Explorations in Social Theory and Philippine Ethnography

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Over recent years one of the central, underlying assumptions of the social sciences has demonstrably collapsed. We can no longer think of the world as consisting of an aggregation of discrete societies, each with its own culture, each managing and expressing its autonomous identity through the instrumentality of a nation-state that participates, as one of many, in a mosaic of nation-states known as "international society". Instead, we now have to fathom how to understand global representations of the local and local experiences of the global. To do that, we need to rethink the very foundations, character, objectives and agenda of the social science. To this task, Raul Pertierra's new collection of essays- a series of related meditations upon which might be involved in disentangling the intellectual presuppositions of the social sciences from the logic of the merging ascendancy of the modern nation-state that framed their growth - makes a notable contribution. While drawing widely from contemporary philosophy and social theory, Raul Pertierra's investigation of our present intellectual predicament rests upon a possibly surprising that anthropology, the social science discipline which seemingly faced the greatest peril from the advances of global culture, may provide the richest and most secure foundation for understanding and coping practically with its challenges.