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The global/local tension in the history of anthropology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 October 2019

Gustavo Lins Ribeiro
Gustavo Lins Ribeiro*
Affiliation:
Department of Cultural Studies, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Lerma, Mexico
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Abstract

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.

Keywords

diffusionismethnographyevolutionismlocal/globalMarxism
Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Global History , Volume 14 , Special Issue 3: Historicizing the global: an interdisciplinary perspective , November 2019 , pp. 375 - 394
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2019 

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