Anthopology Challenges

Coming close the end of the year, I think that we haven’t learned a lot of things about anthropology nowadays: our formation as professionals has been focused only in anthropology’s history. But, I can suspect and approximate my answers to those things that may be a challenge to anthropology for these days.

First of all, the fast evolution of technology, globalization and all those phenomena related to make easier the human life by making machines that can replace us, are extinguishing the identities associated to the place where we live and the ancient traditions. The system established it’s forcing to the indigenous populations to let behind their original places and go to live to cities, converting them into occidental ones, just like bricks in an enormous wall sold as “progress”. But, if the identity losing it’s a trouble, may can be too a new phenomenon to investigate. The adaptation to new systems of life may be able to be described, analyzed and to be treated as a new topic of anthropology investigation (I think that surely it is)

Socially talking, I think that anthropology has to affront the social devaluation of its labor. People thinks that anthropology doesn’t have any importance to the world, and many persons say that we are lazy people that are paid for do nothing. Maybe the anthropologist labor isn’t so vital as a doctor or people dedicated to satisfy basic needs, but I think that culture it’s a need of second or third order to, but a human need anyway. Maybe people think that anthropology isn’t important because they don’t know about the discipline, so the solution to this problem should be to inform to the non-anthropologist about what we do and how important is. That lead us to the last challenge: the one about education. For the same reason told recently, it’s very important to inform and educate to the people about anthropology, its important labor and the amazing things discovered. It could be included in the schools and/or colleges as a topic of the history (because anthropology can be treated as a historical science too, narrowly related to geography). It can be a little step but a important one to give us a respectableplace in the world.