Convenor
Viacheslav Rudnev
Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology, Russian Academy of Sciences
Abstract
Modernity has changed everything: subsistence opportunities and objectives, the organization of people, their hold on the places where they have always lived, the values and political institutions which make their lives orderly, valuable, and possible; the intellectual, cosmological and religious perspectives which have guided their world views, the conditions of their natural and social environments, and their ability to survive.
This panel will look at this worldwide phenomenon from a variety of viewpoints, always keeping the focus on the people who have been the focus of anthropological knowledge and concern from the beginning. What are people doing to survive? Many people have moved from rural villages to towns and cities, gradually loosening the ties that have bound them socially and productively to their village communities. They now must support themselves largely on the cash economy, which grows and develops; or which, in some places, withers away, leaving people stranded in cities without support. When people in cities are able to continue to support themselves, new cultural structures have evolved in many parts of the world to sustain their connections with families and support groups in the village: remittances in the form of cash are sent home to villages all over the world by young people who are making a living in cities as modern professionals, defined by the structures that have evolved in the cash economies now interdependent in a globalized world. Metaphors of mobility built on electronic communications have generated solar computers, people everywhere (almost) with cell phones to their ears, the homogenization of the arts. What has happened to the strength of indigenous knowledge, the certainly of identity in a world of communities, and the ability of individuals to survive in modern jungles? This panel will bring together research on these issues from different places and the diverse perspectives.