For thousands of years, humanity's story was one of diversification. Across centuries and continents our species proliferated new approaches to family and community life; to agriculture, economics, religion, artistic expression and self-understanding. Today, this process is in reverse.
Culturally and ecologically, we are witnessing an almost universal drive towards homogeneity and the loss of diversity. The global forces of capitalism have created a world riddled with overlapping crises, with any alternatives pushed into the margins, narrowing the scope for action just when we need it most. And yet its logic is never totalising: contrary to Margaret Thatcher's famous mantra, there are many alternatives.
The Big Here and the Long Now begins with the story of how our world of efficiency, standardisation and development optimism first came into being; and how promises of progress, growth and prosperity have, in recent years, acquired a nasty aftertaste. The book concludes with hope, and an exploration of creolisation and hybridity. With biocultural diversity already being revived by activists and indigenous communities, from Manhattan to Micronesia, there are plenty of green shoots. Now they must be cultivated and nurtured.
Table of Contents:
Introduction: The Big Here and the Long Now
Part I. A Global History of Standardisation
1. Stories of Loss
2. Everything Was Not Better Before
3. The World after 1492
4. The Global Bulldozers: State and Market
5. Scale Collisions
6. The Loss of Flexibility
Part II. Overheating in the 21st Century
7. The World after 1991
8. The Homogenocene
9. The Smartphone and the Container Ship
10. The Botanical Garden – and the Zoological One
11. Concrete
12. Soil
13. Invasions
14. Language
15. Food
16. The Sensory System
17. Modules in a Customised World
18. Good Standardisation
Part III. Miracles of Creolisation
19. David and Goliath
20. Cracks in the Concrete
21. Desensitisation
22. Boundary Crossings
23. Creole Conviviality
24. The Miracles of Creolisation
25. TAMA
Afterword and Acknowledgements
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the Author :
Thomas Hylland Eriksen (1962 – 2024) was Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo and former President of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA). He was among the most highly cited anthropologists of his generation, and his classic and accessible textbook Small Places, Large Issues remains a cornerstone in anthropology courses. His later books, including Overheating, tackled the important issue of climate change within the discipline.
Review :
'Truly an inspiration. Only someone of Eriksen's stature could write this call to intellectual and political action in everyday life with such authority, lucidity and grounding. Through smartphones, containerships, cement and soil, Eriksen shows us that there are small signs of more liveable worlds than the juggernaut of globalisation allows'
'Thomas Hylland Eriksen is by a wide margin the most influential social anthropologist in Norway'
