The century of our children

Let us first clear up this misunderstanding: The Century of Our Children is not 'the autobiography of Rik Pinxten'. Autobiographies are for sportsmen, musicians and Barack Obama. But in this book, our most famous anthropologist does use himself as an entry point to a universal story: that of the great shifts in our post-war history, a history with which his life so far largely coincides. Using stories from and reflections on his youth in the Seefhoek in Antwerp and on his time as a student, as a researcher with the Navajo Indians in the US and as a professor in Ghent, he tells, among other things, about the economic development of Flanders, the emergence of our secular worldview, the shift from information to knowledge, the primacy of neoliberalism, the revival of xenophobia and nationalism, and the segmentation of society and the individual. A philosophical book but also a parable about life in and of Western culture.