Farewell to Anthropology

Nowadays, at the very moment of a general and total triumph of the so-called globalization, an honest anthropologist has to ask himself one more question about his competence. What has become of the world of primitive cultures? That question is cardinal and crucial. It is far more than an empty rhetorical sentence which opens many university seminars, it is a question which is in fact directly related to the origins of modern anthropology. In this paper, the origins of anthropology are revisited: when Europeans and most precisely the Spanish started to conquer a big part of America they were amazed by the “Indians” of America both those of urban culture and those of primitive tribes in the jungle or desert. If at a first step they massacred them, very quickly monks, and especially Dominicans and Franciscans, and later Jesuits, were all astonished by their cultures. This astonishment led to a change in the anthropological knowledge: it become apparent that they are to be considered as “primitive” not as animals, but still, the question remained why they behaved in such very strange ways for a European who, at that time, had already gathered some knowledge on some of the African costal tribes and kingdoms. That world has progressively vanished through the following centuries due to the violence of modernity, and more precisely because primitive tribes and kingdoms were confronted with capitalism and transformed into proletarians what forced them to change their customs and give up their religious beliefs. This short paper tries to assess whether there is a possibility of a renewed way of thinking for anthropology while maintaining its fundamental questions. If this is not possible, should anthropology be reduced to a kind of archeology of knowledge or should it be completely transformed into one sociological approach of modernity amongst the many?