ence of the postmodern ideologies is the creation of author-saturated rather than data-saturated ethnologies and secondly, the emergence of postmodernism as an empirical entity. Before postmodernism, an ethnology was judged by the quality of the data and the elegance and incisiveness of the analysis. Since then, it has become the author(s) who take the center stage. "Anthropologists have moved from insisting that the anthropologist stay out of the ethnology to having the anthropologist's presence dominate the ethnography". (Nader, 153) This strikes me as being quite odd. Much criticism about ethnologies is that the presence of the ethnologist has a detrimental effect on the results of the study and that the perceptions obtained and recorded must be seen as fictional, with the expansion of the ethnology being seen and a literary piece. How then can this fascination with anthropological writers be explained. In many cases, it is not a matter of the writer being a part of the study itself, but rather playing a part in the story. Traditional ethnologies were quantitatively based, and in many cases for the purpose of research. Now, there is more of a concern towards entertainment and to a certain extent, telling the tale of a people to the reader, as such, the author must engage in the lives of the 'other' as to make it appealing to his reader, and pay the bills. Finally, a great deal of debate in the field of anthropology between those attracted and repelled by the postmodernists perspective, is the feasibility and fluidity of the postmodern perspective and it's influence. "The implication is that postmodernism is merely another theoretical perspective dreamed up by jaded (or perhaps mischievous) academics, with little connection to people's lives". (Barrett, 154) Though this argument has stood the test of time in regards to most theories and theorists, this is not the...
