Social complexity and the question of scale: global challenges to anthropology

At present, there is a sense that anthropology is being tested by new global realities. In actual fact anthropology has been permanently tested since its inception, because history has always been on the move. In this article I shall discuss the current challenges with a view to identifying various scales of knowledge that all of them are in some sense local. By taking off in a discussion of social complexity as the result of bottom up processes of action and deliberation, it is possible to rethink scale in anthropology without loosing the precious foothold in actual social life that was always the hallmark of anthropology. What is being tested right now is not anthropology as such but some of its concepts – notably those that depend on social boundaries.