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■ This article offers a critique of postmodernism, and the rather nihilis tic ethos that some of its advocates suggest. It thus seeks to affirm the salience of a realist metaphysic, and argues for the crucial importance of such conceptions as truth as representation, human agency and empirical science. It suggests the continuing need in anthropology to combine empirical science (naturalism) and hermeneutics (humanism), thus avoiding both positivism, which repudiates hermeneutics and tends towards a reductive materialism, and textualism, which repudiates empirical social science entirely.