The Difficulties and Potentials of Anthropological Practice in a Globalized World(2012 Japanese Society of Cultural Anthropology Award Lecture)

抄録

The upheavals experienced by the modern world have directly affected the field where anthropologists conduct their research and the people who live there. Problems such as civil wars and massacres, development and environmental destruction, immigration and exclusion, and poverty and infectious disease are not simply local in nature, but manifest themselves as well in the context of global relations of dependence. Moreover, it is now an everyday occurrence for anthropologists in the field to become themselves embroiled in violent confrontations, to become involved in such activities as environmental destruction and large-scale development, or to participate in social movements to protect the environment or oppose development projects. Under such circumstances, anthropology has moved from a position that emphasizes neutrality and objectivity in the field to one that actively endorses engagement and value judgments with respect to its research subjects. Contemporary anthropology, being acknowledged as having a universal standard of values based on the ideas of human rights, environmental preservation, and democratic governance in a globalized age, has attempted to intervene in other cultures. However, the expansion of universalistic values like this gives birth to several doubts and reactions. At the center lies the question, what logic justifies engagement and intervention in the field? In its attempt to clarify the sudden rise of that universalism, this essay examines its inevitability and dangers, and tries to consider how anthropology can henceforth articulate or negotiate a relativistic epistemology with the reappearance of a universalistic worldview. However, that attempt is neither a simple rejection of universalistic thought to revive old-fashioned cultural relativism, nor contrarily a dismissal of relativistic thought in order to place a universal standard of values at the heart of scholarship. The goal of the present essay is instead to provide an answer to the question of how contemporary anthropology can articulate those two worldviews and establish an orientation that responds to an increasingly complex world reality.