Autumn 1999
Volume 26, Number 1

As I see the situation, one way to avoid postmodern escapism with its gratuitous celebration of "multivocality" as well as a new objectivism often characterized by calls to rally under the flag of globalization is to stand by recognition as a central issue and to avoid new closures, which, I think, are inevitable if we are too quick to construe new systems of universal ethics. Instead, we should travel farther on the road opened up by thought about re-cognition and join what is valuable in the current fascination with memory and identity. When we seriously consider the re- in recognition and when we concentrate on recognition as an epistemological problem we may be able to avoid the kind of positive thinking about identity that seems to characterize the philosophical trend of thought about the politics of recognition referred to earlier--a positivity that derives from accepting without much debate the nation-state or ethnicity as given frames of the debate.

Johannes Fabian is profesor of cultural anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. His recent publications include Remembering the Present: Painting and Popular History in Zaire (1996), Moments of Freedom: Anthropology and Popular Culture (1998), and Out of Our Minds: Reason and Madness in the Exploration of Central Africa, a critical study of ethnography in the exploration of central Africa.(forthcoming).