From roots to routes

This article suggests that the current discourses of globalization in anthropology, cultural studies and post-colonial studies are expressions and elaborations on a specific socially positioned perspective that has become a contender for a new ideological representation of the world. It is important to recognize that this representation is not so much the result of research but an immediate expression of a particular experience, one that began, in fact, outside of academia. This discourse, which is strongly evolutionist, is contrasted to a global systemic perspective in which globalization is a specific historical phase of such systems, a phenomenon that has occurred previously, most recently at the end of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century when it produced analogous discourses on the global.