BEYOND ANTHROPOLOGY TO POST-ANTHROPOLOGY
TWO VOLUME SET

Is anthropology really so heterophilic that, as Ruth Benedict once suggested, “the purpose of anthropology is to make the world safe for human differences” (BQ 2017) This positive view on anthropology can be contrasted with the opposing one by Nancy B. Smith, who observed instead that “anthropology is the science which tells us that people are the same the whole world over―except when they are different”? (BQ 2017a)

Contrary to these opposing views (and other ones as will be discussed in the book), anthropology (in relation to centrality and peripherality—as well as other dichotomies) is neither possible (or impossible) nor desirable (or undesirable) to the extent that the respective ideologues (on different sides) would like us to believe, such that there is no centrality without peripherality (and vice versa), to be explained by the “symmetry-asymmetry principle” (and other ones) in “existential dialectics” (in Chapter Four).

Needless to say, this challenge to the conventional debate does not mean that anthropology is worthless, or that those diverse fields (related to anthropology)—such as sociology, cultural studies, religion, criminology, jurisprudence, medicine, science studies, biology, linguistics, philosophy, economics, political science, cosmology, psychology, social studies, history, literature, ecology, the arts, communication studies, technology studies, and so on—should be rejected. (WK 2017) Of course, neither of these extreme views is reasonable.

Instead, this book offers an alternative (better) way to understand the future of anthropology (and related fields) in regard to the dialectic relationship between centrality and peripherality (and those in other dichotomies)—while learning from different approaches in the literature but without favoring any one of them (nor integrating them, since they are not necessarily compatible with each other). More specifically, this book offers a new theory (that is, the theory of post-anthropology) to go beyond the existing approaches in a novel way and is organized in four chapters.

This seminal project will fundamentally change the way that we think about anthropology (in relation to the dialectic relationship between centrality and peripherality—as well as those in other dichotomies) from the combined perspectives of the mind, nature, society, and culture, with enormous implications for the human future and what I originally called its “post-human” fate.