By the early 1970s anthropology was operating on intellectual capital that had been accumulated under conditions which no longer existed. The colonial empires that had funded most twentieth-century fieldwork had collapsed. The "primitive societies" that had been the discipline's organizing object had, almost without exception, been incorporated into nation-states, market economies, and global media flows. The structural-functionalist framework that had organized the British tradition had aged badly. American cultural anthropology was theoretically scattered. The discipline needed a turn, and it took several at once.
The colonial reckoning
Talal Asad's edited volume Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (1973) was the first major statement of what came to be called the post-colonial turn. Asad's argument was historically specific: the conditions under which classic British social anthropology produced its archive — territorial colonial administration, military pacification, the legal authority to require informants to answer — were not incidental to the knowledge that resulted. They shaped what could be asked, who would answer, what counted as a finding, and what was permanently invisible. The discipline could not pretend its archive was neutrally produced.
The American version of this reckoning came partly through Writing Culture, the 1986 volume edited by James Clifford and George Marcus. The volume's central claim was that ethnography was a literary genre as much as a scientific report — that the rhetorical conventions which gave ethnographies their air of objective authority (the present-tense voice, the eliding of the ethnographer's presence, the synoptic chart of the social structure) were techniques inherited from nineteenth-century travel writing and natural history, not innocent mirrors of fieldwork. The argument provoked a methodological crisis that took roughly a decade to settle and from which the discipline emerged committed to reflexivity: the explicit accounting, on the page, of the ethnographer's position, the relationships that produced the field data, and the limits of what the fieldwork could see.
What replaced kinship
With the kinship project dismantled (see Kinship & Structuralism) and the colonial reckoning underway, the discipline's organizing problems shifted. The largest growth areas were:
Political economy. The Marxist anthropology of the 1970s — Eric Wolf's Europe and the People Without History (1982) is the canonical example — argued that the supposedly local, traditional societies the discipline had studied had in fact been deeply shaped by global economic forces for centuries. The Trobriand kula ring did not unfold in a sealed local world; it unfolded in a world already touched by the spice trade, missionary contact, and colonial labor recruitment. To study a "local" community was to study a node in a global economic system.
Gender and the body. The 1970s feminist anthropology — Sherry Ortner, Michelle Rosaldo, Rayna Reiter — pointed out that the classic ethnographies had been written almost entirely by men, with male informants, attending male events, and that an ethnographic record produced under those conditions had no reasonable claim to describing a society as a whole. The revisions that resulted were not just additions but rewritings.
Science and technology studies. From the 1980s onward, anthropologists turned ethnographic methods on their previously unstudied home: the laboratory (Bruno Latour's Laboratory Life, 1979), the trading floor, the stem-cell clinic. The argument was that the institutions of Western expertise had themselves never been ethnographically described, and that doing so revealed the same kinds of negotiated, contested, locally specific practices that anthropologists had long described in non-Western contexts.
Globalization and migration. As the post-Cold War world produced new patterns of transnational labor, capital, and media flow, ethnography followed. Aihwa Ong on flexible citizenship. Saskia Sassen on global cities. Arjun Appadurai on the cultural dimensions of globalization. The "field site" stopped being a single bounded place and started being a network or a flow.
The reflexive default
Across all of these turns, one methodological commitment hardened into the discipline's default. Reflexivity, by 2000, was no longer a position you took; it was a baseline expectation of any ethnographic monograph. Acknowledge your funding source. Account for your linguistic competence. Name the people who refused to talk to you and consider what their refusal told you. Disclose what your race, gender, nationality, and institutional affiliation made impossible to see.
The change is real, and it has costs as well as benefits. A reflexive monograph is, in some respects, less useful than a confidently authoritative one. It tells you what the ethnographer could not see; it does not always tell you what is, in fact, the case. Some readers — particularly outside the discipline — read the reflexive turn as a loss of nerve, a willingness to qualify every finding into oblivion. Inside the discipline, the more common view is that the older confidence was unearned, and that the reflexive baseline is the price of working honestly under post-colonial conditions.
What the discipline is now
The contemporary discipline is no longer organized by a single problem (kinship), a single method (participant observation in a remote village), or a single political stance (broadly progressive but otherwise heterogeneous). It is organized by a style of attention — long, close, language-grounded, reflexively positioned — that can now be applied to almost any object. Pharmaceutical regulation in India. Crypto traders in Singapore. Climate scientists in Antarctica. Refugees in Athens. Indigenous activists in Bolivia.
The cost of this expansion is that "anthropology" in the contemporary American university covers an enormous territory and shares less and less with itself. The benefit is that the method — the specific commitment to learning a vernacular and staying long enough to be there for the cycle — has proven robust enough to survive the loss of its original colonial-era objects.
What stayed with me
That a discipline can rewrite its own canon, on its own terms, in roughly a generation. Anthropology between 1973 and 2000 was a different field at the end than at the beginning. The change was painful and incomplete, but it happened. The fact that it happened — that an academic discipline can, when pressed, examine the political conditions of its own production and survive the examination — is the discipline's quietest and most underrated achievement.