ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses one of the paradoxes or ironies of Western modernity. However, the idea of free individual, equal to his fellows, implied that he was responsible for his actions and, above all, for the differences perceived in ‘others’ considered culturally odd because of their diversity. When the Europeans began to conquer and colonize other continents, this idea contradicted the reality of colonial domination, which was based on the domination of culturally diverse ‘others’ and their moral and/or natural disqualification. There is no doubt that anthropology was born as a modern reflection on human cultural diversity. In the sixteenth century, European first expansion to other continents fostered the appearance of an anthropological sensibility that gathered new steam with nineteenth-century European colonialism. Later, in a globalized context, European ‘civilization’ invented new racial categories to undervalue the ‘primitive other’ based on biological and cultural criteria. However, anthropology was not simply a discipline at the service of the European colonial powers; rather, these powers were an indissoluble part of the reality that anthropologists sought to understand.
