From hegemony to fragmentation: North American cultural anthropology over the past fifty years

This chapter reconstructs developments in U.S. cultural anthropology between 1973 and the first two decades of the twenty-first century. Adopting a Gramscian perspective, it proposes a four-phase chronology: 1973–1986 (Struggle for leadership), 1986–1990 (Transition); 1990–2001 (Hegemony), and 2001–2020 (Deflagration). Through the succession of the four phases, it shows the articulation of relationships between different theoretical perspectives and research centers. In particular, it maps the divergences between realist and materialist positions, on the one hand, and interpretive and deconstructionist positions, on the other. The essay then underlines how a new theoretical-analytical space has been developing since the early 1990s, defined by the relationships between theories of praxis, conceptualizations of power, cultural constructions of the self, gender and subjectivity, historiographical imagination and ethnography (understood as both practice and a critical awareness of the poetics and politics of representation). This theoretical scenario did not dissolve during the first decade of the new millennium; rather, research themes underwent a process of pulverization and there was a marked increase in researchers’ ethical, political, and cognitive engagement.