THE CHALLENGE OF ANTHROPOLOGY AS HUMANITARIAN SCIENCE IN THE ETERNAL SEARCH OF ORIGINALITY BETWEEN THE CULTURAL DIFFERENCE AND THE SOCIETAL OTHERNESS

Abstract

For a long time anthropology was defined by the exoticism of its subject matter and also by the distance (mostly cultural than geographic) separating the researcher from the researched group. However, after the coming of the new Millennium many things have been changed radically and many anthropologists imply their old professional ethnographic techniques to study their own cultures using terms as otherness instead of exoticism and reflexivity instead of objectivity. The term of cosmopolitanism also has been too much applied instead of multiculturalism, charged with political connotations of what could be ‘politically correct’ under the western values. In the same time, anthropology is exercised now also by the representatives of these ‘ different cultures’ who exercise by their original ways the inverse influence to the western values. Cultural difference has acquired its most complex meaning nowadays and the scope of this paper is to present through the example of tourism some cases of intercultural meetings under a paradigmatic assumption entailing not only anthropological self-criticism but also the consideration that this self-criticism anthropology prescribes is also morally and originally pointed. Social change has to be analysed objectively and in the same time from all points of view and this consists the challenge of anthropology in our era.