1st Edition

An Overheated World An Anthropological History of the Early Twenty-first Century

Edited By Thomas Hylland Eriksen Copyright 2018
    162 Pages
    by Routledge

    162 Pages
    by Routledge

    Although economic, cultural and demographic changes are part and parcel of the modern world, changes in a number of areas have accelerated in the last quarter-century – a period sometimes spoken of as the global information society, a world of ‘liquid modernity’ – or of fully-fledged global neoliberalism associated with deregulation, flexible accumulation and financialisation.   

    At a global level, some of the substantial areas where change has accelerated are, apart from the spectacular spread of new information technology, tourism, foreign direct investment, urbanisation, resource extraction through mining, energy use, species extinction, displacement, and international trade. These and other changes are, needless to say, perceived and acted upon differently in different countries and localities, and in order to understand the implications of the present acceleration of history, they have to be explored locally.

    This book gives a compelling perspective on the contemporary, ‘overheated’ world, presenting ethnographic material from many countries and weaving the local and particular together with large-scale global acceleration. This book was first published as a special issue of History and Anthropology.

    1.Overheating: the world since 1991 Thomas Hylland Eriksen

    2. Building a city: Korean capitalists and navy nostalgia in "overheated" Subic Bay Elisabeth Schober

    3. Mining, expectations and turbulent times: locating accelerated change in rural Sierra Leone Robert J. Pijpers

    4. Temporalities, time and the everyday: new technology as a marker of change in an Estonian mine Eeva Kesküla

    5. The refugee crisis: destabilizing and restabilizing European borders Synnøve K. N. Bendixsen

    6. From coal to Ukip: the struggle over identity in post-industrial Doncaster Cathrine Thorleifsson

    7. Dreams of growth and fear of water crisis: the ambivalence of "progress" in the Majes-Siguas
    Irrigation Project, Peru Astrid B. Stensrud

    8. Creating and dissolving social groups from New Guinea to New York: on the overheating of bounded corporate entities in contemporary global capitalism Adam Leaver and Keir Martin

    9. Overheated Underdogs: Civilizational Analysis and Migration on the Danube-Tisza Interfluve Chris Hann

    Biography

    Thomas Hylland Eriksen is a Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo and was PI of the ERC AdvGR project 'Overheating' (2012–2017).