emphasize the particular and individual 'other' (or subjects of study) and feel at ease with the image of social structure that is fragmented or disjoined. (Barrett, 153) As a compliment to the inadequacy of positivism, there has been a renewed emphasis on relativism. Relativism, a doctrine pioneered by Boas, emphasizes the diversity and uniqueness of each and every culture. (Barrett, 153) A sort of heterogeneity of cultures, emphasizing difference, promoting the lives of the other, rather than sameness, as a reality of the multicultural "global planet" that we find ourselves in today. This in many way seems like the 'politically correct' approach, attempting to put the wrongs of the past right through a campaign of valorization and glorification of the 'other'. Consequently, what we have seen as a result of the emergence 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 ...
