“The most certain of all philosophical problems is the problem of the present time and of what we are”
—Michel Foucault, in ‘Subject and Power’

Throughout this paper, I will try to discuss the political role of the contemporary anthropologist while questioning how she positions herself against present problems of contemporary world and how she distinguishes her position from other kinds of occupations. Briefly, this paper is about the question concerning the characteristic, the specificity and the peculiarity of contemporary anthropologist.
In her text ‘The Ethnographic Present’, Kristen Hastrup defines contemporary anthropology (quoting Scheper-Hughes) not only as a field of knowledge, but also as a field of action (Hastrup, 13). Thus, the anthropologist has to deal with the present, with a world in motion and with a continuous flux, which she both gives shape to and is shaped by. Thus, as Hastrup and Foucault imply, the search for the present is also the search for what we are as both anthropologists and human beings.
This inextricable relation between the world, the present and the anthropologist (the writer/the being) let us rethink the questions concerning representation, translation, objectivity, reflexivity and relativity in order to reconsider the role and the very existence of anthropologist as a witness, as an agent, as an activist, as a writer and so on.
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