Introduction by the author
Anthropology is evoked regularly in cultural studies. The field has taken up anthropological definitions of culture, anthropology’s concern with meaning, and both ethnographic method and the critical evaluation which 1980s’ reflexivity in anthropology directed towards the ethnographic enterprise. The massive expansion of cultural studies as a field of study (see Kellner 1995, Grossberg et al. 1992, Morley 1992), inevitably means that one of the ways in which anthropology has come to be known and understood outside the discipline as a set of epistemologies and methods, is through the prism of cultural studies’ representations of it. This would suggest that a dialogue between cultural studies and anthropology is timely, if for no other reason than to allow anthropologists to speak for themselves.