The present day crisis of anthropology is related to its wide public success. Starting from the 40’s the number of professional anthropologists has increased exponentially and so has the number of students in the universities, as well as the number of B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. and Masters programmes in anthropology (social, cultural, applied and so on).
Anthropology prospered, and the anthropologies proliferated: specifying itself anthropology spread, enriching many other social and non social sciences. But the theoretical debate has slowed down worryingly during the last decades, with only a few, although important, exceptions confined to particular schools.
Both the methodologies and the form of expression of the ethnographic report have developed and then crystallized around actual protocols. Ethnography is now reduced to a Protokollaufnahme.
But maybe the implicit and explicit anthropological critique to the dichotomy Subject/Object, i.e. the key discussion about the notion of das Fremde and about the relations between Wissenschaftler and Irrationale, speak for an immanent non “protocolarity” of anthropology.
Anthropology, which has at least become an Existenzial in its historicisation (Heidegger), can finally disappear as a positivist science, in order to rise again.
