machine, will seek to look through it (globalization) to the diverse circum-
stances that compose it, rather than simply labeling the phenomena as a
result of‘it’–when‘it’itself is not an explanation but just a label. The same
must roundly be said of all buzz words that arise from time to time in the
discipline and are stretched, squeezed, and spread so as to make further
thought‘unnecessary’, for example, the term‘neoliberalism’, which runs as
a partner along with general historical critiques of global capitalism. Fine,
but what is left out and why? The same with‘post-modernism’.
Finally, here, there is another feature to which we must attend. As
practitioners we tend to place boundaries around our discipline. These
boundaries may suit us individually, and that is legitimate, but they are also
rhetorical artifices of a political kind. How often do wefind statements like
‘Oh, that person is not really an anthropologist’, meaning that their
viewpoints and approaches differ significantly from one’s own. The pro-
cess is ineradicable because of the great and ever-growing diversity of
topics that those who self-identify as anthropologists involve themselves
in. A mindful approach brackets all such judgments, while seeking to make
explicit personal philosophies and preferences that underlie them.‘Truth’
and‘untruth’may live side by side here. Certain values such as engaged
participation and observation, alertness to embodied behavior and lan-
guage use, and overall humanity of description and analysis, can serve as
guidelines, but there will be other, more activist, philosophies as well.
A mindful anthropology will try, literally, to keep all this‘in mind’and
appreciate its complexity as well as a countervailing need to sift that
complexity andfind the essential matters that may lie at its heart.
2 CHANGE 21