ABSTRACT
Anthropology has always been a heterogeneous discipline, engaged in a constant process of debate, self-examination and reinvention. As the study of human connections to, or disconnections from, one another, in myriad environments, it is an eclectic way of thinking by an eclectic group of global practitioners. No single volume should dare to claim that it is providing a comprehensive compendium of everything going on in anthropology today, and this book is no exception. In putting together this collection for readers who may or may not be anthropologists and who learn and work in academic or other contexts, our goal was to compile a range of articles that would speak both to the diversity of the discipline and also to its common threadsand of course to lay out what we see as the significance of its role in the contemporary world.
