ABSTRACT
I present my argument in two sections, corresponding to self and society, subject and object. In the first I will report on my personal journey as an ethnographer of the global elite concerned with development in the 1970s; while in the second, on the basis of further reflection, I suggest that contemporary world society might be thought of as being polarised between a rich elite and the mass of poor people. This leads me to conclude that humanity has failed to consolidate the advances in science and democracy that launched the modern age; and I ask why, after two centuries of the machine revolution, our world still resembles the old regime of agrarian civilisation. For whatever anthropologists may contribute to the study of elite cultures in the plural, I believe it is our duty to show the way towards grasping the human condition as a whole.
