ABSTRACT
Hammoudi asks if humanity is experiencing an axial age. Collage and metempsychosis of “culture” are considered major phenomena, unfolding on a global scale as a source of “opening” inseparable from “disarray.” The enduring reality of powerful and wealthy territorial states from North and South nations is a fact worldwide. They are grand, ghastly experiments with the lives of inhabitants. In new modes of change, revolution is not the transformation of a mode of production and the overthrow of the bourgeois classes and powers. For example, the breaking and remaking of Sudan cannot be lumped analytically with a possible one in Great Britain, involving Ireland and Scotland. Anthropologists have rightly insisted that people everywhere are now confronting each other with cultural differences, in search of the power to survive. In the West, one is confronted with seemingly infinite lifestyle “choices” available in a fast moving market. Elsewhere, it may mean living with the burdensome reality of being physically stuck while virtually on the move, or geographically contained while living the life of a restless refugee. Thus, this historical moment of “opening and disarray” is a global reality of diverse crisscrossing lives and confounding reversals in politics and identity, which means promise.
