The decrease in the importance of the participation of anthropologists in public debates is the result of various factors, some internal to the discipline, others external. Triviality, high specialization, and neglect of issues of broad public interest are issues that need to be debated. Likewise, the current resurgence of discourses of intolerance and racism points to the possible arrival of a postmulticultural era where anthropological knowledge must be repositioned. The internet is another important variable in understanding contemporary anti-intellectualism, as it generates a renewed illusion of transparency that makes the social sciences seem useless. Ethnography, with its ability to bring us closer to agents, is a basis for anthropologists to take up a political / public role.

Lhe relocation of anthropological knowledge in the globalizing process, which has made most nations and ethnic groups interdependent, is one of the reasons why anthropology, as a knowledge devoted to the local, has lost relevance in recent decades. Lins Ribeiro rightly mentions other reasons: competition with other disciplines, hyperspecialization, changes in the culture/nature relationship, anti-intellectualism (partly due to the "empire of the screens" and the information vertigo caused by the Internet). The text points out some of the faults of anthropology itself: "the culture of auditing and productivism" associated with the business model with which academic life is reorganized, as well as "the absence of professors" from public debates.