Our task is no longer one of creating countercultures, engaging in political protest, and pursuing economic alternatives. To create a just, sustainable, and compassionate post-corporate world we must face up to the need to create a new core culture, a new political center, and a new economic mainstream. Such a bold agenda requires many different kinds of expertise, working at many levels of society--personal, household, community, national, and global. It requires breaking the bonds of individual isolation that leave us feeling marginalized when in fact we may already be part of a new majority
David Korten (The Post-Corporate World: Life After Capitalism)

Those anthropologists who question the relevance of anthropology to contemporary issues have not learned the principal lessons of anthropology: cultures are rooted in the material conditions of human adaptation, shaped by the social relations people develop to manage those conditions, and driven as much by the ways that those material and social systems don't work as by the ways that they do.
E Paul Durrenberger and Kendall Thu (Coming in From the Margins, Anthropology Newsletter, Oct 1998. American Anthropological Association)

 

Introduction: What are the Real Dangers?

The extent of active resistance to the expansion of capitalism is evidence of something wrong. The difficulty, of course, is isolating the problem and fixing it. Is the major problem the exploitation of labor? Is it the economic and social marginalization and suppression of women and minorities? Is it the excessive power of corporations, or the widespread distribution of deadly armaments? Or is it the assault on the environment or the decline of community and religious values? Anthropology suggests that even our sense of the risks and dangers we face can be culturally and socially determined. That is, the way in which our society or culture filters our experience and sense of the world may dictate what we most fear. Thus whether your greatest concern is environmental destruction or financial collapse, a nuclear holocaust or disease, the power of witches or God's damnation, crime or societal disintegration, it may be as much a function of your society and culture as it is of any "real" or "objective" dangers (see Douglas and Wildavsky 1983). This does not mean, of course, that some, if not all, of these threats are unreal; but it does determine a person's sense of or lack of urgency concerning them. The questions are: Can we articulate effectively the sources of global problems and gain some consensus regarding their urgency? If so, what are the chances that there is the will to make a change? And finally, even if there is a will to change, what are the specific things that need to be changed?

Hunger, poverty, the spread of disease, environmental degradation, exploitation of women, children, and minorities, and global conflict and militarization are not imaginary dangers or problems. Their effects are felt daily by billions of people. Our analysis suggests that the root of these problems is the central and unarguable tenet of the culture of capitalism--the need and desire for perpetual economic growth. Each of the major elements of this culture--the consumer, the laborer, the capitalist and the nation-state-- has a vested interest in the production and consumption of ever more goods and services. As we stated earlier, and as we examined in the first four chapters, this is not "natural." If acquiring material things were a dominant instinct or value, it should not be necessary for producers to spend some $450 billion a year to persuade people to buy stuff, or devise advertising images that promote desires by appealing to people's longing for love, acceptance, and contact with nature (Korten 1999:213-214).

However, objecting to perpetual economic growth will not win many friends; capitalists require it for their profits, laborers for their wages, consumers for the "stuff" they are convinced they need, and nation-states for their power, revenue, and legitimacy. While people organize to resist capitalist expansion, argue for alternative forms of governance, or propose a different distribution of resources, rarely will they articulate any objection to growth itself. The notion of economic progress is deeply entrenched in our culture.