Földessy Edina, Szűcs Alexandra, Wilhelm Gábor: Tabula 8/1 (Néprajzi Közlemények; Budapest, 2005)

NIEDERMÜLLER PÉTER: Az antropológia metamorfózisai: perspektívák a (késő) modern társadalom kutatásában

PÉTER NIEDERMÜLLER The metamorphoses of anthropology: perspectives in the study of (late) modern society Since the end of the 1980s, scholars of the social sciences and humanities have had to reassess whether existing concepts, theoretical approaches, and methodologies can adequately describe and interpret the processes, phenomena, and logic of late modern society. The transformation to modernity and concurrent development of "post-societies" has necessitated both the re-thinking of the internal problems of individual sciences and the re-definition of the boundaries between disciplines. The present paper reviews the cultural and socioanthropological history of the past fifteen to twenty years within this context. Since the 1960s, the study of anthropology has been transformed from a largely homogenous area of the sciences organised along strict criteria into a deeply pluralistic discipline that incorporates a large number of different approaches. In fact, anthropology has become a typical late-modern discipline, with boundaries, paradigms, and methods that are fluid, rather than clearly and unequivocally definable. In the author's view, it is perhaps no longer worth speaking of anthropology, cultural studies, or sociology at all. In today's world, new processes may be exposed and interpreted only if existing borders are opened and new theoretic and methodological opportunities sought in each area of the sciences, with a focus not on the creation of new authoritative branches of the sciences, but on the development of fresh approaches of a transdisciplinary nature.