Towards a Global Anthropology

Abstract

The development of a global perspective in anthropology is a very different kind of phenomenon from that in economics or economic history. In the latter disciplines, the field of enquiry may easily be extended to the entire world, or at least to large enough portions of it that systemic supra-society relations are clearly discernable. The periodic appearance of an intellectual orientation to global relations – from the mercantilistists to the dependency theorists – is clear evidence of the availability of the larger perspective. The more common focus on the nation state or, by abstraction, the “society”, as the locus of analysis and explanation has been a reflex of the emergence of national cycles of economic reproduction in the nineteenth century. Ricardo, Marx, Keynes and much modern development theory restrict the field of enquiry to the single society where all the necessary conditions of reproduction and thus, explanation, are thought to be located (Friedman 1976, 1978). Finally, with the emergence after World War Two of a center/periphery model of imperialism, a global perspective has again gained prominence.