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Historical Transformations includes appraisals of Marxist, cultural materialist, and neo-evolutionary approaches to understanding modern and postmodern realms. It offers especially trenchant criticisms of most globalization theories, suggesting that they are largely biased ruminations of global elites. Yet out of the ruins of such questionable theory, Ekholm Friedman and Friedman formulate their own global systems theory. Drawing on only a few concepts--of which logic, social reproduction, and transformational analysis are most prominent--they craft an understanding of the world in which Bronze Age empires, Oceanic Big Man politics, Congolese kinship and witchcraft culture, and the postmodern West are explained by transformational analysis. In the end, the authors suggest that the postmodern world in which we live is one at the 'end of empire' when history has taken on a 'Kafkaesque quality.'" - Stephen Reyna, University of Manchester


Historical Transformations represents the work of two distinguished anthropologists over three decades on the history and importance of global thinking in the social sciences. The authors consider numerous examples for which local phenomena can only be understood within the contexts of global systems. Their multidisciplinary work touches on many aspects of social and individual life as well as long-term historical processes.

Les auteurs:

Kajsa Ekholm Friedman est professeur (Lund University, Suède)
Jonathan Friedman est directeur d'études (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales)