World Anthropologies Research Articles

Seeking clarity at a time of confusion, through world anthropologies

Seeking clarity at a time of confusion, through world anthropologies

An anti‐genealogical take on US anthropology and disciplinary reform

AbstractThe “decolonizing generation” is a critical new movement that has captured the imaginations of many younger scholars. While the author would like to consider herself an older member of this generation, she questions whether this moment needs periodization. Is today's moment really so different from the past, when we saw the rise of world anthropologies, postmodernism, the crisis in representation, neo‐Marxism, and anti‐racist movements? And what is meant by “decolonizing anthropology” when experiences with colonialism and decolonization differ around the world? While acknowledging the value of reforming the discipline, the author encourages her colleagues to separate the very important critique of anthropologists’ gatekeeping practices from idealized renderings of what anthropology should be. Rather than decolonization, the discipline ought to focus on establishing a continual decentering of hegemonic knowledge production.

China in and out of World Anthropologies: Epistemic Politics Amidst Historical Ironies and Contemporary Realities

Since the early 2000s, scholars have proposed the notion of “world anthropologies” to expose the pluralistic nature of anthropology, and to counter the colonial legacy embedded in knowledge production. This paper discusses how anthropological knowledge in and of China contributes to, is distant from, and challenges, such intellectual movement at both intellectual and institutional levels. First, unlike Western anthropology which shifts from colonialism to liberalism and then to postcolonialism, anthropology in China began with a progressive agenda of anti-colonialism, and then leaned toward liberalism. In the context of China’s rise, “China” has been further embroiled in a puzzle of imperialism. This reversed ideological tendency contributes to the disorientation of the critical energy in anthropology focused on China. Second, just as China has taken an active role in the competition for education and research in a globalized, yet uneven academia through discipline construction, anthropology in the West, particularly the United States, has become provincialized in terms of its intellectual agendas. Many of the younger generation of Chinese anthropologists have become stuck in the disjuncture, struggling to channel their critical energy through engaged scholarship, both within and beyond academic institutions. The epistemic politics in and of China, at both the intellectual and institutional levels, reveals that the post-socialist condition deserves to be reference points in world anthropologies. If decolonization posits treating plural standpoints as equal, then being counted in the decolonizing efforts necessitates subscribing to the dominant framework. Thus, more attention to the post-socialist condition, and ultimately the pluralization of the reference points of political potency, should truly pluralize, and ultimately decolonize, anthropology.

Decolonizing US anthropology

AbstractAfter Ferguson, Standing Rock, the Black Lives Matter protests, and the crisis of refugees at the US southern border, there have been renewed calls for a racial reckoning in US anthropology. Dissatisfaction on the domestic front runs parallel to an unease over US anthropology's failure to adequately address militarism, imperialism, and predatory capitalism abroad. Finally, there is the fraught question of US anthropology's oversized influence within world anthropologies. We propose that a reassessment of US anthropology might fruitfully begin with some counterfactual history. How would US anthropology been different had the founding generations conceptualized the discipline as a decolonizing project? What topics or themes might have become central to US anthropology? How might our methods have been different? To make anthropology departments more diverse, inclusive, and equitable, we need to do more than add faculty and students of color. Despite being a field whose central concept is “culture,” we have paid far too little attention to the culture of anthropology departments. Do unexamined practices of “white‐norming” that shape the everyday lives of faculty and students in anthropology departments persistently “Other”—marginalize and alienate—people of color?

PERSPECTIVAS ANTROPOLÓGICAS MUNDIAIS SOBRE NACIONALISMOS ECONÔMICOS

Abstract As rising numbers of national governments promote economic nationalist policies and the withdrawal from (or renegotiation of) global political and economic relationships, the impossibility of disconnecting from global circulations is illustrated by the traveling discourse of economic nationalism itself, although conceptualized and implemented quite differently as refracted through specific historical and political contexts. Drawing on the possibilities of world anthropologies, the authors build connected analyses of the lived effects and contradictions of economic nationalist policies through their ethnographic examples from Brazil, India, Uganda, and the US. In comparatively analyzing these contexts, the authors emphasize the plural, transhistorical, transnational, gendered, and contested nature of economic nationalist policies and discourses worldwide, pointing to the need for further empirical investigations into diverse understandings and political deployments of economic nationalist projects.

The artist Karl Marx and the auctioned god: ‘post-practice’ ethnographies of the art world, impossible collaborations, and renewable anthropologies

ABSTRACT Drawing upon ethnographic moments recorded at two of the most prominent art world institutions, the Venice Biennale and the auction house Christie's at its New York headquarters, this article reflects on what it means to investigate the global art world ethnographically and interrogates some of the current trends within the anthropology of art. In particular, the article shows the potential of re–focusing the attention on the interconnectedness of art-world actors, institutions and objects in time and space in order to produce expansive narratives on the art world which reflect not only how art is produced in the present and in the past but also its circulation and commerce. Moreover, by challenging the anthropology of art's focus on the anthropologist–artist dyad, their practice and collaborations, the article shows how a renewed engagement with the art world as an ethnographic field site brings about possibilities for a renewal of anthropology itself.

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’.

Debating Decolonization in the Caribbean: Assessment and Polyvocal Response to Island Anthropologies Workshop (March 18–20, 2019)

AbstractThis article presents a summary of and response to a conference on anthropological research held between March 18 and 20, 2019, on Hispaniola, the island where Haiti and the Dominican Republic are located. In the spirit of world anthropologies and the decolonization of knowledge that structured the event, we offer this review and assessment based in a collaboration effort involving one Dominican woman, one Dominican American woman, one Haitian American woman, and one Indian American man.1 We begin by contextualizing and summarizing the event. The second part is polyvocal, in that each of the co‐authors who attended the event independently crafted a critique and commentary on Island Anthropologies that reflects their positionality.

Eric C. Thompson & Vineeta Sinha, ed., Southeast Asian Anthropologies: National Traditions and Transnational Practices

This book aims at contributing to the “decolonization of anthropological knowledge” (p. 1) in the Southeast Asian study field. In their introduction, the editors, Eric C. Thompson and Vineeta Sinha, claim to follow the paradigm of “world anthropologies” which blossomed two decades ago with the ambition of problematizing Anglo-American centrality, to criticize Eurocentrism and then to produce alternative anthropological practice. To apply this “indigenization” work in their volume, the contrib...

Rights, Gifts, Repair

Rights, Gifts, Repair

World Anthropology and its Institutional Challenges: A History of the Transformative Impact of Democratic Internationalisation on the Discipline of Anthropology

Anthropology reveals a rich diversity of human cultures, while also highlighting our commonalities. The discipline is a distorted mirror of this unity in diversity, however, so long as anthropologists from only a few, privileged cultures dominate the process of global knowledge construction. The World Council of Anthropological Associations (WCAA) was founded to address this. The WCAA provides a global platform for democratic participation in the spirit of a new ‘world anthropologies’ paradigm, which recognises that our understanding of other cultures is perspectivistic, and hence, to be fully understood, every culture needs to be contemplated from the multiple perspectives of all ‘anthropologies’. Key words: world anthropologies, World Council of Anthropological Associations, history of anthropology, internationalisation in anthropology, equity in anthropology.

Japanese ethnographies of the Pacific: Language, politics and perspective

Abstract An increasing number of Japanese ethnographers have conducted fieldwork research in Pacific Islands in the last few decades, which has resulted in a growing corpus of ethnographic literature. This is partly related to the historical role that Japan has played in the Pacific and partly to its geographical proximity to the area. While this geo-historical advantage combines with the availability of ethnographic works produced by non-Japanese scholars, the latter remain largely unable to access anthropological literature only available in Japanese. This not only limits the international circulation of ethnographies produced by Japanese anthropologists of the Pacific, but also the possibility of engaging with a larger body of anthropological traditions and, thus, with the overall project of 'World Anthropologies'. This article discusses the reasons why Japanese ethnographies of the Pacific provide not only a technical advantage for non-Japanese scholars of Pacific Islands but also a qualitative difference in terms of anthropological perspectives. In particular, it examines the differential impact of different colonial and postcolonial debates on Japanese and anglophone anthropology in relation to ethnographies of urban Melanesia.

Possibilities Out of Impossibilities: Foreword to the June 2019 World Anthropologies Section

Possibilities Out of Impossibilities: Foreword to the June 2019 World Anthropologies Section

Redefining ethnography «in the strict sense of the term»: Perspectives gained from non-standard, old-new fieldwork

This essay reflects on the consequences for ethnography of the reversal of the direction of the anthropological encounter – what exactly happens when anthropologists from the Global South undertake fieldwork among populations in the Global North? I will argue that this does not merely correct historical imbalances of anthropological knowledge production, thereby changing the substance of that knowledge itself, although of course that is a goal worth pursuing, as has cogently been pointed out by the “world anthropologies” critique of hegemonic disciplinary practices. Using insights drawn from my own research site in the US heartland, where I conducted fieldwork initially in 1989-91, and then again during a “focused revisit” in 2015, I suggest that lasting misunderstandings between the anthropologist and the research participants are themselves a rich source of data and human possibility. My contention is that non-standard and long-term fieldwork of this kind may help reveal dimensions of the practice of ethnography that would otherwise remain obscured.

World anthropologies: Disciplinary transformations within systems of power

From world anthropologies’ perspective, in this article we explore the diversity of anthropologies being practiced around the world in the early twenty-first century and the ways in which the pluralizing potential of globalization might enable anthropologists worldwide to benefit from this diversity. Our critical standpoint on the monotony and incompleteness of the current international anthropological landscape, as it has come to be structured by hegemonic forces, stems from the conviction that assuming their own diversity is a crucial (political, scholarly) strategy for anthropologies if they are to reproduce and enhance themselves in a globalized world.

World Anthropologies: A Portuguese–Brazilian Conversation

World Anthropologies: A Portuguese–Brazilian Conversation

Committee on World Anthropologies: World Anthropologies: “Travelling Against the Odds”

Committee on World Anthropologies: World Anthropologies: “Travelling Against the Odds”

The Anxieties of History and Memory

The Anxieties of History and Memory

Special Section on Nativism, Nationalism, and Xenophobia: What Anthropologists Do and Have Done

Special Section on Nativism, Nationalism, and Xenophobia: What Anthropologists Do and Have Done

The Status of the Social Fact

The Status of the Social Fact