World Anthropologies: Disciplinary Transformations within Systems of Power

Description

Since its inception, anthropology's authority has been based on the assumption that it is a unified discipline emanating from the West. In an age of heightened globalization, anthropologists have failed to discuss consistently the current status of their practice and its mutations across the globe. World Anthropologies is the first book to provoke this conversation from various regions of the world in order to assess the diversity of relations between regional or national anthropologies and a contested, power-laden Western discourse.Can a planetary anthropology cope with both the 'provincial cosmopolitanism' of alternative anthropologies and the 'metropolitan provincialism' of hegemonic schools? How might the resulting 'world anthropologies' challenge the current panorama in which certain allegedly national anthropological traditions have more paradigmatic weight - and hence more power - than others? Critically examining the international dissemination of anthropology within and across national power fields, contributors address these questions and provide the outline for a veritable world anthropologies project.

Gustavo Lins Ribeiro is Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Brasilia, Brazil, and Researcher of the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq), Brazil. Arturo Escobar is Kenan Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Director, Institute of Latin American Studies, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, USA; he is also Research Associate at the Colombian Institute of Anthropology and History, ICANH, in Bogota

'Given anthropology's long-standing attention to relatively powerless groups and to the relationships between the researcher and the research subjects, we are particularly beholden to query the paradoxical effects of globalisation on our own production of knowledge. This book, and the larger project of which it is part, is to be lauded for raising these issues.' Anthropological Forum, Vol. 18, No. 1, March 2008