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Other worlds exist

04/05/2011 admin 0
[/caption] Maybe anthropology is slowly dropping its positivist burden and stepping towards the contemporary world. In Low and Merry's opening article of Current Anthropology's recent supplement Engaged anthropology, diversity and dilemmas (2010), the authors highlight how little attention the peers who reviewed the article payed to the problem of objectivity and neutrality, until now required to legitimate any ethnographic research. Maybe scholars are slowly recognizing that personal and political engagement in the struggles and demands of the communities studied represent an enrichment, not an obstacle to the production of cientific knowledge. As Micheal Herzfeld (2010) notices in Gentrification, engagement and the neoliberal hijacking of history, it is an ethical duty of anthropologists to show alternative possibilities to neoliberal cynism, and to make them accessible and understandable to the public.