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Anthropologists and the Rise of a Global Civilization: Traditional Cultures and Culture Change
| Article
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10690 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1986 |
2,532 Words |
| Author
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Elliott P. Skinner
Elliott P. Skinner is the Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology
at Columbia University in New York City. This article was
originally presented as paper at the eighth International
conference on the Unity of the Sciences in 1979. It was
published in Volume I of that conferences' proceedings by the
International Cultural Foundation Press in 1980, and is
reprinted by permission. |
Anthropologists have largely ignored the emergence of a global civilization which is affecting all contemporary sociocultural systems. Yet, the signs of an emerging planet wide civilization are all around us.
Sometimes they are trite, and almost in the realm of the cliche, such as the spread of the "Blue-Jeans and T-Shirt Complex" around the globe, creating problems for parents in conservative and progressive societies alike. At other times the signs are ominous such as the activities of multinational corporations which are busily integrating the most exotic societies into the global economic system, and are seemingly impervious to the control of either capitalist or socialist states.
Less threatening, but sometimes having dire consequences for many societies, are the labor migrants overflowing national boundaries, apparently undeterred by laws, fences or oceans. The underdeveloped countries lament the loss of their educated classes in the "brain drain," but welcome the exodus of their unemployables. The developed countries willingly permit their own well-trained people to go off to help the underdeveloped world, blithely ignoring that these persons are in effect high-paid migrants. Yet the developed countries attempt to keep out unskilled foreigners.
Given the interest of almost all the founders of modern anthropology in the evolution of human sociocultural systems and their diffusion through space and time, it is surprising that the global processes of change have not attracted the attention of more anthropologists. One only has to mention the works of Edward B. Tylor, Lewis Henry Morgan, Sir Henry Maine, J.F. McLennan, Adolph Bastian, Leo Frobenius, G. Eliot Smith, and Father Wilhelm Schmidt, to note that whether "evolutionists," or "diffusionists," these men asked fundamental questions about the development and spread of human civilizations.
Even the later American anthropologists such as Clark Wissler and Edward Sapir sought answers to more restricted developmental and diffusionary problems by utilizing such theoretical notions as the "culture-area" and the "age-area" hypotheses. There was the so-called "Boasian" reaction to speculative evolutionary and diffusionist theories, but even Franz Boas felt that diffusionist studies could be empirical. He only insisted that attention be paid to individuals as agents of this process.
The disenchantment with evolutionary and diffusionist schema was not only linked to the concern
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