Grasping The Changing World

As various societies merge increasingly into one global society and consequently have to address crises of identity, purpose and interest, so must social anthropology update its methodology as it is applied to the comparison and understanding of societies across space and time.
"Grasping the Changing World" is the result of various papers read at the second biannual EASA conference in Prague in 1992. These themes were debated in an extraordinary "postmodernist" setting: shortly after the fall of communist regimes in central and Eastern Europe and within Western Europe itself, which found itself in a debate on the general validity of concepts and terms which were in use for more than a century.
The first half of the book deals with the ways of conceptualizing, constructing and perceiving the present and the second half takes stock of both the conceptual strength and poverty of social anthropology as a modern social science.