Borderlands by Agier Michel;

Author:Agier, Michel; [Agier, Michel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Polity Press
Published: 2016-08-08T00:00:00+00:00

The end of the ‘great divide’

Starting from the critical moment whose main lines I have just described, the idea developed that an ‘anthropology of the contemporary’ would define an alternative anthropology of an other that had, by contrast, remained ‘classic’ and thus a point of reference for some (those attached to it as a ‘Golden Age’),10 while immutable and superseded for others (those who criticized it). In this way of thinking and classifying, the anthropology of the contemporary has either been qualified by additions (which may be called ‘sociological’: the city, conflict, mobility, development, etc.) or, on the contrary, by subtractions (supposedly ‘ethnological’: structures of kinship, local languages, the cult of ancestors, etc.).

It is true that both sides indicate, by the greater or lesser place that they occupy in the description and interpretation of fields, a substantial change in the contexts of inquiry (individualization, delocalization, globalization, present-ism, etc.). I shall take one example of this general contemporizing of the facts that the anthropologist deals with. If we take the 100 or so inhabitants of a forest village in West Africa, the 450 passengers on a Paris–New York flight, the 500 inhabitants of a tower block in the Paris region or even the 3,500 tourists at a resort complex on the north coast of Bahia in Brazil, the human scale makes these configurations equally observable and comparable for anthropological investigation, yet the differences in meaning are considerable, and we may think first of all that neither the same concepts nor the same methodological procedures can be used in one or the other case. However, these four places today all involve mobility on a greater or lesser scale and with greater or lesser intensity, and their occupants may well be just as much at home as anywhere in the world. Finally, it is no longer really incongruous today to imagine that the persons occupying each of these four spaces are connected with some others living in the other social and cultural configurations mentioned here (African village, aeroplane, tower block, tourist complex) by various kinds of network, economic activity or kinship.

The problem, therefore, with this superficial partition between the ‘anthropology of the contemporary’ and ‘classic ethnology’ is that change and mobility are increasingly present everywhere, and so are no longer really divisive from the point of view of fields. To defend this partition of knowledge (and thus maintain the ‘great divide’ of the world between modern and exotic societies), anthropology would have to be confined to the old form of human groupings (those that were characterized as ‘ethnic groups’ at the time of their discovery), excluding from its field the contemporary forms of groupings, assemblies, unions or communities in the process of being made, born or transformed.11

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.