In an age of heightened globalization, anthropologists have failed to discuss consistently the current nature of their practice and its transformations on a global scale. This article views anthropology as a cosmopolitics that consolidated itself as a formal academic discipline in the 20th century within a growing Western university system that expanded throughout the world. It is part of a critical anthropology of anthropology, one that decenters, re-historicizes, and pluralizes what has been taken as "anthropology" so far. It questions not only the contents but also the terms and the conditions of anthropological conversations. It also focuses on issues that reveal how anthropology got entangled with geopolitics and national/global power. The article emphasizes that the increasingly important role non-hegemonic anthropologies play in the production and dissemination of knowledge on a global scale is a new transformative force coming from within anthropology itself.
Knowledge and hegemony; Academic globalization; Cosmopolitics; Transnationalism
