Abstract

LOUCA, João Carlos. The world exists now. Etnográfica [online]. 2024, vol.28, n.1, pp.243-256.  Epub Apr 18, 2024. ISSN 0873-6561.  https://doi.org/10.4000/etnografica/15665.

After the end of the Cold War and the Soviet bloc, the 1990’s promised the expansion of capitalism to the most remote corners of the planet. Globalization was the way economic liberalism assumed this purpose by ensuring that economies and cultures, states or regions abandoned particularisms of history to be global protagonists of the change that was announced. After the crises of the neoliberal model that inaugurated the 21st century, globalization and development became anachronic concepts and unable to fulfill future projects at different scales. In these deep crises intolerance and the far right also gain space on a global level. War and political violence are normalized and constitute greater threats to social life. Through ethnography in two differentiated contexts - one urban and in the north of Portugal, and the other in the Pyrenees mountains of Aragon - we observe forgotten territories of this process of globalization and people who have chosen to turn their lives into utopias made concrete in the reciprocity and solidarity of collective constructions. It is in these ethnographic examples that anthropology can be found in the diversity of social experience and in the possible paths that, after all, have never ceased to be traversed in the world that exists now.

Keywords : neoliberalism; globalization; concrete utopias; anthropology.

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