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Contribution short abstract

The academic environment of the Global North is lulled to sleep by the song of neoliberal sirens who promise to "take the other seriously" but end up preaching neoliberal individualism. I want to show some alternatives that can shed light on how to avoid falling into their gentle clutches.

Contribution long abstract

"Deleuze, Descola, Latour, Viveiros de Castro..." resonates in the heads of anthropologists like a mantra that will free us from the original sin of Anthropology, of essentializing the other. However, due to the concealment strategies that these scholars have used in their works, hiding that their theories come from Heidegger's philosophy of individualistic being, they do not realize that what they are doing is spreading academic neoliberalism to its most unthinkable extremes.

Ultimately, postmodernist anthropologists do not consider that the cultures they study base their epistemological perspective on community and reciprocity modes of production, especially regarding societies in the Global South. The individuals they study are part of a whole that is structurally dominated in a preeminent way under neoliberalism. Unfortunately, this topic is largely ignored.

The ontology of social being, initially promoted by Marx and later developed more deeply by Lukács, offers innovative responses to the neoliberal ontology that is currently in fashion, where it is possible to observe that very few researchers have investigated this possibility, considering that the theory of the value of dialectical materialism criticizes precisely the system that has currently reached its maximum development in the history of humanity: late capitalism.

I will explain some key points of the ontology of social being in Lukács and how it could be adopted critically from an anthropological-ethnographic point of view.