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- Convenors:
-
Aleksandar Boskovic
(Institute of Archaeology)
Virginia Dominguez (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)
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- Chair:
-
Salma Siddique
(Connecticut College)
- Discussant:
-
Thomas Hylland Eriksen
(University of Oslo)
- Formats:
- Roundtables
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 22 July, -
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
Short Abstract:
This Roundtable will open some important questions about the shifting roles of ethnography. Drawing on their own research experience, participants will offer their views about new horizons for understanding anthropology's future predicaments.
Long Abstract:
As our discipline makes itself increasingly relevant in contemporary world, this Roundtable will open some important questions about the shifting roles of ethnography, but also different topics that are of concern for anthropologists today. What is the future of anthropology? How have new concepts (like the "Anthropocene") or some old ones (like "globalization") influenced contemporary research topics? Is anthropology closer to humanities or to social sciences (the question especially interesting for former Eastern Europe)? Drawing on their own research experience, as well as the research traditions they come from, the participants of the Roundtable (Kirsten Hastrup, Adam Kuper, Maja Petrović-Šteger and João Pina-Cabral) will present summaries of the changing perspectives of social anthropology, as well as offer their views about new horizons for understanding anthropology's future predicaments.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 22 July, 2020, -Adam Kuper (London School of Economics)
Paper short abstract:
Anthropologists are now engaged in huge issues that are of cross-disciplinary interest, and which are policy-relevant: perhaps most notably climate change, contagious diseases, and family, sex and gender. There are new research methods, revolutionary modes of communicating ideas. Is an interdisciplinary intellectual community taking shape?
Paper long abstract:
The current situation of social anthropology is paradoxical. At the time that EASA was founded, thirty years ago, we were engaged in large and resonant debates about theory – about structuralism, and sociobiology, and postmodernism; about gender and identity; and about post-colonial development policy. But we felt that not enough attention was paid to us by other social scientists, by policy makers, and by the general public. Our current situation is very different. Out there in the world there is a real if rather puzzled interest in the great issues of anthropology. These are discussed in blockbuster best-sellers. Unfortunately they are not written by anthropologists. And yet today a number of anthropologists are engaged in huge issues that are of cross-disciplinary interest, and which are policy-relevant: contagious diseases, and now Covid19; Climate Change; Migration; Family, Sex and Gender; Identity and Nationalism. And the coming generation of researchers has adopted new research methods, and new modes of communicating their ideas and their results in online journals and forums, and video sites. Is a new intellectual community taking form?
Maja Petrović-Šteger (The Scientific Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts)
Paper short abstract:
Anthropological analyses offer not only critical descriptions of the present (on its historical trajectories), but possible intimations of a society’s future. The paper reflects on what values and assumptions are built into our ways of making predictions about our fieldsites.
Paper long abstract:
Our present moment is one of unease. The state of our politics, our economies, the planet, COVID-19--all these both prompt disquiet and have exacerbated cultural and ideological differences around the world.
Anthropology, it is often claimed, is meant to have a public face. There is something like the expectation that we should act as public intellectuals who, on the basis of what they already know, offer predictions concerning the new world order and the future of our discipline (as per the call of this roundtable). This paper suggests that although our procedures of data-collection privilege the present, they overemphasize the expert’s authority and future’s predictability. In that way, they assume continuous time, not rupture.
Joao Pina-Cabral (University of Lisbon)
Paper short abstract:
We always stand on the shoulders of others, both as persons and as parts of collectives, because it is only from the previous existence of others that we can be ourselves. If we attend to the traces with which others scaffolded our world, our ‘ethnocentrism’ opens itself to broader and broader forms of human embracement, of ecumenical reach. This is what I mean by taking the broader view.
Paper long abstract:
Writing in 1963, Ernesto de Martino argued that, to move out of the imperial condition, anthropology had to adopt what he called ecumenical ethnocentrism. By ethnocentrism he meant that, since persons are irrevocably within life, and life is foundationally social, there is no veranda beyond life from which to look at the world. We have to stop fooling ourselves with the vacuous hope that logic can lift us above history, like God had done of old. Today, in order to seek the broader view, we need to unmake the two principal pillars of the modernist paradigm: on the one hand, the notion that the Greater Divide in the human condition lays between modernity and ancientness, and, on the other hand, the neo-Kantian conception of Reason as the external measuring rod that sets up the Great Divide. When one takes these aspects into account, a picture emerges of the kind of anthropology we would want to bring about in our coming postimperial condition.