A World Made Safe for (Future) Difference

In her 1946 book, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, Ruth Benedict famously contrasts policy that leads to a “world made safe for difference” with policy that insists on the universality of human culture. While many have utilized this passage to underscore the urgency of anthropology in a violent and intolerant world, it also suggests the uneasy essentialism of her approach, one where culture is ambiguously shared among denizens of the nation-state. Yet, in almost the next breath, Benedict reassures us that “encouraging cultural differences would not mean a static world.” What if Benedict is referring less to an essentialist “cultural identity” than a way of thinking of the world that is generative of cultural difference and human flourishing? And what would it mean for anthropology to work toward this world “made safe” for the production of difference? In this chapter, I propose to evoke an anthropology focused on future difference, both in terms of challenging hegemonies of power and capitalism and in terms of opening up understanding to alternative futures premised on difference. This involves repositioning anthropology’s immanent critique as the disclosure of possible worlds, on the one hand, and interrogating what exactly “difference” means in terms of the inequalities that have overdetermined our present. The chapter concludes with the possibility of anthropology as a utopian science bound up with disclosing future worlds different from the dystopian present

Anthropological Studies and Insights · Computer Science · Political Economy and Marxism

• Transformations, Decline, and (Imagined) Futures of Gojlo and Kutina

  Open Access•Tihana Rubić•Etnološka tribina•2023

  Add to list