Towards an anthropology of global inequalities and their local manifestations: social anthropology in 2017

Abstract

At a time when political, social and environmental inequalities proliferate around the globe, anthropologists need to be equipped to diagnose, analyse and respond. This review of the anthropological research published in European journals in 2017 identifies three sets of tensions for an inquiry into global inequalities: first, between macro political economy processes and their localised workings/effects; second, between institutional processes of legitimisation and their everyday forms of resistance; and third, between future-oriented projects of change and the political demands of the present. Taken together, these sets of tensions not only offer a starting point for analysing how global inequalities are locally channelled, experienced and acted on from below, but also point to the political and methodological challenges that anthropologists face in today's neoliberal climate of higher education.