthropologists. These kinds of redirections are connected with current processes of globalisation which have seen the return to dominance of metropolitan thinking that a fledging anthropology once enjoyed challenging (see Kapferer 2000). Many of the new directions are important, but some attempts to sweep away a central anthropological concern with the cultural and a retreat from the exotic have threatened much of value in the anthropological project that was to develop after Westermarck's time and to which certain aspects of Westermarck's work pointed, nonetheless.