European Association Of Social Anthropologists Research Articles

Ukraine, One Year On

The following conversation took place as an online round table organized by the Anthropology of Peace, Conflict, and Security research network of the European Association of Social Anthropologists on 14 March 2023. The aim of the round table was to create a space where Ukrainian anthropologists would reflect collectively on the anthropological approach to the invasion of Ukraine one year on. We asked them: What kinds of debates, narratives, imaginaries, and forms of activism have emerged under the invasion, and how have they shifted with time? How does an anthropological lens complicate some of the debates that have perhaps been posed in too simplistic terms? What is the view “from below” in Ukraine regarding life under the invasion, prospects for peace, solidarity, hope, and resistance? And last, but not least: how can we—anthropologists, non-Ukrainians—support them?

Editorial - Paradoxes in the Far Right’s gender and sexuality politics: Nationalism, Islamophobia and multiple positionings on gender

Over the last decades, issues related to gender and sexuality came to the center of public and political debates in Europe. Right-wing parties and actors across Europe are gaining popularity while increasingly drawing on gender and sexuality in their anti-immigration and anti-Muslim rhetoric (e.g. Mayer, Ajanovic and Sauer 2014, Meret and Siim 2013). This Special Issue results from an international workshop organised by the Network for the Anthropology of Gender and Sexuality (NAGS), part of the European Association of SocialAnthropologists (EASA), and held at VU University Amsterdam in December 2019. The workshop interrogated entanglements of anti-migration and gender discourses, including anti-gender movements across Europe. Its overall aim was to discuss different ‘uses and abuses of gender’ in relation to migration and Islamophobia as deployed by right-wing discourse (Scott 2013). 

Afterword

Afterword

Introduction: Politics of Moving and (Un)settling Visual Arts

Short versions of the following articles were presented at the panel ‘Aesthetic Encounters: The Politics of Moving and (Un)settling Visual Arts, Design and Literature,’ which Paula Uimonen (Stockholm University) and I organized at the fifteenth biennial conference of the European Association of Social Anthropologists in Stockholm 2018. The panel’s success, however, is also largely due to Helena Wulff, who provided invaluable ideas for its conceptualization, for which I wish to express my grat...

Gender and Power in Contemporary Spirituality: Ethnographic Approaches.Edited by Anna Fedele and Kim Knibbe.

This book is a collection of papers from the panel ‘Spirituality against Religion: Gender and Power’ presented at a conference of the European Association of Social Anthropologists. Chapters consider Goddess groups in the United Kingdom, Greek New Age spirituality, Soka Gakkai Buddhists in Spain, Umbanda practioners in Paris, pilgrimages to black and white Madonnas in Europe, mediums and healers in Germany and the Netherlands, a Jewish group in Israel, neo-Pagan witchcraft in Germany, two Hindu groups in Portugal, and a 12-step programme in Mexico. Panel conveners and editors Anna Fedele and Kim E. Knibbe each contribute a chapter. The central question posed for the panel was whether or not groups that defined themselves as ‘spiritual not religious’ were non-authoritarian, gender inclusive, and non-hierarchical. I had a hard time getting my head around this question as I know of any number of New Age spiritual groups led by male gurus who expect members of their groups to accept male authority (their own) without question. Feminist spiritual groups I am familiar with question male authority and hierarchy in general, but struggle with issues regarding female empowerment, female leadership, ritual conventions, and ‘traditional’ teachings. Thus for me the question posed was a non-question and the types of groups surveyed were too broad to form interesting comparisons.

Early-career anthropologists: Vocation and occupation

In 2004, Susan Brin Hyatt reported from a roundtable session organised by the American Anthropological Association ‘a dispiriting picture of academic life in the early years of the 21st century’, due to, amongst other things, ‘the casualization of the academic workforce’ (Hyatt 2004: 25–26). Less than a decade later, Joëlle Fanghanel notes that the ‘increased casualization of academic staff [has] significantly affected the evolution of academic work and working patterns’ (2012: 5). Casualisation takes different forms in different academic contexts, from the ‘adjunctification’ of teaching in the U.S.A. to precarious grant-funded postdoc positions common in Europe and the U.K. and the efforts to introduce other forms of temporary academic employment in New Zealand (Shore and Davidson 2014) and Australia (Barcan 2014). Seeking to contribute to these and other current discussions on the future of research and higher education in the era of privatisation and funding cuts, Hana Cervinkova and Karolina Follis convened the panel Anthropology as a Vocation and Occupation, held on 3 August 2014 at the 13th Biennial Conference of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) in Tallinn, Estonia.

Anthropologists Are Talking about Queer Anthropology

The following roundtable discussion took place at the European Association of Social Anthropologists’ biennial conference held in Tallinn, Estonia, on 31 July to 3 August 2014. It sprang out of the session ‘Whatever is happening to the critical study of sexual and gender diversity in anthropology?’ convened by Paul Boyce and Silvia Posocco, and a meeting of the European Network of Queer Anthropology (ENQA), which was founded in 2013 by Paul Boyce and Elisabeth Engebretsen. The aim of the discussion was to explore what we mean by a queer anthropology and what it can still contribute to the discipline some two decades after the emergence of queer theory in the academia. The discussion was recorded, transcribed and edited by Ethnos Co-Editor in Chief, Mark Graham

Why an open access publishing cooperative can work

Why an open access publishing cooperative can work

Editorial Anthrovision issue 3.1

Dear reader, We welcome you to the first issue of the new online journal Anthrovision published by the Visual Anthropology Network of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (VANEASA). The title of our journal stands in certain ways for our programme and this first issue reflects some important points: Visual Anthropology is the focal point of the journal, but academic discussions are becoming more interdisciplinary and more complex, so the journal wants to publish quite diverse co...

Engaging Anthropology and Art: 13th EASA (European Association of Social Anthropologists) Biennial Conference (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

Engaging Anthropology and Art: 13th EASA (European Association of Social Anthropologists) Biennial Conference (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

What Comes Next in European Applied Anthropology?

Applied Anthropology Network of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) started its activities in 2012 and has since then grown to 120 members. The newly established network has already tackled some of the crucial issues in Europe related to applied anthropology, and has so far identified at least three key challenges: (1) how to increase employability of applied anthropologists, (2) how to deconstruct stereotypes about their activities (within and without academic settings), (3) how to boost self-esteem of younger colleagues at the beginning of their applied career.

Ulf Hannerz

Ulf Hannerz

Co-being and intra-action in horse-human relationships: a multi-species ethnography of be(com)ing human and be(com)ing horse

A multi‐species perspective identifies and offers ethnographic insight into a variety of everyday, practical experiences and the roles they may play in shaping human–horse relationships. Analysis of narrative data from 60 open‐ended interviews with a wide variety of riders in Norway and the Midwestern USA identifies three central themes of co‐being. These are expressed, felt and voiced as embodied moments of mutuality, engagements of two agentive individuals and as a kind of anthropo‐zoo‐genetic practice, where species domesticate each other through being together. Co‐being as intra‐acting describes how horse and human meet and change as a result of their meeting. © 2013 European Association of Social Anthropologists.

Late to the party: debt and data

BILL MAURER Late to the party: debt and data At the 2012 Law and Society Association meetings, law professor Tom Baker argued that add-on insurance – the kind you are offered at the point of sale when you purchase a computer or rent a car – constitutes a ‘situational monopoly’ and should be regulated away. It was striking: rarely do you hear a legal scholar make such an unequivocal case. One government official in attendance, though supportive, was flabbergasted. I was struck, however, by Baker’s comment that add-on insurance receives little scholarly attention because it is ‘not obviously cool’, and ‘does not compute’ according to standard economic theory. For some time, I’ve been arguing that the not obviously cool and the difficult to compute are crucial to understanding how contemporary market societies and the regulatory frameworks that lay the grounds for them do and do not work (see Star 1999). In a purposeful mistranslation, I take the word ‘mode’ in ‘capitalist mode of production’ as referring to a statistical central tendency, and follow through the metaphor by attending to the long, fat tails of non-capitalist relations on either side of that mode. These do not compute in standard economics or in social and critical theory attempts to understand finance or the economy. And so, at a time when many anthropologists and cultural critics are re-examining debt and credit, my work in the anthropology of finance wants me to encourage attention to the not-so-cool stuff (derivatives are cool, credit and abstraction are cool; regulations and legal technicalities are not cool), and to pay heed to moments when even the cool stuff does not compute in our liberal or critical assessments of it. In foregrounding the debt side of the credit/debt nexus, contributors to this issue gently moderate certain critical exuberances. Credit has always been sexier than debt, especially outside anthropology but also lately in some quarters within it. Credit speaks to issues critical theorists treat very well: fiction, the relationship between intellectual and financial speculation, the ‘spirit’ of charismatic risk-takers (Appadurai 2011), futurity, potentiality. The unreality or hyperreality of it all, the houses of cards or sand castles of credit give themselves to modes of analysis warranted by a separation of the real from ideological, or productive from speculative, the impulse to expose the falsity of worlds where all that is solid melts into air . . . But the ‘debt’ side of the credit/debt nexus is harder. It brings up theoretical (almost theological) languages of obligation. Anthropology for a time did very well with such languages (think Gluckman (1965)). These concerns are now seen as part of the actual past – ‘they’ don’t have those kinds of relations anymore (although they very C 2012 European Association of Social Anthropologists. Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale (2012) 20, 4 474–481. doi:10.1111/j.1469-8676.2012.00219.x

12th Biennial conference of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

12th Biennial conference of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

European Association of Social Anthropologists: 11th Biennial Conference (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

Anthropology TodayVolume 27, Issue 1 p. 25-25 European Association of Social Anthropologists: 11th Biennial Conference (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate) Hayder Al-Mohammad, Hayder Al-Mohammad University of Kenthayderalmohammad@googlemail.comSearch for more papers by this author Hayder Al-Mohammad, Hayder Al-Mohammad University of Kenthayderalmohammad@googlemail.comSearch for more papers by this author First published: 05 February 2011 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8322.2011.00785.xAboutPDF 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 onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume27, Issue1February 2011Pages 25-25 RelatedInformation

Indiascapes: Reflecting on India at the 11th EASA conference

The recent Commonwealth Games opening ceremony aimed to showcase the places and people of India to the world. The image it sought to project (of a united yet diverse place, where the past and the present sat comfortably together) was at odds with the image that Western-based media companies had projected in the weeks building up to the games. This latter vision was of India as a chaotic and wild place, where hygiene was questionable and planning imprecise. This is no surprise, for these elements of the modern Indian landscape often attract the Western gaze. This summer a group of academics came together at the annual meeting of European social anthropologists in an attempt to somewhat rectify the selective nature of this gaze through a presentation of different reflections on (and of ) landscapes of contemporary India. The group, which consisted of both Indian and Western academics, gathered together for two panels, connected by the workshop title ‘Indiascapes: reflections of contemporary India’.1 It was part of a larger academic conference, the 11th biennial conference of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA), which attracted over 1,100 academics. Most participants came from Europe but there were also delegates from Asia, Africa, Latin America and North America. The theme of the conference was ‘Crisis and Imagination’ and Professor Talal Asad gave the keynote speech. The conference was hosted by the National University of Ireland, Maynooth; the organising team included the local department of anthropology, EASA and NomadIT (a professional event organising team). 

European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA)

European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA)

Transferring Anthropological Skills to Applied Health Research

This issue of Anthropology in Action examines the relationship between conventional anthropological methods and those used by anthropologists working in applied health research. Three of the articles were originally presented at a workshop at the 2006 conference of the European Association of Social Anthropologists, while a fourth (Poehlman) addresses related themes and sits well alongside those from the workshop.

OBSERVATIONS OF A POST‐EAST EUROPEAN MEMBER European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA), 9th Biennial conference, Bristol, 18–21 September 2006

OBSERVATIONS OF A POST‐EAST EUROPEAN MEMBER <i>European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA), 9th Biennial conference, Bristol, 18–21 September 2006</i>