One of my honors students asked me in my cultural anthropology class "Is anthropology influced at all by philosophy?" or something like that. I held my breath. Then I let it out. What a can of worms. I am the WRONG person to be asked that question, for the very reason that I was both a philosophy major and an anthropology major. You would think that I would be the best person to answer that question, but if it came up at a cocktail party and you and I were chatting by the food table, after 10 minutes you would be stuffing as many nachos into your mouth that you could manage and mumbling something about a cat that need to be fed at home before you beat a hasty retreat.
I started with a discussion of postmodernism and I've decided to look online for a good, brief introduction that someone else wrote that I could steal, in order to save myslef the work of having to write one myself. In true postmodern form, the first one I encountered immediately took the position that it was wrong, even insulting, to attempt to distill postmoderism down to any sort of "essence" because postmoderism itself repudiates the very enterprise of distilling ideas down to essences. (I hear that cat calling...)
Here's a site that has what is for better or worse a fairly good explanation of postmodernism along with examples after placing it into a breif but comprehensive historical context of ophilosophical and artistic movements. General Introduction to the Postmodern
Oh, and Wikipedia might be helpful as well if you want to figure out what this is all about.
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