Anthropology Of Europe Research Articles

Enfolding History: Identities, Performances and Contexts in an Early Ethnographic Album from Natal, South Africa

The histories of anthropology and photography are closely entwined, and nowhere more so than in southern Africa, where new European settler colonies emerged at around the same time as technology transformed people’s ability to represent the places and people they encountered. This article explores the early ethnographic photography of the settler colony of Natal, South Africa, through the identities and contexts of one mid-1860s album. The article reveals a rich and burgeoning photographic culture in the colony, with numerous practitioners creating and copying images of African people for a variety of colonial audiences. One hitherto overlooked photographer in particular emerges from this story, who I here argue was probably the resident border agent Capt. Joshua Walmsley, whose racial ‘type’ images of Natal Africans were collected and published in many European scientific circles in the period. The album thereby constitutes what might be described as an incunabulum of the nascent sub-discipline of visual anthropology, a document that enfolds many interrelated histories that help us understand how European anthropology came to visually create its subject.

"For the Good of Their Souls": Performing Christianity in Eighteenth-Century Mohawk Country by William B. Hart (review)

Reviewed by: "For the Good of Their Souls": Performing Christianity in Eighteenth-Century Mohawk Country by William B. Hart Christopher Jocks (bio) "For the Good of Their Souls": Performing Christianity in Eighteenth-Century Mohawk Country by William B. Hart University of Massachusetts Press, 2020 WILLIAM B. HART has given us a useful, readable, well-researched history of Protestant efforts to convert Kanien'kehá:ka (Mohawk) people to Christian religion and European culture in the eighteenth century. The account skillfully navigates the shifting sets of interests among individual and collective actors in this drama. Motives of Dutch and English participants, as well as French Catholic proselytizers to whom they are often compared, are well documented. Hart's use of performance theory to suggest the motives of Mohawk actors is a smart move but limited by his uncritical acceptance of Jesuit and other external descriptions of Mohawk and Haudenosaunee ontological, epistemological, and axiological foundations. At times the Protestant efforts appear almost comical as they are riven by disputes between adherents of Church of England theology and its English and Dutch dissenters, as they barely conceal their loathing of the very people they seek to win over. Tireless Jesuit efforts, both in the Mohawk Valley and at Kahnawà:ke, serve as an illuminating, though incomplete, contrast. We are led to the conclusion that the existence of Mohawk Protestant communities in the early nineteenth century (and today) can be credited mostly to Mohawk people themselves, as they repeatedly took control of the conversion and education process for their own reasons. The story is presented in six chapters that could remind one of a Ken Burns documentary. This is engaging storytelling, meticulously documented. Mohawk youth today will surely want to read about the heroism and intelligence of Ian, a Mohawk warrior whose English skills and Mohawk literacy, possibly gained in a missionary school, enabled him to derail the intent of an incursion of the Continental Army into Mohawk territory in 1776 (181–84; from the Schuyler Indian Papers in the New York Public Library). The story of Teyorhansere (Little Abraham) is a stark but instructive lesson on the vincibility of peaceable actions in a time of war. It is insightful to frame Mohawk participation in Protestant churches and schools as "performing Christianity," but Hart's suggestions for Mohawk motives suffer in two ways. The first is his uncritical use of English [End Page 164] translations of Jesuit terminology in chapter 1 to portray the starting point of Mohawk actors in this drama. Upstreaming is laborious and demanding work, but too great a gulf exists between external historical accounts and more recent culturally grounded discourse regarding matters such as the narratives of the origin and organization of life on earth, the origin of clans, and the Kaianeren'kó:wa (the "Great Peace" or "Great Law"). Words such as worship, supplication, sacrificial offerings, propitiation, taboos, and talismans can only mislead the reader. They have a long history in European anthropology but completely miss key structures of thought and practice as articulated by Mohawk people themselves, such as teiethinonhwerá:ton, skén:nen, ka'satsténhsera, and karihwi:io. Hart does well to quote Sakokwanionkwas/ Tom Porter on the necessity of well-grounded Mohawk interpreters of Kanien'kéha (Mohawk language) (p. 141). Jesuits and other external scholars offer no substitute. The second limitation concerns the contrast with Kahnawà:ke. (Disclaimer: This reviewer descends from and maintains family ties with that community.) As Daniel Richter documents in The Ordeal of the Longhouse (1992), Kahnawà:ke's relative strength in the eighteenth century can largely be attributed to greater security of land and prevalent (not perfect) sobriety. The consistency of Jesuit preaching and missiology and their performance of regard for Mohawk people and etiquette should be much farther down on the list of factors. Hart discusses Mohawk revitalization in the aftermath of the American Revolution and its dispersal of Mohawk people. He references Deserontyon, Red Jacket, Neolin, and Tecumseh but chooses to completely omit Handsome Lake. The reasons for this omission are not clear, but despite controversy among Mohawks today over some aspects of Handsome Lake's message, it certainly did include an unwavering focus on land and sobriety...

22nd EAA Congress – 15th ISGA Congress – 5th International Conference of Evolutionary Medicine

This Abstract book covers material of the Joint International Meeting: 22nd EAA Congress, 15th ISGA Congress, 5th International Conference of Evolutionary Medicine. This event was organized at Vilnius University (Lithuania) in 2022 on August 24-27th in a hybrid way, which brought together 28 famous keynote speakers from Austria, Great Britain, the USA, Australia, Croatia, Poland, France, Switzerland, Germany and other countries. This book includes the abstracts of more than 180 presentations.
 The main theme of the 22nd Congress of EAA (European Anthropology Association) is Human variation and adaptation in a changing world with a particular focus on physical, biopsychosocial and general health changes in the human body. The topics of the 15th Congress of ISGA (International Society for the Study of Human Growth and Clinical Auxology) expand our understanding of human growth and development in health and disease. Special attention is paid to human growth in the period of early ontogenesis, to environmental factors affecting growth (including growth in war and other stressful conditions), children and adolescents’ nutrition and body composition, also modern analyses of growth data. The 5th International Conference on Evolutionary Medicine expands an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the diversity of human health and disease, sharing research from different fields to cooperate together in order to understand the mechanisms of different disease from the evolutionary point of view.
 The Abstract Book of this joint international event should not only be interesting to scientists of various scientific fields such as anthropology, human biology, public health, and health education, but also to clinical doctors, especially neonatologists, paediatricians, family practitioners and many others. Organisers believe that knowledge of the potential of human adaptation and evolutionary mechanisms in maintaining the health and wellbeing of our species will encourage fruitful interdisciplinary discussions in medical society as well as among biologists, sociologists and other specialists.

Shared Histories and Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Southeastern Europe – Festschrift for Karl Kaser

Review of the volume “From the Highlands to Hollywood. Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Southeastern Europe” – dedicated to the academic achievements of Karl Kaser and to the 50th anniversary of Southeast European History and Anthropology (SEEHA) at the University of Graz.

The human problem in the context of New European theory of progress

This article analyzes the anthropological paradigm of modernism in light of the New European theory of progress. The author underlines the importance of these worldview constructs for understanding the phenomenon of modernism, and based on the hermeneutical method conducts a historical-philosophical reconstruction of the corresponding ideas. It is noted that the specific features of New European anthropology alongside New European interpretation of the idea of progress, can be understood only in relation to each other. Special attention is given to determination and analysis of the fundamental, although not implicit contradictions arising within the worldview of modernism The New European image of the world is based on the synthesis of progressive pathos and assurance in fundamental imperfection of human nature. A participant of the progressive movement is proclaimed an atomized subject that follows selfish principles. Such way of thought leads to a contradictory result: namely the imperfect essence of a human is the foundation for the development. An important role is assigned to the idea of historical law that regulates the collision of selfish human for producing social good. This paradoxical construct can be viewed as an attempt to solve the fundamental for modernism problem of the part and the whole. Based on the research of H. Blumenberg, the origins of this problem can be traced in the dispute on the universals that took place in the late Middle Ages . The victory of nominalism with its thesis on the primacy of the singular undermined the medieval model of integrity, depriving human of the ontological foundations. Namely the crisis of integrity underlied the philosophical pursuits of modernism. By reconciling the singular represented by an atomized subject and the universal represented by the historical law, the theory of progress resembles the model of integrity. However, this model can only be effective in a situation of “comfortability” of the historical process. In the conditions of catastrophism of the XX century, the confidence in the progress is being problematized, and the problem of human nature becomes increasingly relevant.

The new animism

The new animism

European Anthropology as a Fortuitous Accident?

Under what conditions does European anthropology emerge today as an intellectual project? European anthropology takes shape only provisionally, as a fractured, heterogeneous and uneven field, for the duration of time-limited research projects and meetings with Europe-wide participation. In the currently dominant socio-economic conditions of academic life, European anthropology as an intellectual project has little chance to develop, except as an accident. And yet, with more institutional stability for researchers and their conversations, European anthropology could be turned into a more inspiring intellectual endeavour that challenges the classic Anglo-Saxon way of understanding anthropology as a conceptual translation between ‘our’ modern and ‘Other’ worlds; it could also help us to reimagine the world anthropologies framework through the postsocialist and postcolonial lens as something other than a ‘family of nations’.

Between Boundary-Work and Cosmopolitan Aspirations

This article presents a historical genealogy of EASA and European anthropology. Performing a heuristic exercise ofethnographic epoché, it critically examines European anthropologists’ writings on European anthropology and EASA as they appear in different statements and accounts, especially in the Association’s newsletters and reports of its conferences, understanding these documents as praxeologically embedded in anthropologists’ everyday production of knowledge. Drawing on the sociology of critique and the concept of boundarywork, it argues that EASA created its own ‘space of critique’, funnelling previous discussions on European anthropology, and becoming a platform for its production and its contestation as a site for the production of ‘hierarchies of knowledge’. Those contestations reflect an original and longstanding tension between EASA’s inclusive cosmopolitan aspiration and the exclusionary practice of boundary-work.

Problematising Boundaries and ‘Hierarchies of Knowledge’ within European Anthropologies

Is European anthropology the product of a colonialist plot to gain intellectual hegemony? Was the epistemic posture of its main representatives in the past one of crypto-imperialism aimed at – and based upon – power, in the attempt to climb up the ‘hierarchy of knowledge’ and subjugate from its peak minor traditions of study? How can we think about the genealogy of Euro-anthropology (and its future progress) without necessarily capitulating to these narratives of powerism and to the grip of the radical post-colonial discourse, which has been growing mainstream of late? This piece seeks to briefly but piercingly address these pressing issues, while at the same time proposing a few viable routes around the resulting methodological impasses. It also represents the prolegomena to a longer and more substantial critique, which will be published later.

Theory from the Peripheries

This article argues for the benefits of a relational approach to understanding centres and peripheries across scales in anthropology, as opposed to an approach based on substantive notions of geographic areas. Based on an extensive literature review, I expose how the salience of the division into Western and Eastern Europe, and, increasingly, into Northern and Southern Europe, obscures the divisions on other scales within and across these divisions. Instead, I argue for thinking relationally about centres and peripheries, highlighting two relevant contributions that the anthropology of postsocialism can make to a European anthropology: one is based on analyses of how places become peripheral, while the other starts from analyses of political-economic changes and their social impacts after the collapse of socialism.

Anthropological Perspectives on Romanian Socialism. A Case Study

This paper aims to analyze mainly how and why Western anthropologists conducted fieldwork in Eastern Europe during the Cold War. What motivated their particular research interest in this part of Europe, how they understood these societies and socialist systems, what specific factors made possible and facilitated the fieldwork they had conducted in difficult times. These are the main research questions addressed in this paper. Specifically, I refer to their work carried out in the 1970s-1980s in Romania. In particular, I aim at analyzing the works of three reputable US specialists in the field, who manifested a research interest, and conducted fieldwork especially (but not exclusively) in different rural settlements of this country. The paper attempts to identify the ways in which the Romanian socialism is understood in its peculiarities by these notable anthropologists, analyzing their studies as results of intensive fieldwork. Their works, published initially in English, in the USA, were translated into Romanian in the post 1989 decades, being received with high interest by “local specialists,” as well as by the broader public. They are present in representative anthologies on socialism and postsocialism, as valuable contribution to the understanding of these periods. Despite all these, comprehensive analysis of their contributions is still lacking, as well as the comparative frames meant to facilitate the identification of both specificities and recurrences in their works, in the ways they viewed the impact of socialisms on various, studied communities. It is a necessary and useful task to revisit their works (as well as the works of other anthropologists who conducted fieldwork in Romania and broader, in Eastern Europe) to understand in depth their views, their meanings and relevance in that particular context and afterwards, as well as their contribution to the Anthropology of Socialism and Postsocialism. Through this, other fields and topics are opening to the analysis, such as the contribution and particular roles of the Anthropology of Socialism and Postsocialism in structuring the Anthropology of Europe, as it is configured nowadays.

DECOLONIZING EUROPEAN ANTHROPOLOGY?

Anthropology TodayVolume 36, Issue 2 p. 24-24 Conferences DECOLONIZING EUROPEAN ANTHROPOLOGY? Lucilla Lepratti, Lucilla Lepratti lucillalepratti@yahoo.com Search for more papers by this authorNadav Wall, Nadav Wall nadav.wall@gmail.com Search for more papers by this author Lucilla Lepratti, Lucilla Lepratti lucillalepratti@yahoo.com Search for more papers by this authorNadav Wall, Nadav Wall nadav.wall@gmail.com Search for more papers by this author First published: 03 April 2020 https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8322.12566AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume36, Issue2April 2020Pages 24-24 RelatedInformation

Anthropology and Ethnology in Europe Today

The book under review is an important collection of essays on anthropological traditions in Europe. The subject of "European Anthropologies" has been on the agenda at least since the special issue of Ethnos on “The Shaping of National Anthropologies” (1982) and Ulf Hannerz and Tomas Gerholm’s introductory article. It but gained new urgency since the Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the rise of neoliberalism and global capitalism. Long in the making, but well worth the wait, the book is based on conferences held in Paris (2007) and Madrid (2008), aimed at reviewing “Anthropology in Europe” - defined as both “sociocultural anthropology and ethnology.” Under the broad rubric of “facing the challenges of European convergence in higher education and research,” the book brings together eleven chapters on anthropology and ethnology in Portugal, Germany, Russia, Italy, France, Finland, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, Croatia, and Greece.

Sami swoi? Refleksje metodologiczne o antropologii u siebie


 
 
 The dichotomy between home and abroad, recently very popular in anthropology, but especially significant in the anthropology of Europe, assumes, in my opinion, an increase of Otherness in line with a geographic-political distance . The aim of my article is to demon- strate that the sense of Otherness is not dependent on territorialized culture but on mental as well as bodily dispositions of individuals . The relativity of the concept of Self/Other in the context of anthropology at home will be discussed based on fieldwork carried out by a Polish anthropologist among Polish Contemporary Slavic Pagans associated in the Order of Zadruga ‘Northern Wolf’ . For narrative and analytical purposes, the category ‘at home’ will be problematized by scaling and contextualizing the notion of Europeanness .
 
 

Locating European anthropology

This commentary revisits the “Rethinking Euro-anthropology” Forums published in the journal Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale. It reconsiders three specific issues: who are the subjects of European anthropology, who are its others, and who are its authors? Noting that European anthropology does not imply a spatial fixity (there is no “there there” in European anthropology), we suggest instead that European anthropological scholarship is the outcome of diverse forms of crossborder and transborder exchanges. Yet as a project that is both intellectual and political, we further discuss some of the contradictions, ambiguities and paradoxes behind this “worlding” of the discipline. By observing that E(e)uropean anthropology in particular should constantly strive to relate the locating endeavours of ethical practice, empirical evidence, historical reflection and humanistic theorising, we call for innovative forms of academic collaboration, narrative creations and belonging to/with places.

Introduction: Disciplinary cartographies and connectors

This special section explores and problematises the disciplinary boundaries of European anthropology by studying the shifting conditions of our work and changing centres of gravity in the field. The contributors have been invited to think about what the concept of “European anthropology” brings actually to the fore, while working in a context of changing epistemic relations, labour conditions, institutional assessment and claims to disciplinary validity. This set of papers and commentaries proposes to approach European anthropology as a specific kind of relation between localities and practitioners, not an essence. Polemically, we argue that European anthropology does not exist as a single, easy to define entity precisely because it exceeds its conditions of possibility and goes beyond geographic relations and separations. Additionally, we pose as problematic not only the conjunction of the adjective European and the noun anthropology, but also the separate standing of each of them and what kinds of relations are established as a result (possession, placing, aspiration, rejection and so on). We conclude that a key feature characterising European anthropology is its transnational character – multiplying the relations with what has been traditionally considered non-anthropological and non-European, and troubling of the boundaries of the discipline.

The nature of a cosmopolitan anthropology and the nature of human difference

Thomas Hylland Eriksen argues in his incisive and fair-minded insight to “what is European about European anthropology” by advocating its cosmopolitanism. Anthropology that is cosmopolitan might go beyond hierarchies of language, country and institution, he urges; might provide the friction between different traditions that sparks a global intellectual exchange; and might bring global insights to bear, comparatively, on local issues of political economy. In this way Eriksen makes interesting links between “European anthropology” as an idea or concept and “European anthropology” as a set of ethnographic studies: I read him as saying that by virtue of the empirical facts that anthropological research in European settings has unearthed, we can now imagine a way of practising anthropology that is “cosmopolitan” – as amplified above. I would invest equally in a cosmopolitan anthropology, and would like to explore further what in the nature of cosmopolitanism as a concept enables it to have its intellectual and its moral power.

What is European about European anthropology?

The elusive and contested idea that there exists such a phenomenon as a European anthropology, and not least the ongoing discussion about it, reflects and contributes to the general, no less ongoing debates about European identity, the potentials and shortcomings of the European Union and questions concerning the boundaries and processes of exclusion and inclusion within Europe. However, the subject of this special section is not merely, or even mainly, the idea of Europe. It also (and perhaps mainly) concerns the characteristics of anthropology. Indeed, I shall argue that the ongoing conversation about a European anthropology mirrors theoretical debates and controversies within anthropology itself, sometimes in surprising ways. Let us begin with language.

European anthropology: Transnationality and reflexivity within a shared horizon of meaning

Why is European anthropology still a controversial concept? In this commentary, I propose to locate European anthropology in its epistemology, by which is primarily meant the discipline’s reflexivity, and in its transnational setting which requires not only communication across national borders but also equality in exchanges among European anthropologists. Also, I argue that European anthropology is to be found in the common horizon of meaning that is shared by European anthropologists. Along these lines, I conclude that dealing with the “controversy” of European anthropology entails engaging with further controversies.

An expert in peripheries: Working at, with and through the margins of European anthropology

This research explores the relationship between knowledge production and place by studying different notions of disciplinary and personal peripherality. In an auto-ethnographic manner, the author discusses some of the power relations at work and the politics of representation of an anthropology being done at the margins of European scholarship. By analysing his own professional trajectory, the author surmises that the question of centre or periphery highly depends on the perspective applied (i.e., methods, labour conditions, institutional support, funding, the scale, access to jobs…). Also, he argues that there is a distinct form of reflexivity at the margins, as well as a distinct temporal regime – characterised by discontinuity. To contrast and complement his personal insights, the author invited fifteen scholars working in Estonia to share their experience of researching “at the margins”. Based on their responses, the author concludes by admitting that being at the periphery is relevant, yet circumstantial – something to be aware of, yet not definitive or a determinant. The article contributes to the discussion on the need to differentiate, contextualise and problematise the question of the academic marginality, making this issue more nuanced by putting the ethnographic focus on the conditions of possibility among practitioners and the state of being peripheral.