James F. Weiner wonders if the subjects of anthropology are closer to modern man or to his ancestors.

Martin Heidegger first raised these issues in powerful form earlier this century. He took note of what we would call in Foucault's terms an epistemic shift between the medieval and the modern periods. It was with the dawn of the modern age that European society arrived at the notion that the world in its entirety could be pictured or represented. For Parmenides, but also for our medieval forebears, 'man is the one who is looked upon by beings' [P. 68], whereas in the modern age, 'The being is that which rises up and opens itself; that which, as what is present, comes upon man, i.e., upon him who opens himself to what is present in that he apprehends it. The being does not acquire being in that man first looks upon it in the sense of a representation that has the character of subjective perception' [ibidem]. Hence, Heidegger remarks that 'the world picture does not change from an earlier medieval one to a modern one; rather, that the world becomes picture at all is what distinguishes the essence of modernity [ibidem]. Guy Debord, characterizing the 'society of the spectacle', notes in similar terms that:

The spectacle cannot be understood as an abuse of the world of vision, as a product of the techniques of mass dissemination of images. It is, rather, a Weltanschaung which has become actual, materially translated. It is a world vision which has become objectified. [s. 5]

Heidegger accurately identified this shift to totalizing picturing as underwriting the emergence of subjectivity itself: 'Representation [Vor-stellen] here means: to bring the present-at-hand before one as something standing over-and-against, to relate it to oneself, the representer, and, in this relation, to force it back to oneself as the norm-giving domain' [P. 69].

P. 135-136

I expanded the quotes from "The Age of the World Picture" a bit, and replaced the original excerpts with a more recent translation.  ¶ 8:27 PM