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Palestinian cause as his heartfelt political commitment, influencing many in academia
to side with Palestine.
Shrichakradhar.com
Two important intellectual streams converge in postcolonialism. One is Marxism, and
particularly Leninism. Marxism was a great political influence in the second half of the
19th century and the 20th century, and became a major academic influence as well.
Popular in Europe throughout the 20th century, Marxism became influential in North
American academia during and after the 1960s. But with the decline and fall of the
Soviet Union and communism in the late 1980s, Marxism lost some of its luster. Lenin’s
Imperialism, which updated Marx by applying his theory to the wider imperial and
colonial fields, has continued to be an inspiration. Postcolonialism, without
acknowledging its debt too explicitly, has drawn on Marxism and Leninism, although,
like Foucault, a more modern and direct influence on postcolonialism, stressing power
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more than the economics emphasized by orthodox Marxism.
The other stream converging in postcolonialism is postmodernism, arising in
anthropology from cultural and symbolic anthropology; it takes the epistemological
stand that everyone is “positioned” and can only see a particular point of view, rendering
all opinions “relative” and “subjective.” There is, thus, no objective knowledge, and one
view (or custom, practice, culture, or society) is as good as the next. Postcolonialism
applies this precept to Third-World societies.
For postcolonialists, anthropology cannot fulfill its “modernist” or “realist” objective of
discovery and accurate representation. According to the postcolonial vision, Western
anthropologists—epistemologically hampered by cultural blinders, and guilty of
colonialist crimes—can legitimately only advocate on behalf of the colonial oppressed,
the subaltern, the disadvantaged, while at the same time condemning their oppressors,
European and American imperialists and advocates of capitalist globalization. Indeed,
under the influence of postcolonialism, much academic anthropology has discarded
aspirations of a scientific nature and taken on the character of political advocacy.

Q8. Elucidate the present strength of anthropology briefly.
Ans. Thus anthropology is redefining its boundaries and also opening up to other
disciplines such as history and cultural geography even as other disciplines like
psychology, political science and even literature are beginning to use the anthropological
methods of fieldwork and qualitative data collection. Today from its colonial past,
anthropology is emerging as the humane discipline that looks at human beings with
empathy and produces discourses with a human face.
Anthropologists are emerging as the voice of the marginal and the critics of materialism
and consumerism in an increasingly global and market-dominated world.
Anthropologists gain insights into real people’s lives by their close and prolonged
contact with their field areas and have now become the specialists who can deal with any
kind of human problems (see Veronica Strang 2009).

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