The Making of Anthropology

This book offers an interpretation of anthropology as a discourse that contrasts the western self and the non-western other and shows that the organizing principle of this discourse was the Judeo-Christian episteme of the "Other in Us" that the Christian Church Fathers developed to define why the pagan others were endowed with negative, ungodly attributes of humanity. It is pointed out that the anthropological application of this episteme to represent and explain the colonized non-western others resulted in the emergence of eurocentric, hierarchical models of humanity, and that although these models of humanity were largely replaced by pluralistic models in the late 20 century, anthropology has continued to be linked with the episteme of the Other in Us. The authors, Drs. Jacob Pandian and Susan Parman, professors of anthropology at California State University, Fullerton, suggest in this book that anthropology should be liberated or uncoupled from the Judeo-Christian episteme of the Other in Us in order for it to be relevant in the twenty-first century. They propose a model, identified in this book as "protean pluralism," for the study of the unity and diversity of humankind in the globalized world of the twenty-first century.