Abstract

The crisis of the belief -nowadays considered native- in the possibility of getting rid of our own concepts, or prejudces, and gaining a more of less immediate access to, achieving a more or less transparent insight in, those cultures alien to us pushed anthropologists ot begin to explore in the very conditions of possibility of the anthropological discuorse itself. Thus, the same series of transformations that undermined many evident, opened also new horizons of enquire paving the way to a process of growing self-reflectiveness of the discipline. This process is particularly noticeable in the United States, where theoretical anthropology has had a vertiginous development in the last two decades in connection with the development of what is known as «postgeertzian anthropology». The present article outlines the different stages through which theoretical anthropology crossed in North America in its attempt to make sense of its own epistemic and institutional conditions of possibility, as well as the diverse problems that in the distinct phases of this development it faced