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Anthropology

An Anthropological and Postmodern Critique of Jewish Feminist Theory

An Anthropological and Postmodern Critique of Jewish Feminist Theory

April 27, 1994 | Maurie Sacks
Anthropologists believe that cultures operate as whole systems and that subsystems such as religions cannot be understood outside the context of the larger culture in which they operate. Religion, then, is simply an analytical category that bounds certain behavior clusters, but does not encompass the totality of a culture. Postmodernists espouse "a wariness toward generalizations which transcend the boundaries of culture and reason." Together, these two methods of inquiry suggest that it is not possible to separate religion from culture or knowledge from the particular "knower."