Toward an Anthropology of “Sustainable Network-Society”

Abstract

What is new in the literature of the social sciences and humanities has been the proliferation of the word “network” to describe contemporary society. Society nowadays is being referred to as a network of relations. Although these descriptions, especially in anthropology, try to reconfigure the modernist distinction between subjects and objects, most of them share the postmodernist aversion to granting any grand narrative or ideal to the network society. The aim of this paper is to give an anthropological perspective on contemporary network theories and to add a new quality of verticality in the architecture of network societies. The paper argues that any worldview that tries to define the contours of society and individuals living in it must provide for a higher ideal or a grand narrative to enable its inhabitants their gradual evolution and progression. The sustainability of any ideology or worldview, this paper argues, comes from this fact of ensuring a continuous and gradual movement to higher dimensions of life.