CONTENTS:- 1. Introduction to anthropology. 2. History of anthropology. 3. Recent trends in anthropology. 4. Self-interpretation, agency, and the objects of anthropology: reflections on a genealogy. 5. Cognitive anthropology. 6. Fishermen, developmentalists and conservationists on lake Malawi. 7. Second-generation cognitive anthropology and the problem of history. 8. The contemporary context of Carib revival in Trinidad and Tobago. 9. African gender research and postcoloniality: legacies and challenges. 10. NGOs, anthropology, and the encounter with cultural knowledge. 11. Anthropology and global environmental change. 12. Empire to nation, and the relevance of reciprocal understanding to China.
DESCRIPTION
During the past decade, processes associated with what is popularly though perhaps misleadingly known as globalization have come within the purview of anthropology. Migration and mobility- and the footloose or even rootless social groups that they produce as well as the world wide diffusion of commodities, media images, political ideas and practices, technologies and scientific knowledge today are on anthropology's research agenda. As a consequence, revived notice about the way in which culture relates to territory have been abandoned. The term transnationalisation captures cultural process that stream across the borders of nation states. Anthropologists have been forced to revise the notion that transnationalisation would inevitably bring about a culturally homogenized world. Instead, we are witnessing a surge of greatly increasing cultural diversity. New cultural forms grow out of historically situated articulations of the local and the global. Rather than left-over relics from traditional orders, these are decidedly modern, yet far from uniform. The discussion and research engages the idea of the pluralization of modernities, explores its potential for problematic assumptions underlying new theoretical concept.
