Contemporary worlds anthropology

This book attempts to be a statement, but that only obliges its author, and in doing so, it is undoubtedly indebted to all those who, like him, seek to build an anthropological project of contemporary worlds, imagining them in an aggressive way, not as a retreating stance for those who were disappointed by exotisme, notably including Marc Abélès, Gérard Althabe, Jean Bazin, Alban Bensa, Jean-Paul Colleyn, Jean Jamin, Michèle de La Pradelle, Emmanuel Terray, and those from within the field such as Françoise Héritier, or from outside it like Fernando Gil and Denys Lombard, who contributed with their insightful, critical, and generous perspectives. But the comments proposed, the opening analyses presented, and the concepts or terms discussed here were not the subject of a collective discussion in the full sense of the word, and therefore they cannot claim to summarize or monopolize the personal and original methods of some and others. The purpose of this book, then, is to contribute to a shared effort that is nonetheless diverse in its subject matter. We have covered everything, the world and ideas, and it was necessary for some that liberated mermaids from magic to tempt the world of ethnology on its way back, but it is a path with no return. The paradox of today is that the absence of the meaning of meaning requires, as every unity of form of difference demands, a divergence. In this complex game of questions and answers, the anthropologist today finds his new intellectual topics; he has not forgotten them when he went to distant lands, discovering for the first time in human history that the Earth is truly round.