What is it about?
We often think of the world as made up of relatively stable things, places and living beings. This article starts from a different idea: movement, exchange and change are fundamental to life itself. Movement happens at every scale, from an expanding universe and a changing planet to migrating people and animals, circulating viruses, growing fungi and exchanges between the cells in our bodies. Looking at the world in this way challenges the idea that humans are separate, self-contained beings living within an external “environment.” Instead, we are part of constantly changing relationships with other people, other species and the planet itself. The article asks what this means for anthropology and argues that the discipline can play an important role in helping us understand an interconnected world undergoing rapid environmental and social change.
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Why is it important?
Many of today's greatest challenges, including climate change, pandemics, biodiversity loss and migration, involve forms of movement and interconnection that cross the boundaries we usually use to organize our knowledge. A virus does not respect national borders; climate change connects actions in one part of the world with consequences elsewhere; animals and plants migrate as their environments change; and even human bodies depend upon constant exchanges with microorganisms and other forms of life. This article argues that understanding such challenges requires us to move beyond thinking about humans, societies and environments as separate entities. Humans are not outside nature. We are participants in complex living systems that are continuously moving, communicating and changing. This recognition also challenges anthropology itself. A discipline traditionally centred on human beings needs to become more attentive to other species, ecological relationships and processes operating from the microscopic to the planetary scale. What makes the argument particularly important is its call for anthropology to draw on its holistic traditions while crossing established intellectual boundaries. That includes connecting biological and sociocultural perspectives, taking Indigenous knowledge systems seriously, studying mobility alongside immobility and paying closer attention to the political and economic structures shaping who and what can move. Such an anthropology can help us understand not only how the world is changing, but also how humans might learn to inhabit a shared planet differently.
Perspectives
For me, this article grew out of a deceptively simple question: what happens if we take movement seriously, not merely as something that humans do, but as something fundamental to life and perhaps to reality itself? Once we look at the world in this way, the familiar boundaries between people and environment, human and non-human, organism and surroundings become much less self-evident. This required me to move beyond my own familiar anthropological territory. My work had long dealt with human mobility, including migration, tourism, pilgrimage and other forms of travel. But thinking about movement at radically different scales, from planetary and animal mobilities to microbes, fungi and cellular exchanges, made me reconsider what an anthropology of mobility might actually encompass. It also raised a more fundamental question: if humans themselves are continuously constituted through relationships and exchanges with other forms of life, what exactly is the “human” that anthropology claims to study? I see this not as a reason for anthropology to abandon its concern with humanity, but as an opportunity to rediscover one of the discipline's greatest strengths: its holistic ambition. Anthropology can connect forms of knowledge that have increasingly become separated through academic specialization. It can bring sociocultural and biological perspectives into conversation, connect processes occurring at different scales, and learn from Indigenous knowledge traditions that have long challenged the Western separation between humans and nature. Ultimately, the article is an invitation to rethink our place in the world with greater humility. In the Anthropocene, we are confronting the consequences of behaving as if humans stand apart from and control the environment. Anthropology can help us imagine another position: not as detached observers or masters of the planet, but as participants in a vast and fragile web of relationships whose complexity we are only beginning to understand.
Professor Noel B. Salazar
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Anthropologies of the Present and the Presence of Anthropology, Etnografia, July 2022, Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography of the Russian Academy of Sciences (The Kunstkamera),
DOI: 10.31250/2618-8600-2022-2(16)-6-24.
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