Discussing Kath Weston and Kirin Narayan?s critiques of the concept of ?native anthropologist,? Bunzl considers that ?the program they enunciate fails to deconstruct the category of ?native anthropology? itself? (Bunzl, 2004: 436). In his view, even the most radical atempts to reconsider indigenous anthropology have not been able to deconstruct the foundational Self/Other divide ?that organizes classical fieldwork and produces the native anthropologist as a virtual member of the discipline? (Bunzl, 2004: 436). Even James Clifford, one of the most lucid critics of contemporary anthropology proposes a ?roots and routes? or a ?traveling cultures? perspective (Clifford, 1997). In commenting on the fact that James Clifford understrikes the role of travelling?understood mainly as ?a detour [made by the native anthropogist] through a university or other site that provides analytic or comparative perspective on the place of dwelling/research? (Clifford, 1997: 206). Bunzl considers that in this way Clifford is ?reinscribing cultural alterity as the privileged generator of ethnographic authority? (Bunzl, 1996: 437).

The solution Matti Bunzl proposes is quite an ingenious one as it combines Boasian anthropology with Foucaldian genealogy. Grounding his demonstration especially on some ?early? Boasian texts like The Study of Geography (1887) or On Alternating Sounds (1889), Bunzl is trying to re-legitimize an ?ethnographic research program that derived from such German counter-Enlightment figures as Johann Gottfried Herder and Wilhelm von Humboldt? (Bunzl, 2004: 437). By the emphasis put on the uniqueness of values transmitted through history, articulated in the cosmopolitan framework of a Humanitätsideal (ideal of humanity), this tradition can help in constituting a different understanding of the epistemoloy of fieldwork. As this understanding does not rest on a distinction between ethnographic self and native other it can draw ?its analytic levereage from a rigorous historicity that refigures the question of Otherness in terms of temporal rather than cultural alterity? (ibid.).

The recourse to Foucault is a recourse to a non-panoptical representation of fieldwork, and a focusing on the moment, and power context, of invention of cultural differences. For Bunzl, a neo-Boasian anthropology is to be constituted as the ethnographic dimension of a Foucaldian project aiming at a history of the present (Bunzl, 2004: 441), a present constructed out of layers of ?secondary explanations? where anthropologist and informant are united in a common epistemic position towards the real Other. This ?Other? being, ultimately, the history that has generated the present condition (Bunzl, 2004: 438).

We have insisted so much on Bunzl?s attempt to lay, theoretically, the conditions of possibility for the emergence of a neo-Boasian (counter-Enlightment) cum Foucaldian anthropology because it is one of the, not so numerous,radical attempts, to disrupt the hallowed ?alterity paradigm.? Nevertheless, the diverse counter-Enlightment theoretical traditions Bunzl is trying to knit together with foucaudian genealogy, have some historical complicities, sometimes quite difficult to disentangle.