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Abstract:
The post-1989 world inaugurated a movement away from narrative as a political, economic, and cultural value, and toward the fetishizing of fragmentation and disruption. After official communism’s demise and the universal triumph of capitalism elites emphasized discontinuity, a lack of control, a rupturing of certainties. This discourse has pervaded western society—in reigning demands to accept contingency and change as facts of life—as well as anthropology as an academic discipline. This chapter reflects on these changes as they concern two domains: cosmological narratives and capitalist preeminence. Neoliberalism and its monetization of sociality are commonly assumed to have displaced immanent political, religious, and ethical narratives. In contrast, a twenty-first-century anthropology must highlight the coeval continuity and contemporaneity of non-capitalist narratives as they unfold alongside conditions structured by the imprint of capitalism.
