INDIGENOUS ETHNOGRAPHY, POLITICAL CORRECT NESS AND THE PROJECT OF A COSMOPOLITAN ANTHROPOLOGY

A concern with questions of ''identity'' has characterized anthropolog y in the 80's and early 90's. It is argued that this is due to a new p ositioning of cultural relativism in postmodernist disguise - social, historical, and comparative problems tend to be neglected by this rang e of approaches, which emphasize subjectivity and ideology as their ma in references. The author shows that such premises lead to a reductio ad absurdum of scientific social anthropology and are untenable. Inste ad, the advantages of discourses among experts for the scientific vali dity of social anthropology are elaborated, specifically for a non-rel ativist discipline of the social sciences.