Towards an anthropology of global inequalities and their local manifestations: social anthropology in 2017

At a time when political, social, and environmental inequalities are proliferating around the globe, anthropologists need to be equipped to diagnose, analyse and to respond. A review of the anthropological research published in European journals in 2017 identifies three sets of tensions for an anthropological inquiry into global inequalities: first, between macro political economy processes and their localised workings and effects; second between institutional processes of legitimisation and their everyday forms of resistance; and third, between future-oriented projects of change and the political demands of the present. Taken together, these sets of tensions not only offer a starting point for analysing how global inequalities are locally channelled, experienced and acted upon from below but also point to the political and methodological challenges that anthropologists face in the neoliberal climate of higher education today.