Hierarchy and hybridity: Toward a Dumontian approach to contemporary cultural change.

In this introductory essay to the special issue ‘Dumont, Values, and Contemporary Cultural Change’ we argue that Dumont should be seen as an important theorist of contemporary process of cultural interaction and transformation. Although Dumont is rarely read as a scholar of the kinds of cultural changes scholars have over the last two decades tended to examine under the rubric of globalization, his extensive studies of the interaction of individualist and holist social forms represents a key resource for this kind of work. After providing a synoptic account of Dumont’s account of the roles of the values of individualism and holism in cultural change, we consider a number of ways in which the changing hierarchical relations between these values that mark so much contemporary social process can be studied ethnographically. We illustrate our general arguments with discussions of the arguments of the other articles making up this issue. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]