In the histories of anthropology that we tend to tell, certain decades loom large: the 1920s, for example, or the 1980s. In this paper, I experiment with a critical and comparative reappraisal of a decade closer to our present: the 1990s. In the wake of the Cold War, the 90s were the temporal ground for an anthropology that both responded to, and was facilitated by, an apparent liberal hegemony that proved to be short lived. Today, the 90s are treated with nostalgia, derision, or some combination of both. But with the benefit of some three decades’ distance, and with a view to the discipline’s current condition, I join others in beginning to historicize 90s anthropology, tracking its turns amid the political conditions and cultural moods of that moment. I do so by approaching it alongside the history of an adjacent (and at times overlapping) intellectual and social formation, that of engaged Buddhism. Considering how anthropologists and engaged Buddhists grappled, through the 1990s, with a set of related questions—about the global and the local, participation and observation, suffering and freedom—reveals ethical ambitions and political shortcomings that continue to shape debates in both fields, not least about the promises and practices of solidarity.

Michael Edwards is a Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Sydney whose research focuses on religious life, media ecology, and political change. His first book project, Real Change: Myanmar and the Dissonance of Salvation, has been selected for the Atelier series at the University of California Press.

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