Blick zurück im Zorn: Ethnologie als Kulturkritik
Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 122.1997:3-17
Anthropology as cultural critique
##Ethnology is the discipline of boundary-transgressions and borderland-existences. The discipline would not be what it is without commuting between the own and the other or the seemingly familiar and the strange. Ultimately ethnology depends on the continuous dialectic matching of such dual aspects. According to Gadamer, 'standing-in-between' is the necessary precondition for 'understanding'. Ethnology, as the science (wissenschaft) which by definition 'stands-in-between', therefore is THE hermeneutic discipline. 'Standing-in-between', however, does not imply that the ethnologist works free of values or without taking a position. In the contrary, it means to always already operate in a political context. Intentionally or not, as an active agent or as a passive and abused information-provider, the ethnologist moves in a political space. In the first mode, as an intentionally active agent, the ethnologist has the opportunity to render visible what had been kept invisible, and s/he may critically expose the revealed issues to discussion. In such a case ethnology is culture critique. The author demonstrates her critical approach looking through the lens of kinship anthropology at the current concern with human technology in German society. She analyzes responses to new techniques of reproduction and organ transplantation by showing how these affect prevailing notions of kinship that had been traditionally constructed through the medium of the body in German culture.##
Keywords: culture critique, anthropology and culture critique, genetic engineering, politics and anthropology, hermeneutics, border and anthropology
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