When we speak of prehistoric art, we think almost instantly of visual art, although we know that even the least technologically developed peoples on earth also expressed themselves by means of music, dance, gesticulation, and poetry; they practised the arts of eloquence, of moving and decorating their bodies, and of awakening social or sexual interest; prehistoric peoples developed any number of other aspects of artistic creativity and of externalization of the self, of which we can for the time being only recover (since archaeology does not reconstruct temporal arts) that which leaves decipherable physical traces.

When I was preparing a paper about the problem Greek studies have with globalization of culture on the threshold of the twenty-first century, I was asked who the Greek man was, considered as a separate entity, and how future decades would see him. The question had all the appearance of a trap. The very idea of ‘the Greek man’ is disturbing, even though it is so commonplace that it is hard to trace it back to its origins. Of course it contains a well-established but ill-defined consensus around the Greeks as the first free, rational human beings to found a free polity, who furthermore presided over the creation of a literature without equal in Antiquity and an exceptional and innovative body of art. A more precise answer could also echo the prestigious and much discussed title of Werner Jaeger's indispensable and troubling volume: Paideia. Die Formung des griechischen Menschen (1934), and even become, rather insidiously because of its date and the last few words of the sub-title, a parasitic echo of the period when a mythical discourse evoked Aryans and non-Aryans. But we must take care not to place the thesis of Werner Jaeger, to whom I will return, in that company, since the title is less a reflection of a suspect mode of thought than a simple coincidence of choice of language. And the reason it turns up here is that Jaeger and Dodds, whom we shall meet later, are the two opposite poles of this paper, standing in Greek studies on either side of the bloodstained struggle that transformed Europe and the West's relationship with the rest of the world for ever.

Cornelius Nepos tells us that when Cato talked of wars, he did not mention the generals’ names, but stuck to events without ever glorifying the protagonists. He saw the military exploits themselves as important and not the pride they might inspire in noblemen who were often more concerned with their personal merit than the glory of the Roman people. However, he made a few exceptions to this rule, which, precisely because they were rare, made the individual selected appear more brilliant. I shall do likewise. I intend to present a survey that will give a full account of the body of knowledge that has been consolidated between the end of the war and today. I shall deliberately give more emphasis to general trends than to specific results, highlighting the overall picture rather than individuals as such. But, as I have indicated, I shall break my rule occasionally to point to the birth of a new idea or to show how cooperative work developed out of an individual's vision.

In order to understand history as it has been practised in the twentieth century, we must go back in time. Not necessarily to Herodotus and Thucydides, nor even to the great founding figures of the ages of learning and of the Enlightenment, however enduring their influence. But to those historians who in the course of the nineteenth century brought to its conclusion the radical renewal of knowledge about the past: the means that enabled them to acquire it, arguments which were accepted as proofs, conceptual frameworks supposed to make deeds intelligible, ways of talking about times past - to historians who integrated this knowledge that was formerly split between literature, learned research and theology supplanted by philosophy, around a discipline comparable to philology as much from the epistemological point of view as in terms of status and driven not only by ambition to retain the exclusive right to the term history but also, very early, by that of conquering a superior position in the world of science.

This title is playful, of course. It is designed merely to attract curiosity and attention … It dates back to a childhood game of which I have forgotten both rules and stakes. An imaginary sovereign was roused from his indifference and responded with an approximate repetition of Marie-Antoinette's suggestion that if the people were hungry, food should be thrown to them. I took such caricatures of kings as anti-models, replacing bread with symbols. Now we are all too disturbed, individually and collectively, by the economic discomfort which is a generalized hunger and, in too many parts of the world and - not only in the third world - by actual famines, not to be aware, on a daily basis, of the responsibility it is to cultivate and transmit to others substance which is purely symbolic. Certain statistics, which now form part of our daily life, are capable of discrediting definitively the ivory tower which our universities are accused of representing, or of having represented in the past. In my own country, Canada, one child in five lives in poverty. The economic worth of the poorest forty-eight countries in the world is equal to the combined wealth of the ten richest individuals. There were twenty million refugees in 1997. One billion two hundred million human beings are short of fresh water this year, etc. This type of figure is, sadly, all too familiar. And it is a case of preaching to the converted to assert the extent to which culture, education and all their constituent disciplines are nourishment of a different order to physical food, because intellectual work is genuine work, providing a living for those who work at it professionally, and above all also those who benefit from its immediate and continuing fruits - i.e. ideally, the whole of society, and in all countries. In this respect - and this is implicit, but through depending habitually on what is implicit nothing is ever sufficiently explicit - it is generally acknowledged (thanks to UNESCO in particular) to what extent the development of economic resources is linked with the advancement and communication of knowledge, on a scale which is regional as well as national, within cities, rural communities, families.

As the last century of the present millennium is drawing to a close and the first century of the next one is looming on the horizon, linguistics and the fate of many of the 6000 languages on our planet is poised on a watershed, looking at a changing future.

The twenty-first century is close at hand. This great historical turning-point demands that we contemplate the future as best we can. Confronting the third millennium, many disciplines, linguistics included, have reached a time to take stock. At this stage it is helpful to cast a retrospective glance on linguistics in China during the past half-century to evaluate the gains here at the transition between the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries.

With the new millennium approaching, to sketch the wider canvas of the state of art historical research at the end of the 20th century is hardly a realistic objective. For those who like to delve deeper into this matter, I heartily recommend Donald Preziosi's recent critical anthology, published by Oxford University Press, called ‘The Art of Art History’. Here you will find a survey of the major directions in art historical research since the days that Johann Joachim Winckelmann invented our profession, illustrated by appropriate texts chosen from over the whole period of the mid-18th to the late 20th century.

The discipline of anthropology was established in the 19th century to answer one major question, viz., Why are we different? The first answer was provided by anthropologists educated in the biological sciences, principally doctors and anatomists. With the establishment of the anthropological society of Paris in 1839, the first President, Paul Broca, declared in his inaugural address that the task of anthropology was to trace the long evolutionary sweep of humankind from its first appearing to the present. A second answer was provided by pioneers in the social sciences, including Sir Edward Burnett Tylor and Emile Durkheim, each of whom asserted that we learn to be different. Most anthropologists would agree that our differences are results of both our biological inheritance and our personal and social experiences.