World Anthropology and its Institutional Challenges: A History of the Transformative Impact of Democratic Internationalisation on the Discipline of Anthropology
Volume 19, Issue 28 (2019): Lietuvos etnologija: socialinės antropologijos ir etnologijos studijos, pp. 191–206
Pub. online: 31 December 2019
Type: Disscusion
Open Access
Published
31 December 2019
31 December 2019
Abstract
Anthropology reveals a rich diversity of human cultures, while also highlighting our commonalities. The discipline is a distorted mirror of this unity in diversity, however, so long as anthropologists from only a few, privileged cultures dominate the process of global knowledge construction. The World Council of Anthropological Associations (WCAA) was founded to address this. The WCAA provides a global platform for democratic participation in the spirit of a new ‘world anthropologies’ paradigm, which recognises that our understanding of other cultures is perspectivistic, and hence, to be fully understood, every culture needs to be contemplated from the multiple perspectives of all ‘anthropologies’.