Bondarenko Dmitri M. Homoarchy

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Naturally, I did my best to “insert” my ideas in the current debates
in anthropology. Particularly, I tried to insert them in that sector of the
discipline which is yet not embraced by the post-modernist and similar to it
discourses. Although nowadays this sector looks marginal and old-fashioned,
and hence those cultivating this field may be seen by many “progressivelyminded”
colleagues like primitive manual agriculturalists working nearby
modern farmers, I aspired for a bed just in that field, however small it is today.
On the one hand, I am well aware of the fact that the very kind of problematics
the present work deals with is outside the contemporary mainstream in
anthropological thought and it is simply not of interest to those this mainstream
representing. On the other hand, even much more importantly, within the
trends currently dominating, I do not see any room for elaboration of any crosscultural
theory, disregarding its concrete contents and level of generalization.
Extreme relativism multiplied by the popular idea of principal impossibility of
even reasonably objective vision of another’s culture naturally lead to ignoring
of one side of the anthropology’s dualistic subject – of that of the human
cultures’ common background and features not to a lesser degree than unilinear
evolutionism and rigid positivism of anthropology’s pioneers of the 19 th
century resulted in the overall neglect of cultures and culture areas’ specificity.
However, to my mind, there is a crucial difference between the 19 th
century evolutionism and the late 20 th – early 21 st centuries postmodernism in
anthropology, though they have something in common in a broader context.
The commonality they share consists in the fact that both evolutionism and
postmodernism are the phenomena which are very far from being merely
academic trends, nothing more than some academics’ conscious inventions for
other academics. They represented or represent the reflections in the academic
thought of the way of thinking, typical of the respective historical epochs in
general; they may be called “intellectual formations”, by analogy with Karl
Marx’s “socio-economic formations” (not by chance for example,
postmodernism is so powerful in contemporary fiction and poetry). In the
meantime, the difference between early evolutionism and postmodernism as
research paradigms is essential and great. It looks like the former contained the
potential for the appearance of all the numerous subsequent theoretical trends in
anthropology, including those that were developing as antitheses to it, as
attempts to overcome its shortcomings. Postmodernism seems to be the last in
this row, the “all-theoretical” intellectual potential of early anthropology was
finally exhausted and settled in postmodernism, the theoretical thought has
actually transformed into antitheoretical. The way anthropology has passed
may be compared with the one of European painting: neither icons nor abstract
paintings belong to any genre but all the genres known to the European painting
from proto-Renaissance on have been born out of the syncretic (in this sense)
icon painting while it is impossible to imagine that the genres could grow out of
the abstract art. The same way as the abstractionist art is the death of the very