ABSTRACT
The world anthropologies project aims at pluralizing the existing visions of anthropology at a juncture in which hegemonic, North Atlantic–centric discourses about difference prevail. The connection between anthropology and world politics applies to all anthropologies, often in contrasting ways, and it applies with particular poignancy to hegemonic anthropologies. The sizable presence of indigenous peoples, strong nation-building projects, and persistent debates over race and culture in both countries enabled national and transnational institutional developments that greatly conditioned their anthropologies. Metropolitan provincialism is the ignorance that anthropologists in hegemonic centers have of the knowledge production of practitioners in nonhegemonic sites. Metropolitan provincialism and provincial cosmopolitanism need to be understood in relation to the language issue. It is doubtless that English has become both a hegemonic language and the main global means of intellectual communication. Linguistic diversity is part of any world anthropologies project.
