Anthropology's World: Life in a Twenty-First-Century Discipline

"Ulf Hannerz takes readers behind-the-scenes with wit, insight, political acuity, and a good measure of humanity. His observations about the frequent privileging of English in today's 'global discipline' and its consequences are especially sharp."-Virginia R. Dominguez, President, American Anthropological, Edward William and Jane Marr Gutgsell Professor of Anthropology University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

"Widely admired as a leading anthropologist of globalization, Hannerz... shows how anthropology came to be a central intellectual discipline, and why it should stay that way in a globalized world where the local refuses to be beaten into submission."-Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo

In this masterly book, Ulf Hannerz maps the contemporary social world of anthropologists and its relation to the wider world in which they carry out their work.

Raising fundamental questions such as "What is anthropology really about?", "How does the public understand, or misunderstand, anthropology?" and "What and where do anthropologists study now, and for whom do they write?" Hannerz invites anthropologists to think again about where their discipline is going.

Full of insights and practical advice from Hannerz's long experience at the top of the discipline, this book is essential for all anthropologists who want their craft to survive and develop in a volatile world, and contribute to new understandings of its ever-changing diversity and interconnections.

Ulf Hannerz is Professor Emeritus of Social Anthropology at Stockholm University and a former Chair of the European Association of Social Anthropologists.