Paper short abstract:

We always stand on the shoulders of others, both as persons and as parts of collectives, because it is only from the previous existence of others that we can be ourselves. If we attend to the traces with which others scaffolded our world, our ‘ethnocentrism’ opens itself to broader and broader forms of human embracement, of ecumenical reach. This is what I mean by taking the broader view.

Paper long abstract:

Writing in 1963, Ernesto de Martino argued that, to move out of the imperial condition, anthropology had to adopt what he called ecumenical ethnocentrism. By ethnocentrism he meant that, since persons are irrevocably within life, and life is foundationally social, there is no veranda beyond life from which to look at the world. We have to stop fooling ourselves with the vacuous hope that logic can lift us above history, like God had done of old. Today, in order to seek the broader view, we need to unmake the two principal pillars of the modernist paradigm: on the one hand, the notion that the Greater Divide in the human condition lays between modernity and ancientness, and, on the other hand, the neo-Kantian conception of Reason as the external measuring rod that sets up the Great Divide. When one takes these aspects into account, a picture emerges of the kind of anthropology we would want to bring about in our coming postimperial condition.