Search

In the early days of anthropology as a discipline in the nineteenth century, evolutionism and diffusionism supplied anthropologists with 'global' visions. Anthropologists have always been involved with all-encompassing cosmopolitan notions such as humankind and culture. Many have thus endeavoured to explain the world as a whole, and how humans have developed in different historical moments. In the 1980s and 1990s, when the new label 'globalization' generated a field of scholarly preoccupations, anthropologists started to contribute to this growing body of literature. Their most valuable contributions are related to the tensions between local and global forces, and between forces of heterogeneity and homogeneity, as well as to the use of ethnography as a methodological tool. Anthropologists have borrowed notions from other related disciplines such as sociology, history, and geography. This paper situates the anthropological production on 'the global' within this diverse history of borrowings, internal disciplinary debates, and wider historical junctures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A substantial part of the conservative or reactionary backlash that occurs around the world is based on a double movement with regard to the social sciences. On the one hand, a denial of the perspectives of social construction and cultural and historical relativization; on the other hand, an appropriation of approaches abandoned by the social sciences, or of the mechanisms used by them to explain the social as a constructed reality. Perhaps the most striking example is that of "gender ideology". But I will also consider nationalism, the naturalization of ethnocentrism and racism, the notions of war of civilizations and religions, sexism and homophobia, reactions to the "politically correct", among others (namely, at more sophisticated levels, new theorizations with political implications, coming from genomics, evolutionary psychology, neurosciences, etc.). I will explore the hypothesis that this backlash is organized on the basis of an apparently contradictory alliance between neoliberalism and traditionalism, in a new and specific phenomenon of our time and not as an atavism of the past. In this sense, it is a "revolutionary" movement and the progressive fields (on which the social sciences are largely based) are sent to an uncomfortable place of "conservatism". How can anthropological discourse and ethnographic practice produce knowledge (and its dissemination) against this reality -- in a political gesture -- but also about it, in an attempt to make it intelligible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Linguistic relativity, rightly understood, implies that the presence or absence of certain grammatical categories and discursive styles can influence how we perceive and experience the world around us. In this study, monolingual speakers of Chol Mayan, a tenseless language, were shown a series of visual stimuli portraying different sequences of events, and were asked to describe what they saw to an interviewer. Participants were shown a long silent story composed of many sequential images, and a set of shorter stories composed of a minimum of two sequential images and a maximum of five sequential images. None of the stories that the Chol speakers told in response to the stimulus followed a sequential-chronological order, and all sequential images were described in non-sequential terms. In line with the linguistic relativity hypothesis, it is argued that this interesting discursive effect may be the result of the tenselessness of the Chol language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]