Expanding Possibilities

The following quote from Hornborg's article struck me as I was reflecting on discussion in 101 yesterday.

We are trained as anthropologists and tend to maintain a healthy distance to social engineering, but as stewards of a vast collective memory of global cultural experimentation, it could be argued that we have an obligation to share these alternative ideas and ideologies with nonanthropologists seeking visions of a sustainable world. Like so many other populations over the past few centuries, the Tiv have discovered how their incorporation into a world economy orchestrated by general-purpose money implied loss of local control, inequitable trade relations, and environmental degradation [2007:65].

Very often, policy makers and other social scientists assume the experience of Western peoples defines the boundaries of possibility (see this link for an interesting, but long, study in which the study populations used by the discipline of psychology are scrutinized...how representative of a general human species are those results?). However, as Hornborg argues above, there are other ways and other possibilities and should not be discounted out of hand as "backward" survivals from a more primitive stage of human cultural evolution.