Departments. The Marxist trend was then superseded successively by post-
structuralist, postmodernist, interpretivist, and most recently cognitivist
schools of thought, all of which back away from analysis in terms of class
and exploitation and move towards reflexive and occasionally meditative
positions. Postmodernism, however, proved too vulnerable to the doubt
that it itself generated. Interpretivism, the search for meaning, also assisted
in its own transcendence when cognitivist viewpoints reasserted a kind of
scientific approach as opposed to a humanistic standpoint. Throughout all
this, the works that have proved most resilient are ones solidly grounded
on bothfieldwork and imaginative thought placing the work in a com-
parative context.
What, then, of breaking the frames as a mark of movement and change
in our discipline? Our argument has been that as new theories come up,
they have tended to do two things: declare a break with the past and
impose a new dichotomy on the present. While this may be seen as an
unfolding dialectical process, the danger is always that the new frame
quickly becomes reified and then slips into dogma. A mindful anthropol-
ogy must always resist such a trend, in the name of mindfulness itself. It
must also refuse to be seduced by dichotomies and look to cross-cut them
with recourse to our own thoughts. Referring again to a conundrum in the
ethnography of the South-West Pacific, whatever became of the‘indivi-
duals’who appeared so clearly and vividly in an early generation of writ-
ings on the New Guinea Highlands? In another generation all the
individuals vanished and were replaced by dividuals, at least on the pages
of anthropological monographs. Subsequently, emphasis on the dividual
as a somewhat static stereotype has receded in the face of greater concern
about the pressing importance of understanding change, violence, peace-
making, Christianity, and transnational influences. Our own modest inter-
vention in the personhood debate by proposing that people arerelational–
individualsdid not exactly replace the dividual fad, but perhaps it helped
to make it possible for ethnographers to move off in a number of direc-
tions in search of new frames, without having to pull their forelocks to
paradigms past.
A modifying word here. It pays not to genuflect before the past, but it
pays also not to scorn it, especially in relation to the central historical
players in the creation of theory. At this stage much can be learned by
actually reading the works of, dare we declare it, Frazer, or Radcliffe-
Brown, or Levi-Strauss, for the many mindful insights they produced in
bending their thoughts to classic topics such as dying gods, taboos, and
10 FOR A MINDFUL ANTHROPOLOGY 91