Ethnohermeneutics in a postmodern world

Authors

• Armin Geertz University of Aarhus

DOI: https://doi.org/10.30674/scripta.67244

Keywords:

Postmodernism, Hermeneutics, Ethnology, Postcolonialism, Ethnocentrism, Primitivism, Methodology, Humanism

Abstract

During the last three decades a growing amount of literature has accumulated that, to quote from the title of a recent collection of essays, can aptly be summed up with the words: The Empire Writes Back. This literature addresses Western literature and science and definitively rejects much of that literature and its stereotypes. It shows how power is at the center of Western literature, and it therefore addresses issues of hegemony, language, place and displacement, racism and sexism, and it attempts to address a common post-colonial theory. This critical literature, sometimes extreme but usually insightful, coincided with the postmodern crisis in ethnography and other cultural sciences that have also assimilated literary theory. Some of the greatest philosophers, sociologists, psychologists, historians, and cultural scientists are either ignorant of world history or adamantly ethnocentric. Ethnohermeneutics is an appeal to professionalism in dealing with these cultures, especially in requiring the basics of the study of any other religion, namely, historical insight, linguistic knowledge.