‘Good Question’ answered: Charles Piot on ethical development and globalization

In the latest edition of the Kenan Institute for Ethics’ “Good Question” series, Charles Piot, Chair and Professor of Cultural Anthropology and African & African American Studies, offers insight about ethical development in an increasingly globalized world.

Piot, whose research has focused on the political economy and history of rural West Africa, has long looked at rural Africa’s place in a globalized world. When it comes to development, breaking down barriers to understand challenges on a local level are what can make a difference in impacting lives, he said.

“It’s long been anthropology’s mission to give voice to other societies’ ways of being in the world – of making the strange familiar, and the familiar strange,” Plot noted. “In so doing we come to understand that our culture is not given in nature. Nor is it the only way of organizing the world.”

Read more of Piot’s ideas in his Good Question profile.