ABSTRACT
Social and cultural anthropology has for a hundred years been occupied with issues of human variation, cultural creativity, technological innovation, and what is often referred to as social and cultural evolution. In interaction, often quite intense, with archeologists and ancient historians, there has been a diverse production of models of the social history of our species. I have myself been very much involved in this broad attempt to discover the nature of long-term processes, a perspective that has become much diminished in the field of anthropology since the 1980s, not least under the aegis of social and cultural anthropologists themselves. During this period there has been a focus on ethnographic research and a rise of a strongly present-oriented ethnography that eschewed both historical and comparative research. In this chapter I review some of the arguments that propelled the development of what I call a global systemic anthropology.
