Paper short abstract:

The reflexive nature of anthropological knowledge, and the lack of a solid paradigm on which to start a predictive theory, has left anthropology with little to contribute to the development of ideas about the obvious global problems and dire future of our subject, humanity.

Paper long abstract:

Anthropology, while claiming a global sweep and evolutionary time scale, is ultimately rooted, not in objective knowledge, but the appreciation of shared understandings. We are drawn to highly localized, in-depth long-term research. The result is a concern with the reflexive nature of our knowledge, an appreciation that what we have learned is inseparable from how we have learned it, that our knowledge. Along the way, anthropology has failed to also develop its promise of a global perspective.

It is now being recognized that the human species has entered a new era. The interlocked problems of non-renewable resource depletion, accumulating industrial waste, biosphere degradation and climate change lead expert and lay observers to postulate extreme predictions about the foreseeable future: e.g. the collapse of industrialized food production and a "die off" of human population from 7 billion to less than 3 billion in the next 150-200 years. Many political commentators see these crises as the underlying explanation for the current geopolitical situation.

Surely nothing could be of more central concern to anthropology. I do not know any anthropologist who is not deeply concerned; many are alarmed. Yet those discussing the possible futures of humanity are natural scientists, independent authors, and journalists, not anthropologists.

Anthropology lacks a solid paradigm on which to start a predictive theory and, it seems, is about to be rendered irrelevant by truly global transformations occurring to its own subject.