Understanding cultural diversity. Culture, cultural traits and cultural changes between global and local scales

This essay argues for a new attention to cultural traits and cultural diffusion notions by side of anthropologists. Such concepts are crucial to understand how Culture works and changes in the wider world beyond the local. Anthropologists are required to focus in a less parochial way on particularistic views and analyses of local cultures, and to study cultural processes from more wide perspectives, if they still have some ambitions to contribute almost in parts to improving cultural theory. To grasp what is going on in contemporary societies with regard to cultural dimensions is the chance for anthropology to overcome the crisis of representation of the last decades and to reaffirm its “authority” as understanding of cultural diversity.