Meanwhile the global economy has made many people migrant labourers of one sort or another, moving from country to country for corporate postings, academic appointments or cleaning jobs. Faraway places are now accessible to holiday-makers. Or they may come courtesy of the corner store, run by recent immigrants from another part of the world. As travel and television bring eye-witness reports into homes around the world, such investigations may seem increasingly redundant. Those who predict the marginalisation or even the end of anthropology point to the proliferation of the concept of culture.
Culture is the concept upon which anthropology was built.
Today, whether in academia or in everyday life, everyone talks about culture. Britain is not immune. This might seem a victory for anthropology, a field which began with Victorian ideas of hierarchy and race, and ended celebrating difference and championing theories of cultural relativism. A glance inside London's huge Borders bookshop certainly suggests that anthropology is becoming marginalised. Clearly, if everyone's talking about culture, they're not reading anthropology to do so.