{"id":1846,"date":"2012-11-05T21:26:27","date_gmt":"2012-11-05T21:26:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/comp6044\/?p=1846"},"modified":"2012-11-05T21:27:38","modified_gmt":"2012-11-05T21:27:38","slug":"anthropology-global-issues","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/comp6044\/2012\/11\/05\/anthropology-global-issues\/","title":{"rendered":"Anthropology & global issues"},"content":{"rendered":"

This week I have done some more reading on anthropology\u2019s methods, complementing the findings I wrote about last week. The more I\u00a0found out about anthropology, the more I wondered how as a discipline it would tackle global issues. Indeed from reading the introductory texts, I got the sense that anthropology (the socio-cultural kind) was concerned with the study of human kind. A priori<\/em> this doesn\u2019t seem to pose a problem in terms of the globality of the subject matter, but in its approach and even epistemology, anthropology is firmly based on the notion of classification. Indeed its ontologies are cultures, peoples, societies, etc. and its methods are primarily descriptive and comparative, assuming the existence of different \u2018things\u2019 to compare. As mentioned in previous posts, an anthropologist looks at a society\/community\/social group which he\/she investigates doing fieldwork, conducting interviews, historical research, etc. But what happens when the group in question is the entire world population, as is often the case with so-called global issues? How then would such a discipline tackle questions that seem to contradict its own epistemological foundations?<\/p>\n

Trying to look at the digital divide from an anthropological lens, I have hit what might be the crux of the issue in this assignment \u2013 how to let go of my previous assumptions about the world, shaped in large parts by my training in International Relations and instead of re-phrasing the \u2018probl\u00e9matique\u2019 I immediately see with the global digital divide in anthropological terminology, attempt to \u2018discover\u2019 the problems and \u2018frame\u2019 it as an anthropologist would. In order to try and do that, and while I did find some answers in the introductory readings, I decided nevertheless to look for some more targeted articles on the issue.<\/p>\n

An article by Kearney (1995) \u2018The Local and the Global: The Anthropology of Globalization and Transnationalism\u2019 in Annual Review of Anthropology<\/em> was particularly helpful. The answers or thinking I considered fall in two broad categories \u2013 theoretical and practical.<\/p>\n

On the practical side, Peoples and Bailey (2000, p. 5) assert that for global issues, which have admittedly gained importance in the past two decades, anthropologists are often called to consult on specific projects \u2013 an emerging sub-field of the discipline referred to as applied anthropology<\/em>. The idea here is that solutions to global problems often require local knowledge, provided by traditional anthropological research and therefore increasingly useful in the field.<\/p>\n

On the theoretical front, Kearney recognises that new thinking is required in \u2018anthropological theory and forms of representation that are responses to such nonlocal contexts and influences\u2019 (1995, p. 547). He sees global issues (and globalisation) as having \u2018implication for [anthropology\u2019s] theory and methods\u2019 as research which is limited to local units of analysis \u2018yield incomplete understandings of the\u00a0 local\u2019 (1995, p. 548). He sees the redefinition of space-time into a multidimensional global space with fluid boundaries and sub-spaces as the most important disruption to anthropological epistemology. He also notes that the notion of \u2018progress\u2019 assumed in the discipline and the notion of \u2018development\u2019 is and needs to be questioned in the context of globalisation, that is to say that there is no inevitability in the course of global history. Moreover with the \u2018deterritorialisation\u2019 of culture, the focus of anthropological study is shifting towards \u2018identity\u2019.\u00a0 Underpinning these changes is the fundamental reframing of the concept of classification, no longer considered \u2018an invariant subject of investigation in anthropology, but taken instead as a historically contingent world-view category\u2019 (1995, p. 557).<\/p>\n

This has given me some interesting avenues to explore so I will conclude my introductory reading on anthropology here. Next week I will start looking at management as a discipline.<\/p>\n

References<\/p>\n

Kearney M. (1995) \u2018The Local and the Global: The Anthropology of Globalization and Transnationalism\u2019 in Annual Review of Anthropology<\/em>, Vol. 24, pp. 547-565<\/p>\n

Peoples, J. and Bailey, G. (2000) Humanity: An Introduction to Cultural Anthropology<\/em>, 5th<\/sup> ed., Belmont: Wadsworth\/Thomson Learning<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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