ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the key concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book focuses on the economic crisis that affected higher education generally and on the sense of intellectual exhaustion that led Marcus to say that the discipline is in suspension. It has argued that they are linked, being two aspects of neoliberalism and the neoclassical economics associated with it. Economists were not presented with understandings of economic systems, and anthropologists were not presented with understandings of society and culture. The United States was important for both neoliberalism and postmodernism, and during that same period it experienced the Civil Rights and Women's Liberation movements. Both of these sought to assert what they saw as the rights of individuals against institutions and systems that restricted those rights. Those American and French anthropologists, like many in the movements who inspired them, may have had visions of replacing the old order with a better world.
