How can anthropologists describe and compare ethnographic regions? Much information has been gathered since the nineteenth century that assumes a satisfactory answer to this question, but the problems that attend it are larger than ever. As emphasized from a politicoeconomic perspective, ethnographic regions are interwoven through trade, coercion, and economic dependence or political domination, particularly as states engage their ever-shrinking peripheries (e.g., Wolf 1982, 1988; Lomnitz-Adler 1991). As a result, the autonomy, divisibility, and uniqueness of ethnographic regions cannot be assumed.

From a postmodern perspective, the ethnographic characterization of culture areas and regions is an artifact – the result of a Western academic discourse that projects its own cultural biases and assumes incorrectly that these characterizations reflect other people's reality (e.g., Clifford and Marcus 1986; Clifford 1988; Boon 1990). Culture area comparisons thus neglect the irreducible authority of indigenous voices and collapse them into pigeon-holed categories deriving from the analyst's own time, place, and disposition. What becomes untenable from both the postmodern and the politicoeconomic vantage point is synchronic objectivism: the assumption that cultures have coherent, stable traits that render them comparable within the analytic space of a timeless ethnographic present.

In the current academic climate, few can deny the intellectual importance of these two critiques, much less their scholarly influence.