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Forum Rethinking Euro-Anthropology -For a European Union of anthropological localities

August 2015
Social Anthropology 23(3):330-364

DOI:10.1111/1469-8676.12216

Authors:

Sarah Green

Purdue University Global

Patrick LAVIOLETTE

Berghahn Books

Evthymios Papataxiarchis

University of the Aegean

Adam Kuper

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This forum opens up a debate about the diversity that is European Anthropology and the directions in which it is travelling. To set the scene, we contacted SA/AS's Editorial Board and other prominent anthropologists, inviting them to write a short comment on the topic. We suggested they might wish to discuss “any of the diverse anthropological debates, approaches or issues that have been generated in European universities, and which have made a contribution to your own research.” We also welcomed work/approaches that are not necessarily 'generated in European universities' but which have been, or are handled differently, with different emphases in Europe as opposed to other parts of the anthropological word.

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FORUM: Rethinking

Euro-Anthropolog Q1y

This forum opens up a debate about the diversity that is European Anthropology and

the directions in which it is travelling. To set the scene, we contacted SA/AS’s Editorial

Board and other prominent anthropologists, inviting them to write a short comment on

the topic. We suggested they might wish to discuss ‘any of the diverse anthropological

debates, approaches or issues that have been generated in European universities, and

that have made a contribution to your own research’. We also welcomed work/

approaches that are not necessarily ‘generated in European universities’but that have

been, or are handled differently, with different emphases in Europe as opposed to other

parts of the anthropological world. For instance, this could include some of the

thoughts about ‘sociality’vs ‘the cultural’, or work on ‘indigeneity’, or on environ-

ment, post-colonialism and so on. We added a comment about being aware that ‘there

is nothing holding this diversity together as such; our aim is to try and gain a sense of

the range of institutionally, conceptually, socially, politically, economically –perhaps

even aesthetically or morally –distinctive ways anthropology has been thought,

debated, and practised from one or other European vantage point’.

Appreciating that it’s not easy to say much in such a short statement of 500 to 1000

words, the idea was nonetheless to generate some overall snapshot. The purview that

has resulted is therefore far from exhaustive. After approaching around 35 people,

the Forum below reﬂects the responses we got. We’ve divided them here into two:

the ﬁrst nine deal, more or less, with such issues as histories, traditions and the impacts

of funding and the second ten address more speciﬁc concept statements regarding

particular research projects or approaches.

In casting our net wide, we tried to convey an ethos for beginning a debate, rather

than closing or directing one. The idea was simply to invite colleagues to say what was

on their mind, so as to start the ball rolling for a longer and more detailed discussion

over the next four years. The results, printed here virtually as they were written, are a

rich start to satisfying those aims. Some threads to the commentaries are brieﬂy

summarised below. Collectively, they raisemanyofthekeyissuesaffectinganthro-

pology today, not only in Europe, but all over the world. Yet there was also

something that stood out as an issue of distinctive relevance to the European region,

and which to our minds may form a basis for developing the debate considerably

further in future issues.

In discussing historical, institutional, and national/state differences in anthropolog-

ical practice (Eriksen, Gregory, Papataxiarchis, Cervinkova, Kuper, Hviding), several

doi:10.1111/1469-8676.12216

Journal Code Article ID Dispatch: 03.07.15 CE:

S O C A 1 2 2 1 6 No. of Pages: 36 ME:

of the contributors made comments about what makes the European context

distinctive, and what should be done about it. Speaking both from personal experience

and through an overview of the conditions in which anthropology is practised, a

surprisingly coherent message came through here: that location matters. Even where

the broad traditions of anthropology are similar between locations, differences are

generated by the institutional position of anthropology; by the particular trajectories

the discipline took in any given country, or even university; and by the vagaries of

historical events.

Noting this, Papataxiarchis calls for an ‘anthropological federalism’that embraces

these differences and generates both vertical and horizontal alliances across them. That

contrasts with Kuper’s call for a continuation of the cosmopolitan ideals with which

EASA began. Somewhat differently from either of these, Gregory suggests that

emphasising the diversity of anthropologies practised in the European region provides

an opportunity to turn the concept of ‘Eurocentrism’upside down –to draw on a

sparkling array of different national and even institutional traditions to imply that

‘Eurocentrism’should stand for the opposite of singularity or homogeneity. Gregory

suggests there might yet be hope to develop a ‘truly transnational Eurocentric

anthropology’, echoing the view of some others, including Pina-Cabral, that Europe

long ago stopped being European, in the earlier 20th-century meaning of the word.

Whether one agrees with any of these suggestions, or indeed of other suggestions,

such as Corsín Jiménez’s call for recalibrating anthropology’s thinking as a ‘prototype’

form, what clearly comes through from the contributions overall is the sense that what

the European region can offer to anthropology is its diversity –linguistic, institutional,

historical, intellectual, political. Yet there is also a restlessness in the tone of many of the

contributors –an impatience.

A summary of other possible issues for further debate are listed below.

•The political and economic conditions in which anthropology is being practised, and

the challenges and opportunities these present (Corsín Jiménez, Gregory, Miller,

Papataxiarchis, Hviding). Here, the current ﬁnancial crisis, which is hitting the

southern part of Europe hardest, is clearly presenting both enormous challenges,

but also some new possibilities. As Papataxiarchis notes on his experience in

Greece, while anthropology is thriving intellectually, it is severely threatened insti-

tutionally there at the moment. At the same time, Corsín Jiménez notes that the

frosty environment in Spanish universities has pushed some academics out into

the digital world, presenting work within Medialab/Prado, a leading ‘hacklab’.

Both Miller and Gregory note the enormous effect the new European Research

Council’s funding is having on thepotential for making anthropology morevisible.

•Anthropology’slanguageregimes,whichcarvedeep ravines between what is known

by different anthropological communities (Gregory, Kuper, Nic Craith). This issue

is relevant everywhere, but several commentators pointed out that in the European

region diversity of language has had a particularly fragmenting effect. While

acknowledging the political hierarchy involved in this, Gregory suggests that the

dominance of English does not necessarily prevent diversity of debate.

•The shifting foci of anthropological attention, particularly as a result of technical

change (Miller, Maguire, Ingold, Wade). Technical and biological transforma-

tion leading to questions of the reclassiﬁcation, or even recalibration, of

2RETHINKING EURO-ANTHROPOLOGY

anthropology and its bits and parts. Here, there is an underlying question of the

way that technologies seem to constantly slip the knot of being somewhere in

particular: indeed, they appear to have the capacity to alter locations. Wade

notes that debates about race, biology and genetics are circumscribed in differ-

ent ways in Europe and the USA; the science may be the same, but what can be

discussed is not.

•As might be expected, changes in the places and peoples that anthropology

studies have demanded that anthropological practice and concepts shift their

goal posts (Pina-Cabral, Wulff, Siniscalchi, Dawson, Favero), and have also

led to renewed reminders that anthropologists should live up to the new

moral obligations that these changes have brought about (Miller, Meyer,

Hviding, Cervinkova). Thoughts about the way these shifts are, or should

be, affecting anthropology’s relations with other disciplines, and even

redeﬁning the discipline itself, are also present (Wade, Corsín Jiménez,

Kuper, Meyer, Okely).

We look forward to publishing various responses to these thought pieces and

provocations in our second issue as editors in November.

Sarah Green

email: sarah.green@easaonline.org

Patrick Laviolette

email: patrick.laviolette@easaonline.org

EVTHYMIOS PAPATAXIARCHIS

For a European union of anthropological localities

I am in favour of a European union of anthropological localities. I believe that it is time

to conceive the anthropology that is practised in Europe in a new way, not just in re-

spect to individuals but also, not to say primarily, in terms of the places where social

anthropology is established. We should give more attention to ‘anthropological

localities’, i.e. the venues –social, institutional, virtual and geographical –of

anthropological production, instruction and conversation. We should foster these loci

of anthropological synergy where our disciplinary identity is being built.

Our anthropological localities have a ‘complex phenomenological quality’.They

are products of an anthropological imagination, which is informed by varying

epistemological traditions, interpretations of the ethnographic canon and political

sensibilities, and traverses ‘national schools’and ethnographic communities. This

diverse anthropological imagination is often inscribed in social forms –

programmes of study, projects, exchanges and public discussions. The small

anthropological worlds, which many of us inhabit on the ground, provide the vital

breathing space of our discipline. This is where we deal with the cognitive

challenges related to our research and teaching as well as sense our professional

vulnerability in difﬁcult times.

FORUM 3

The anthropological uniﬁcation of Europe was initially conceived in

Castelgandolfo in 1989 as a project primarily addressed to individual practitioners

of social anthropology. It was also given the name ‘cosmopolitanism’. Its leaders

were keen to propose a theoretical framework that would secure some basics –

including the ethnographic canon –and provide the means to deal with major

epistemological challenges of the ‘postcolonial crisis’. Cosmopolitanism in principle

was the defence of a social, comparative science of human variation; or an anti-

nativist doctrine; or a norm of fundamental fraternity against ‘radical difference’.

Cosmopolitanism in practice worked as an urgent plan of integrating the ‘national

ethnologies’of Eastern Europe to Western European ‘social anthropology’after

the fall of the Berlin Wall.

I think that this cosmopolitan project has exhausted itself. EASA has been a

hospitable home. It has set networks, it supported initiatives in research and publish-

ing, it embraced many anthropologists. In the present circumstances, however, it is

important to change course irrespective of the degree of convergence between ‘East’

and ‘West’. In order to cope with the effects that the socio-economic crisis has on

our profession, we need a strategy that is more attentive to our local realities, more

attuned to the emergent grassroots sensibilities, more efﬁcient against structural

inequalities, more open to the alternative, even dissident, theoretical discourses that

are generated by the current predicament.

During the last 25 years there has been signiﬁcant progress, particularly in the

institutional grounding of social anthropology in Europe outside the historical

metropoles. There have been new departments, programmes of undergraduate and

postgraduate studies, PhDs and research initiatives at national and European level.

Social anthropology has established new roots. Now these roots need our attention.

III

The current decade of the ﬁscal and socio-economic crisis has marked the beginning of

a new phase in the anthropological uniﬁcation of Europe. Let us call it the phase of

consolidation. The challenge that we are facing now is not theoretical; it is political.

We have to conserve and improve what we have achieved over the past two decades.

In many places, particularly in the European South, which expanded to include a

considerable part of the East, the institutional foundations of our discipline –in public

universities and research centres or in publishing –are threatened by the current crisis.

Everywhere neoliberal policies are undermining these foundations.

This is deﬁnitely so in Greece, where the reliance of academic anthropology on the

state have made it particularly vulnerable to the destructive effects of the ‘debt crisis’.

The cosmopolitan identity of Greek anthropology, as it is informed by a wide diversity

of intellectual backgrounds and cultivated in an international community of ethnogra-

phers of Greece, is quite safe. What is currently at stake is our institutional survival as

an autonomous academic discipline. This is not just an issue of diminishing ﬁnancial

resources. The closure of the university to new appointments threatens our very

existence. We are confronted with a lost generation of scholars, who are currently

searching for a job outside Greece, in the international ‘arid zone’of post-docs and

short contracts. We are threatened together with the rest of the social sciences with

falling standards in conditions of neoliberal ‘restructuring’of higher education and

with marginalisation in the audit regime. Larger epistemic inequalities related to the

4RETHINKING EURO-ANTHROPOLOGY

practice of anthropology in a small language are added to all that. We are in retreat,

moving from expansion to contraction.

On top of this we are confronted with a paradoxical situation. In difﬁcult times

anthropology matters most. The more our position as a discipline is undermined by

the crisis, the more the issues requiring systematic anthropological study increase.

These include inequality, poverty, the effects of austerity policies on kinship,

alternative ‘solidarity’economies, borders, migrations, racism, political protest and

the growth of social movements. Some of these issues demand our engagement as

public intellectuals, thus becoming important sources of intellectual inspiration.

Engagement works as a path to critical awareness, the very same path through which

some of us had ‘discovered’social anthropology in the ﬁrst place.

In such circumstances the structural asymmetries increase everywhere to such an

extent as to become the source of division. The North–South divide has tended to

come back to life! I join other colleagues from the South in arguing that our current

predicament is a challenge to rethink the architecture of European anthropology in

the direction of a more inclusive, multi-centric approach that resists the fragmenta-

tion imposed by the crisis and goes beyond the opposition between nativism and

cosmopolitanism. This could be achieved through an ‘anthropological federalism’,

through giving more weight to anthropological localities and establishing all sorts

of interconnections between them. We should aim for greater political unity in

intellectual and linguistic diversity. In this way, the ongoing project of European

anthropological uniﬁcation will engage more colleagues and consolidate the

achievements of the last decades.

Evthymios Papataxiarchis

Department of Social Anthropology and History

University of the Aegean

GR-81100 Mytilini, Greece

epapat@sa.aegean.gr

ADAM KUPER

Join the conversation

In a splendid survey of novels featuring anthropologists, Jeremy McClancy (2013)

pointed out that our people appear as characters far more often than any other social

scientists. Featuring above all as ﬁeldworkers, the anthropologist-characters are of

two types: ‘the anthropologist as hero’and the ‘pathetic anthropologist’. But almost

all are old-school, alone in the bush.

McClancy’s book appeared just two years ago, but some notable works in the

genre have been published since. Lily King’s (2014) Euphoria, a best-seller now being

made into a Hollywood movie, is an acute and entertaining novel based on real and

imaginary adventures of a lightly ﬁctionalised Margaret Mead, Reo Fortune and

Gregory Bateson on the Sepik. Flawed heroes, they come to a bad end.

Mischa Berlinski’s (2007) Fieldwork: a novel, is about another doomed ethnographer,

FORUM 5

this one working among hill tribes in Thailand, but her experiences ring true. Andrew

Beatty judges that Berlinski has invented:

what, to my knowledge, is the ﬁrst convincing ﬁctional portrait of an ethnographer

in the ﬁeld […]hehasgivenus,imaginatively,agenuinetasteoftheﬁeldwork

predicament: the fascination and boredom, the chaﬁng moral adjustments, the

addictive curiosity, the incremental risking of self.

The narrator of Tom McCarthy’s (2015) wonderful Satin Island: a novel is not a

Malinowskian hero, on the loose on a remote island. He is doing a study of cyber

Europe. And in contrast with most ﬁctional anthropologists, his big problem is not

the ﬁeldwork but rather the writing up. He works for a global entrepreneur of ideas

who demands that he produce The Great Report. ‘The Book. The First and Last Word

on our age […] It’s what you anthropologists are for, right?’The anthropologist tried

to put him straight. ‘Your version, I said […] vision, I mean, depiction –then striking

upon the right word –characterization of the anthropologist […] it might have been an

accurate one a century ago. But now there are no natives –or we’re the natives’.

What then would ‘The Book’look like today? I recently sat on a panel judging the

2015 BBC ‘Thinking Allowed’ethnography prize. The winner was Ruben Andersson’s

(2014) Illegality Inc., which deals with the boat people sailing from Africa to Spain, and

the surveillance regime the EU has set up to keep them out. It is methodologically

sound, academically respectable, very well written, but what marks it out is that it

speaks to a larger debate, recasting the conventional narratives and so undermining

received ideas.

Apparently, and not surprisingly, Illegality Inc. is selling rather well, but perhaps

not so much to anthropologists. That is just a guess, but I do have some evidence.

When I am invited out to give a talk I sometimes play a rather sad game. I ask if anyone

in the audience has read ﬁve journal articles published this year. The response is usually

rather embarrassed, and embarrassing. So what do anthropologists read? Old stuff they

happen to be teaching? Blogs? Student essays and drafts? Bits and pieces directly

relevant to current research? The consequence –perhaps the cause –is that few of us

are engaged in interesting conversations.

There may, however, be a good reason for the fact that there are many conversa-

tions going on, with little overlap between them. Cutting-edge social research is

necessarily interdisciplinary in inspiration. Anthropologists no longer think that they

are all working on a common type of society (primitive, tribal, pre-literate and so

on). Consequently, there is no predetermined audience for an ethnography.

So who are you writing for, and what can you tell them? Those are crucial

questions. Your answers will suggest how you should formulate what you have to say,

what to put in, how to set it in context, and where to place it once it is written. Plus, as

EASA members will know very well, there may be a tactical choice of a language to write

it in. All obvious enough. Yet, surprisingly often, these questions aren’tevenasked.

But there is an earlier, even more critical choice to be made. Where to go, and what

to look for? This is a momentous decision, not quite up there with getting married or

having children, but one that may change your life. An impetuous choice based on

superﬁcial looks, or easy money, or mere convenience is not to be recommended.

1 See more at: http://aotcpress.com/articles/ﬁeldworksﬁctions/#sthash.Q22o9eyD.dpuf

6RETHINKING EURO-ANTHROPOLOGY

Pseudo-parental guidance and charismatic advisers should be treated with caution.

(‘Shifting tectonics, new islands and continents forming: we need a brand-new

navigation manual’, the anthropologist’s boss advises, seductively and dangerously,

in Satin Island). The really important decision is about what discussions you want to

join. I hope that the cosmopolitan forum of SA/AS will host the liveliest conversations

of European anthropologists.

Adam Kuper

Department of Anthropology

London School of Economics & Political Science

London WC2A 2AE, UK

adam.kuper@gmail.com

References

Andersson, R. 2014. Illegality Inc. Clandestine migration and the business of bordering

Europe. Oakland, CA: University of California Press.

Berlinski, M. 2007. Fieldwork: a novel. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

King, L. 2014. Euphoria. New York: Grove/Atlantic.

McCarthy, T. 2015. Satin Island: a novel. New York: Knopf.

McClancy, J. 2013. Anthropology in the public arena. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

CHRIS GREGORY

The case for a Eurocentric anthropology?

A remarkable fact of recent developments in Science and Technology Studies is

that anthropologists have begun to study the laboratories of natural scientists but have

not turned the anthropological gaze onto themselves. Until ethnographic studies of the

functioning of anthropology departments in France, Germany, Finland, Japan and

other countries are done, ‘symmetrical anthropology’, as Latour (2013: 290) calls it,

remains unrealised. If the gossip and rumours that circulate in the corridors are any

guide, then one suspects that the results of a truly symmetrical anthropology would

not be a pretty sight to behold. Academic institutional politics, shaped as it is by

squabbles over the distribution of research funding and big-man struggles for prestige

and status, is but a minor variation on the wheeling and dealing that generations of

political anthropologists have described in their ethnographies from various parts of

the world. A comparative ethnography of anthropology departments would reveal that

there are winners and losers, high points and low. It would also reveal the existence of a

wide range of national traditions, each with its own theoretical language, academic

politics and institutional sources of funding.

My vantage point is that of Australian anthropology, whose institutional structure

and theoretical language was initially shaped by those trained in the British Social

Anthropology tradition. That has changed slowly over the years. Today it is shaped

by scholars trained in the American Cultural Anthropology tradition and the US

market model of funding. The product is an institutional system that contains the worst

FORUM 7

elements of both national traditions as Australian governments have slashed university

funding and partially implemented ill-thought out policies to deregulate the market for

student fees and academic salaries. The heyday of Australian Anthropology was in the

1960s and 1970s when the ANU was established and generous government funding

enabled anthropologists from around the world to conduct original research in

Melanesia, Indonesia and Aboriginal Australia; this path-breaking work quite literally

changed the terms of anthropological debate. Specialist research in the broader

Asia-Paciﬁc continues today but in a radically changed political and economic

environment where the bottom line, rather than the pursuit of truth, has become the

prime concern of university administrators.

The problems faced by Australia-based anthropologists today is a familiar one

found the world over, but the situation obviously varies from nation to nation.

Regional universities in the poor countries of the world –I am familiar with anthropol-

ogy departments in central India where Hindi is the lingua franca –have always been

starved for funds and have never had money for long-term ﬁeldwork at home, let alone

study abroad. Japan has had the funds but the intellectual product of this research is

locked up in a script that is inaccessible to those in the dominant English-speaking

tradition. This is also true to some of extent of the national traditions of Europe.

English speakers know something of the French tradition via the many agenda-setting

texts have been translated into English, but relatively little about those national

traditions expressed in German, Finish, Danish, Norwegian, Dutch, Spanish and other

European languages. There is a sense in which there has never been a transnational

‘Eurocentric’anthropology; we have instead a range of contrasting national anthropol-

ogies where ideas have ﬂourished here, been stiﬂed there. Anthropology is an English-

speaking centric discipline where the terms of debate over the past century have been

shaped, for the most part, by the dominant English-speaking British and the American

traditions but enriched greatly by the input of scholars from non-English speaking

traditions.

Herein lays the signiﬁcance of the new agenda that the new co-editors of Social

Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale propose. As I see it they want to change the terms

of debate by turning the meaning of the word ‘Eurocentrism’upside-down. They seek

to do this by exploring ‘the multiple intellectual, institutional, and historical threads

that currently make up the practice of social anthropology by those trained in, or

currently working in, European universities’. The establishment in 2007 of the

European Research Council (ERC) has already transformed the politics of research

funding in Europe. I am personally aware of at least four major research grants that

senior anthropologists have managed to win. These grants will not only enable

European-based scholars to continue to work overseas, they are also funding ﬁeldwork

in Europe, a site where the global ﬁnancial crisis and the Euro crisis have radically

transformed social relations in many urban areas and widened the gap between the rich

and poor everywhere.

The prominence the editors give to the word social in their ‘manifesto’is signiﬁcant

in this respect. Research funding is a necessary but not sufﬁcient condition for good

scholarship. We can be certain too that generous ERC funding will not last forever;

but four years should be enough time for the incoming editors to set new terms for

debate that has the study of 21st-century social relations between people at its core.

Anthropology needs different points of view grounded in different national traditions.

English will remain the dominant mode of discourse, but there is hope for a truly

8RETHINKING EURO-ANTHROPOLOGY

transnational Eurocentric anthropology yet one that exploits the best aspects of the

national traditions on which it is based.

Chris Gregory

School of Archaeology & Anthropology

Australian National University

Acton, ACT 2601

Australia

Chris.Gregory@anu.edu.au

Reference

Latour, B. 2013. ‘Biography of an inquiry: on a book about modes of existence’,Social

Studies of Science 43: 287–301.

DANIEL MILLER

What difference might the ERC make?

Right now European anthropology is undergoing a revolution, or at least it should

be. The European Research Council is giving out grants worth up to €2.5 million each.

In addition, new digital media have made tasks such as communication and dissemina-

tion much easier and cheaper. After years complaining about the lack of resources, we

really don’t want to look this gift horse in the mouth. We will have little excuse if

Europe does not become a leading force in the discipline of anthropology as a result.

I would argue that we should not use such extended resources merely to do more of

what we currently regard as ‘anthropology’. Instead we should re-think what

anthropology is. Because, as with any discipline, all past anthropology is partly a result

of the constraints under which it was created. It is a highly individualistic profession

partly because in most cases only individuals were funded for ethnography. So what

would or what could anthropology have been if it had always commanded such

resources? Based on my current experience of having such a grant, I want to suggest

a few of the many possible answers to this question.

First, resources should be used to secure our foundational strength. We have

always committed to carrying out not just qualitative research but classic ethnographies

of at least 15 months. This is something other disciplines can’t or won’t do –and

secures a depth of scholarship that is otherwise endangered. I would deﬁne ethnogra-

phy as a commitment to holistic contextualisation such that we do not have to prejudge

the factors relevant to our topic.

Second, these resources should ensure that ﬁnally we can actually be comparative

and collaborative. Something this discipline has always promised but rarely delivered

on. My own ERC project consisted of nine simultaneous 15-month ethnographies.

All nine of us studied the same topic during each month of ﬁeldwork and on return

we have written under the same chapter headings in our nine respective monographs.

It was not just the money. It was also the new media that allowed us to be constantly

in touch, making this level of collaboration and continual comparison now possible.

We are also committed to two volumes that are directly comparative in content. All

eleven volumes will be launched under the Why We Post website in February 2016.

FORUM 9

Where possible, let’s repudiate the presumption of individualism in anthropology as

mere constraint.

Third, our topic, which was the use and consequences of social media, lends itself

to extending the discipline’s intellectual ambition that in some ways was constrained by

a focus on kinship. Instead, we should have always been deﬁned by the more general

topic of all human modes of sociality and social order. Ambition of this scale is

facilitated by this level of collaboration and comparison.

Fourth, when applying for such grants we should ask for much more money for

dissemination than in the past. In this case my point may not be general, because our

increased commitment to popular dissemination is linked to the fact that our topic of

social media is one with clear popular appeal. In such cases we should include a

responsibility to inform non-academic as well as academic audiences. Ideally all our

material should now go Open Access. It is a scandal when we publish work that people

cannot afford to buy or read in the countries where we work. We may have more

resources, but they do not. If need be, we should subsidise the production of publications

in order to make them free online (but NOT by subsidising commercial publishers). As

well as books and journal articles, we should create extensive and highly accessible websites

including more visual materials such as YouTube videos, acknowledging that this is now

much simpler and easier to produce. We can now also afford to create MOOCS [Massive

Open Online Courses], free Open Access university courses that can be taught anywhere,

including under-resourced universities outside of Europe.

Fifth, we should use this money to translate at least the more accessible materials into

the languages of the place where we worked and ideally also other major languages. A

key determinant of the future of anthropology will be how it becomes established in

the emerging universities of regions such as Africa, China and India. A topic such as so-

cial media can be used to suggest that as well as traditions related to the study of indig-

enous and tribal studies, we have the potential to give depth and breadth to the

understanding of any contemporary social development. Anthropology in these emer-

gent economies should incorporate this future-orientated ambition and commitment.

For this to be accepted, we need to clearly describe in non-academic language the original

insights that come from our scholarship and make these available in the languages of this

emergent world. In this way the improved resources of Europe can be used to help se-

cure the global development of a future anthropology. Ideally, anthropology should al-

ways have been a global subject of researchers and not just the researched.

Finally, I obviously acknowledge that most people don’t and won’t have such

grants, but for those who do, this is a privilege that could beneﬁt us all.

Daniel Miller

Department of Anthropology

University College London

London WC1H 0BW, UK

d.miller@ucl.ac.uk

BIRGIT MEYER

Towards a broader horizon

Anthropology is the forum par excellence in which the limits and possibilities of

communication and contact across cultural difference are experienced and thematised.

10 RETHINKING EURO-ANTHROPOLOGY

I regard anthropology as the ‘queen’among the disciplines in the social sciences and

humanities. Based on grounded theorising, it is able to throw light on the complexities

of inter-human and inter-cultural encounters in our heavily entangled globalised

world. Anthropology is the practice of informed ‘translation’that places centre stage

misunderstandings and incommensurabilities as well as surprising moments of

understanding. Since I made a transition from a chair in cultural anthropology at VU

University Amsterdam to religious studies at Utrecht University, I started to cherish

anthropology even more than before, and re-invented myself as an anthropologist

against the broader horizon of the humanities. From this standpoint, I will propose

three areas in which anthropologists in Europe, wherever they are based, could engage

more deeply and systematically.

One, I have the impression that across Europe anthropologists, exceptions granted,

tend to be locked up in their own discourse. Indicative of this trend is the popularity of

ontological perspectives that stress the ultimate alterity of the Other, or a heavy

theoretical investment in quite opaque, abstract reasoning (for instance, under the

ambit of ‘French’philosophy). This happens often at the expense of pondering bigger

issues of our time that demand transdisciplinary collaboration. What does doing

anthropology –as knowledge about being human –mean in a broader sense, beyond

one’s speciﬁc research site or theoretical hang-up? What does it mean to be human at

a time when the possibility to draw sharp distinctions between persons and objects,

and between persons and animals is eroding, when nationalist-populist identity politics

mobilise citizenship and human rights in ever more exclusivist ways while actual

diversity calls for the opposite, when the prominence of the notion of the anthropocene

denotes a tipping point that erases the long-maintained nature–culture opposition? In

principle, anthropologists have much to say about these processes on the basis of their

speciﬁc, situated research, but as yet they seem to lack visibility and input in broader

scholarly arenas and in public debates. Anthropologists should cultivate much more

than is the case now their ability to engage in conversation and collaboration with

scholars across various disciplines, including the more usual interlocutors (from

sociology, political science, history, literature, religious studies, media studies) as well

as so far more unlikely ones in the sphere of the neuro-sciences and life sciences.

Second, in our ever more diverse world, European societies themselves may well

be described as post-colonial contact zones shaped by colonial legacies and global in-

equalities, fuelling migration of people from dis-privileged areas into, especially, cities.

Anthropology is the discipline par excellence to throw light onto the complexities of

being and belonging in our ever more diversiﬁed world. Religion is a particular case

in point. Far from vanishing with modernisation, religion is a salient force that is

central to people’s identity and by the same token a source of tensions and conﬂicts,

as recent commotions around blasphemy and related issues about which people take

offence show. Anthropologists offer important insights into the dynamics of religious

plurality, often on the basis of speciﬁc case studies. However, to fully grasp current

religious dynamics in a deep historical perspective, more intense conversations with

scholars from religious studies, theology, Islamic studies and history are indispensable,

as I now experience day in, day out.

Third and last, our world of global entanglements and interdependencies calls for a

critical reﬂection about the division of labour in the production of knowledge between

the so-called systematic disciplines that strive to make universal claims, on the one

hand, and expertise built in the framework of area studies, on the other. Operating

FORUM 11

on both sides, anthropology is the appropriate intermediary to challenge the masking

of Eurocentric knowledge as universal. It can play a crucial role in opening up a space

for critical, trans-regional and transdisciplinary approaches to knowledge production

in past and present, helping to proﬁle post-colonial critiques to ‘provincialise Europe’

(Chakrabarty 2000) and the articulation of ‘theories from the south’(Comaroff and

Comaroff 2011) in larger arenas of scholarly and public debate.

In short, in my view the critical knowledge offered by anthropology is indispens-

able to grasp the implications of intensiﬁed diversity, with all problems and possibilities

ensued, that characterises life in Europe and beyond in our time. Hence, the need to do

what we are good at as anthropologists against a broader horizon.

Birgit Meyer

Department of Philosophy & Religious Studies

Utrecht University, 3512 BL Utrecht

The Netherlands

B.Meyer@uu.nl

References

Chakrabarty, D. 2000. Provincializing Europe: postcolonial thought and historical dif-

ference. Princeton, NJ: University Press.

Comaroff, J. and J. L. Comaroff 2011. Theory from the South: or, how Euro-America is

evolving toward Africa. Boulder, CO: Paradigm.

TIM INGOLD

Dropping the social

When we set about creating a new department at the University of Aberdeen, in

Scotland, one immediate question we faced was what to call it. We were building a

programme of teaching and research in social anthropology, not in biological anthro-

pology or archaeology. Should we then have called ourselves a department of social

anthropology? Or were we to be, quite simply, a department of anthropology? We

chose the latter option, for three reasons.

The ﬁrst reason was intellectually the most trivial, but it has undoubtedly had the

greatest practical impact. Quite simply, anthropology begins with an A. In these days

of alphabetically ordered drop-down lists, it helps to have one’s subject placed near

the top, so you don’t have to scroll down to ﬁnd it. And of course it put clear water

between us and sociology, which is placed way down.

The second, more serious reason was that we felt we were speaking for a discipline,

not a sub-discipline. With this, we wanted to signal our rejection of the traditional view

that anthropology can be neatly segmented into sub-ﬁelds. National traditions vary in

the number of recognised sub-ﬁelds: there used to be three in British anthropology

(social, biological, archaeological), compared with four in North America (including

anthropological linguistics), but recent years have seen the emergence of many more,

with the addition of visual, medical, environmental, historical, and any number of other

varieties. Several attempts have been made to put these into some kind of order and to

draw up a comprehensive list, partly to satisfy the demands of funding bodies, but no

12 RETHINKING EURO-ANTHROPOLOGY

two lists are alike, and all lead to absurdities. Surely, if anthropology stands for

anything, it is for the idea that human life cannot be sliced up into discrete layers, for

separate study by different disciplines.

This leads to the third reason. The fracturing of the discipline, we believe, has

seriously weakened its voice, and in seeking to counteract this, our aim has been to

promote a vision of anthropology as the study of human being and becoming, as it

were, ‘in the round’. This is not, however, to imagine the human as a thing of parts –

biological, psychological, social –that have simply to be stuck together again in order

to recreate the whole. Far from reassembling the pieces, our task is rather to undo the

logic that led to their division in the ﬁrst place. Just as all life is biological, there is a

sense in which all life is social too, for every living being is formed and held in place

within a matrix of relations with others. Taken in this sense, there can be no anthropol-

ogy that is not social. We are for an anthropology that seeks neither to reduce the social

to the biological, nor vice versa, but to get rid of the distinction. We invite our

colleagues, not just in social anthropology but in biological anthropology as well, to

join us. No more social, no more biological: we are all just anthropologists!

Tim Ingold

Department of Anthropology

University of Aberdeen

Aberdeen AB24 3QY, UK

tim.ingold@abdn.ac.uk

MÁIRÉAD NIC CRAITH

Diversity and singularity in European anthropology

The new editors of Social Anthropology have thrown down the gauntlet. Deﬁning the

journal as a key forum for research carried out by anthropologists trained or currently

working in European universities, they query the European dimension of this anthropol-

ogy. They ask whether there is anything distinctive about European anthropology, given

the diversity of anthropological practice in Europe, as well as the impact of historical

events, multilingualism and institutional conditions on that practice. In their quest for sin-

gularity in European anthropology, the editors are engaging with a process that has been

one of the key challenges for the European Union. How does one identify the unifying

threads in a diverse continental mosaic? How does one brand the ‘unity in diversity’?

From an anthropological perspective, the ‘unity in diversity’motto raises many

interesting questions. I have argued elsewhere (Nic Craith 2012a) that this slogan can

be interpreted as an attempt to bring together, recognise and legitimise the full range

of European cultures. In the case of this journal, one could reasonably argue that unless

the contributors engage not just with the wide range of anthropological traditions in

Europe, but also with that diversity in the different languages of Europe, the quest will

have barely begun. An interesting barometer of that engagement could be the number

of references in this Forum piece to publications in languages other than English (see

Kockel’s commentary (1999: 96) on Goddard et al. 1996).

‘Unity in Diversity’raises an issue of power. To what extent is the quest for

singularity in European anthropology an appropriation of the ﬁeld from the different

FORUM 13

institutions in which it is practised? Can it be argued that the quest is an appropriation

of power to the centre –and in a region as ill-deﬁned as Europe, can there be a centre?

Reﬂection on the ﬁeld is always worthwhile. However, in the ﬁeld of languages in

Europe, the acknowledgement of different speaking publics has also resulted in a

hierarchical approach to language status –with those speaking a ‘procedural’language

(i.e. English, French or German) at the top of the scale and speakers of immigrant,

non-European languages close to the bottom. Is there a danger that our response to

the quest for unity in diversity in European anthropology will inevitably result in the

‘ranking’of different anthropological practices in Europe according to language or

publishing outlet, and can that be avoided?

An additional complication in the case of Europe’s linguistic diversity has been the

issue of conceptual clarity. How does one distinguish between language and dialect?

This tension can also be applied to the anthropological ﬁeld. Does the quest for

singularity in European anthropology engage only with ‘proper’anthropology or will

our discussions include anthropologists who breach disciplinary boundaries and stray

into areas such as cultural studies or comparative literature? How about those who

have engaged with the discipline without formal qualiﬁcation?

All of this brings us back to the concept of Europe (Kockel 2011) and what is our vi-

sion of anthropology on the continent. If we are unclear about Europe conceptually, why

should we seek out singularity on a continental basis? Should we speak of anthropology

in the singular (as we already do with heritage) and instead refer to the anthropologies of

Europe? Post-universalism and post-disciplinarity pose a challenge to epistemology and

one might ask whether the notion of singularity is relevant for European anthropology

at the beginning of the 21st century. Perhaps this editorial gauntletwill generate an appre-

ciation that there is no one common disciplinary ﬁeld in which we all share and even rec-

ognise in Europe. Maybe we have multiple anthropologies, multiple traditions and

practices in a geographical region whose boundaries are regularly contested geographi-

cally, culturally and even anthropologically (see Kockel et al. 2012).

Máiréad Nic Craith

Department of Languages & Inter Studies

Heriot Watt University

Edinburgh EH14 4AS, UK

m.niccraith@hw.ac.uk

References

Goddard, V. A., B. Kapferer and J. Gledhill (eds.) 1996. The anthropology of Europe:

identities and boundaries in conflict. Oxford: Berg.

Kockel, U. 1999. Borderline cases: ethnic frontiers of European integration. Liverpool:

Liverpool University Press.

Q2Kockel, U. 2012. Re-visioning Europe: frontiers, place identities and journeys in

debatable lands. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Kockel, U., M. Nic Craith and J. Frykman (eds.) 2012. A companion to the anthropol-

ogy of Europe. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

Nic Craith, M. 2012a. Language, power and politics in Europe, in U. Kockel, M. Nic

Craith and J. Frykman (eds.), A companion to the anthropology of Europe,

373–88. Oxford: Blackwell.

Q3Nic Craith, M. 2012b. ‘Europe’s (un)common heritage(s)’,Traditiones 41: 11–28.

14 RETHINKING EURO-ANTHROPOLOGY

JOÃO DE PINA-CABRAL

Is there a European anthropology?

Of course there is: in practically all universities in Europe, there are academics who

answer by this disciplinary title. But then we ask: do they all agree about what

anthropology is? No, they do not.

The philosophical deﬁnition of anthropology (the study of the human condition) is

too generic a description of what we do. During the Belle Époque, the reformulation of

the common Darwinian inspiration led to a separation between the social and the

natural sciences. Biological and social anthropologies diverged: today, our canons

differ; our methodologies differ; our theoretical assumptions differ; our scientiﬁc

culture follows clearly distinct paths.

On the one hand, the engagement of social anthropologists with the fast-changing

world that high colonialism was producing in the 1920s and 1930s meant a move away

from biological racialism and material determinism. By the end of the Second World

War, most social anthropologists were adopting interpretation as their essential

disposition. On the other hand, for the biological anthropologists, the focus on

Primatology played very much the same schismogenic role. There was a methodolog-

ical approximation to Archaeology and a theoretical merging with Biology and

Forensic Science. Today, no one seriously contemplates merging the two disciplines,

but there are many of us in both camps who deny that there is an ontological frontier

between nature and culture and who search for theoretical pathways that do not

polarise our understanding of humans.

Unfortunately, some confusions do arise. One of the most common concerns

what, in the USA, is called ‘the four-ﬁeld tradition’. This disciplinary formulation

never held any sway in Europe, as it still does not today. When Franz Boas formulated

it, ﬁrst in Mexico and then in the USA (cf. Claudio Lomnitz 2005), ‘four-ﬁeld’

anthropology was associated with the study of Amerindians and responded to the

intellectual demands posed by nationalism in these settler societies (cf. Sidney Mintz

1996). In Europe, to the contrary, the central divide was between national and exotic

anthropology (cf. Ulf Hannerz 2010).

In fact, the most momentous change that is taking place in European

anthropology today is the end of this primitivist divide. We have witnessed the

increasing momentum of this convergenceduringthelifeofEASA.Astheworld

is increasingly globalised, as anthropologists originate in different ethnic groups

and classes, as Europe becomes a land of immigration, we are no longer struck

by the relevance of the separation between ‘us/them’,‘moderns/primitives’,‘the

West’and ‘the Rest’. To the contrary, we are challenged by alterity within:that

is, the theoretical capital that anthropology accumulated in the study of exotic

societies is now being brought to bear on the study of human difference at a

moment when the modernist ‘us/them’divide is no longer foundational or even

relevant.

Furthermore, in a world so patently anthropocenic, new challenges have arisen that

demand that the human condition and the world condition be seen as integrated.

Today, European anthropology reaches far and wide, both in the topics it covers and

in its theoretical ambitions. We remain bound, however, by the inescapable universality

of our founding question: what is the human condition?

FORUM 15

João de Pina-Cabral

School of Anthropology & Conservation

University of Kent

Canterbury, Kent CT2 7NR, UK

J.Pina-Cabral@kent.ac.uk

References

Hannerz, U. 2010. Field worries: studying down, up, sideways, through, backward,

forward, early or later, away and at home, in Anthropology’s world: life in a

twenty-first century discipline, 59–86. London: Pluto Press.

Lomnitz, C. 2005. Bordering on anthropology: dialectics of a national tradition in Mexico,

in B. De L’Etoile, F. Neiburg and L. Sigaut (eds.), Empires, nations, and natives:

anthropology and state-making,167–96.New York: Duke University Press.

Mintz, S. W. 1996. ‘Enduring substances, trying theories: the Caribbean region as

Oikoumenê’,Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 2: 289–93.

THOMAS HYLLAND ERIKSEN

The North Sea approach to ethnicity

When, in the mid-1980s, I developed an interest in the intricacies of ethnic

complexity, my teachers at the University of Oslo were unequivocal in their advice.

Harald Eidheim (the author of the pioneering Aspects of the Lappish minority situation,

1971) emphasised the need to study what people did and not merely what they said,

and to remember that ethnicity was an aspect of a relationship, not a property of a

group. Eidheim would generally be loath to award a good grade to a student who

did not offer a sound analysis of social organisation. My supervisor Axel Sommerfelt,

who had previously worked in Southern Africa, lent me a tattered copy of Clyde

Mitchell’sThe Kalela dance (1956) and spoke about social dramas, networks and

relationality. Their focus was on politics, interaction, kinship and power. Meaning

and symbols were signiﬁcant only in so far as they had a bearing on social life.

The towering ﬁgure of Norwegian anthropology was Fredrik Barth, whose

inﬂuence was huge even at the height of Marxist and feminist tendencies. Although

he received his ﬁrst degree from Chicago, his later studies were at Cambridge, and in

spite of his American accent, Barth was widely perceived as a British social anthropol-

ogist. Indeed, an English colleague once claimed, not entirely inaccurately, that

Norwegian anthropologists were afﬁnal kin of the British, with Barth as the mother’s

brother. Even today, one could argue that a North Sea anthropology exists, with a

distinct (salty?) ﬂavour.

Both Eidheim and Sommerfelt had participated in the ‘Ethnic Groups and Bound-

aries’symposium, which led to the famous 1969 book of the same title, still an

indispensable reference in research on ethnic relations and group identities in general.

Barth’s‘Introduction’was a sociological alternative to the culturalist approaches to

ethnicity that were at the time still inﬂuential: Ethnicity was about intergroup relation-

ships (not essences or substances), it concerned resource ﬂow, power and social

organisation rather than values, meanings and what Barth, a tad too dismissively, spoke

of as ‘the cultural stuff’. The introduction, and several of the subsequent chapters in the

16 RETHINKING EURO-ANTHROPOLOGY

book, illustrated the difference between culturalist and sociological approaches in an

almost exemplary way. Never mind that Michael Moerman’s‘Who are the Lue?’

(1965), a precursor to Barth’s analysis, was written by an American, or that Robert

Park and the Chicago School were Americans whose studies of urban social life could

resemble the Barthian ethnicity paradigm. It felt homegrown; it was somehow ours.

I had brought a handful of books with me to Mauritius. One of them, recom-

mended by Eidheim, was Ernest Gellner’s recent edition of Nations and nationalism

(2008 [1983]). It seemed supremely compatible with the Barthian perspective,

emphasising as it did social and political processes as the fundamental facts underlying

nationalist ideologies. Gellner’s book was even more emphatically European than

Barth’s; it could almost be described as a philosophical meditation on the breakup of

the Habsburg Empire. We have all moved on, but with the hindsight of a few decades,

it seems that the European approaches to collective identities differed from their

American counterparts partly due to differences in their respective historical

experiences. In this, anthropological approaches to ethnicity are no different from the

other knowledge systems we study.

Thomas Hylland Eriksen

Department of Social Anthropology

University of Oslo, 0317 Oslo

Norway

t.h.eriksen@sai.uio.no

References

Barth, F. (ed.) 1969. Ethnic groups and boundaries: the social organization of cultural

difference. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget.

Eidheim, H. 1971. Aspects of the Lappish minority situation. Oslo: Oslo University

Press.

Gellner, E. 2008 [1983]. Nations and nationalism. Oxford: Blackwell.

Mitchell, C. 1956. The Kalela dance: aspects of social relationships among urban Afri-

cans in Northern Rhodesia. The Rhodes-Livingstone Papers, No. 27. Manchester:

Manchester University Press.

Moerman,M. 1965. ‘Ethnic identiﬁcation in a complex civilization: who are the Lue?’,

American Anthropologist 67: 1215–30.

PETER WADE

Race and biology: allergic reactions

The common-place notion that race is a ‘social construction’has been challenged

recently from two rather different directions, both spurred by research carried out in

the USA and Britain, rather than continental Europe. On the one hand, some

geneticists argue that recent genomic work on human diversity shows that the familiar

old racial categories, based on continental regions, have some biological validity –a

claim denied by other geneticists (for a discussion, see Bliss 2012; Weiss and Lambert

2014). More interesting in my view is another tendency in which some anthropologists

are pushing to reintroduce biology into the study of race, but a biology seen in

FORUM 17

processual, developmental terms, far removed from genetic reductionism. The idea is to

see how environmental inﬂuences, shaped by racialised social structures –such as the

multiple stresses caused by racism and racial inequality –enter into the physical

constitution of the body.

Studies of ‘environmental racism’have shown how an unhealthy environment can

directly impact on the well-being of dwellers, who may be disproportionately of a

racialised minority. The developmentalist approach takes this further, arguing that

biology is plastic, but biological effects also accumulate in resilient ways, affecting

the health of individuals and shaping the life experiences of categories of people

(Hartigan 2013; Wade 2002). Thus different urban contexts for black and white people

in the USA tend to create different experiences of learning basketball skills, which

become embodied as ‘second nature’and inﬂuence future success in competitive

basketball (see Wade 2004). In California post 9/11, women with Arab surnames gave

birth to under-weight babies 34% more often than in the previous year. Low birth

weight is linked to a number of health problems later in life. Pregnant mothers who

are subjected to stress of various kinds –which could include the experience of racism,

the fear of racism and effects of poverty that tend to impact black people more often in

the USA –tend to have children with higher risks of poor health later in life. In other

words, these kinds of biological effects can work over more than one generation

(Gravlee 2013; Kuzawa and Thayer 2013). Some of this inter-generational dynamic

may be epigenetic, that is, related to molecular processes, shaped by the environment,

which inﬂuence the way DNA is expressed in the phenotype and which may be

heritable.

Grasping the biological effects of racism and racial inequality is an important

step forward, but one that seems to gain most traction in academic contexts in

which the (western) European continental allergy to the idea of race is less en-

grained. In much of western Europe –less so perhaps in eastern Europe (Kaszycka

and Strzałko 2003) –the mention of ‘race’(as opposed to ‘racism’) in an academic

or political context is often awkward, while talking of ‘race’and ‘biology’in the

same breath is likely to be taboo (Lentin 2004). Compare France’s 2013 decision

to ban the word ‘race’from all legislation with Britain’s Race Relations Act and

its bureaucratic industry for the regulation of such relations. It is tempting to

conclude that the contexts in which the concept of race has a public institutional

life are also those that permit a more open-minded approach to understanding

how biology and race become entangled.

Peter Wade

Department of Social Anthropology

University of Manchester

Manchester M13 9PL, UK

peter.wade@manchester.ac.uk

References

Bliss, C. 2012. Race decoded: the genomic fight for social justice. Stanford, CA: Stanford

University Press.

Gravlee, C. C. 2013. Race, biology, and culture: rethinking the connections, in J.

Hartigan (ed.), Anthropology of race: genes, biology, and culture, 21–42. Santa

Fe, NM: School for Advanced Research Press.

18 RETHINKING EURO-ANTHROPOLOGY

Hartigan, J. (ed.) 2013. Anthropology of race: genes, biology, and culture. Santa Fe, NM:

School for Advanced Research Press.

Kaszycka, K. A. and J. Strzałko 2003. ‘“Race”: still an issue for physical anthropology?

Results of Polish studies seen in the light of the U.S. ﬁndings’,American

Anthropologist 105: 116–124.

Kuzawa, C. W. and Z. M. Thayer. 2013. Toppling typologies: developmental plasticity

and the environmental origins of human biological variation, in J. Hartigan (ed.),

Anthropology of race: genes, biology, and culture, 43–56.Santa Fe, NM: School

for Advanced Research Press.

Lentin, A. 2004. Racism and anti-racism in Europe. London: Pluto.Wade, P. 2002.

Race, nature and culture: an anthropological perspective. London: Pluto Press.

Wade, P. 2004. ‘Race and human nature’,Anthropological Theory 4: 157–72.

Weiss, K. M. and B. W. Lambert 2014. What type of person are you? Old-fashioned

thinking even in modern science, in A. Chakravarti (ed.), Human variation: a

genetic perspective on diversity, race, and medicine, 15–28. Cold Spring Harbor,

NY: Cold Spring Habor Laboratory Press.

ALBERTO CORSÍN JIMÉNEZ

Anthropology: a prototype

Over the past four years, streets have become deep sites of learning in Spain. I

mean this in a number of senses. First, in the wake of the economic and ﬁnancial

meltdown of 2009, thousands of Spaniards took to the streets on May 2011 and

reimagined the city as a political experiment. The movement that became known as

the Indignados or 15M movement took residence in plazas and public spaces all over

Spain in the shape of popular neighbourhood assemblies. These assemblies met weekly

in the open air and laid out the conditions for learning and inventing politics anew.

The assemblies became an inspiration for cultural practices elsewhere. For exam-

ple, throughout 2011–12 members of various guerrilla architectural collectives in

Madrid, joined by digital artists, designers and educators, met in the open air to discuss

the conditions for learning in the city. Convened every second Thursday via Twitter

(hashtag #edumeet), there was no agenda to the meetings, nor indeed expectations of

attendance. Some meetings were attended only by a handful of people, who would then

take the conversations indoors to a nearby bar; other meetings would pull in audiences

of over thirty people. Attendants discussed the role of the university, the nature of

autonomous education and the possibilities that new technologies opened up for

relocating how and where learning took place in the city. In an unprecedented event,

in 2012 an entry on #edumeet was included in a special issue that Spain’s most

prestigious architectural journal, Arquitectura Viva, edited on up-and-coming

architectural studios (edumeet 2012).

Another example concerns the work of free culture activists in Madrid, in

particular the activities and programmes carried out at Medialab-Prado, one of the

country’s leading hacklabs. For a variety of reasons, including the debacle of the public

university model under the politics of austerity, Medialab has become a congenial and

hospitable environment for academics. It has hosted academic conferences and

seminars, offered technological and infrastructural support, and occasionally

FORUM 19

contributed in kind towards the organisation of academic events. But importantly,

academics’partnership with Medialab-Prado has also exposed their (our) work to the

material epistemology of free culture hackers: the use of free intellectual property

licences; documenting and curating publicly accessible, editable and shareable archival

registries of our projects; or using, sometimes even participating in the development of,

open-source prototypes whose aim is to interrogate and ‘white-box’the interfaces

holding material and social practices together (versus the ‘black-boxes’of mainstream

intellectual proprietary technologies).

So what about anthropology? How has anthropology come to inhabit these

prototypes –between and betwixt the street and the academy, amidst novel alliances

with architects, designers or digital activists, equipped with the cultural infrastructures

of hackers?

There are of course as many answers to these questions as there are anthropologists

in Spain. But I wish to essay here one programme of action and research. This outlines

a view of anthropology of/as prototype as both a theory of relation and a modality of

collaboration.

As a theory of relation, the anthropology of/as prototype sketches a ﬁgure of

complexity that is ‘more than many and less than one’(Corsín Jiménez 2014). Unlike

the partial connections of fractal complexity, where part and whole mirror each other

as self-scaling devices –‘more than one and less than many’–thereby avoiding a model

of political plurality based on difference as a multiplicity of identities (Strathern 2004);

unlike such ﬁgure of complexity, prototypes may be thought of as designs that are

always less than ‘one’, for they keep referring back to –they are sourced on –the

conditions of their own openness (that is, they are open-sourced). At the same time,

the existence of a source code enables prototypes to proliferate and reduplicate not

through the multiplicity of number and identity, but through edits, extensions or

bifurcations. They index towards a plurality not of ‘many’but of ‘many more than

many’. The prototype, then, as more than many and less than one.

This brings me to the modality of collaboration. More than many and less than

one, anthropologists working with/as prototypes have often found their ethnographic

projects re-functioned as infrastructural projects where ethnography becomes one of

the many ‘sources’open-sourcing the collaborative enterprise. We may think of these

collaborations as ‘anthropological experiments’for our contemporary (Marcus 2014).

Yet more than their experimental vocation, when ethnography joins the source code

of a prototyping project it becomes in effect a member of a community whose interest

lies not just in ‘doing things together’but in sourcing this material epistemology out

(becoming less than one) for others to learn from it (becoming more than many).

The culture of prototyping is of our times, of course. But there may be a lesson for

anthropology in the cultural momentum that drives its techno-material hopefulness.

We have long known of anthropology’s commitment towards the making explicit of

cultures of learning. Yet the notion of anthropology-as-prototype offers perhaps some

valuable insights into the infrastructures of apprenticeships holding our ﬁeld/s together.

Alberto Corsín Jiménez

Spanish National Research Council

Madrid 28037

Spain

alberto.corsin-jimenez@cchs.csic.es

20 RETHINKING EURO-ANTHROPOLOGY

References

Corsín Jiménez, A. 2014. ‘Introduction. The prototype: more than many and less than

one’,Journal of Cultural Economy 7: 381–98.

edumeet 2012. edumeet. Arquitectura Viva 145: 26.

Marcus, G. 2014. ‘Prototyping and contemporary anthropological experiments with

ethnographic method’,Journal of Cultural Economy 7: 399–410.

Strathern, M. 2004. Partial connections. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.

JUDITH OKELY

Travellers

The social anthropology of Europe was once ethnocentrically dismissed or

marginalised because it was not ‘Exotically Other’. The European Roma, Gypsies,

Travellers (GRT) offer a case study of how social anthropology was ﬁnally

constructively embraced, then misappropriated, even travestied or again by-passed.

From the late 1990s, Soros-funded Roma courses at the Central European Univer-

sity, Budapest, recognised anthropological studies as crucial. By contrast, with EU

expansion and its funded decade of ‘Roma inclusion’, bureaucratic hegemony was

prioritised. Positivism re-emerged triumphant, with ethnographic methods increas-

ingly sidelined. CEO grant holders oversee ‘data gatherers’on unstable contracts.

Top-down directives discourage individual ﬂexibility.

On the EU Romany Studies Network across disciplines, clichés have re-emerged.

Unique anthropological insights from intensive ﬁeldwork are rubbished as ‘anecdotal’

by linguists. The medical diktat, prioritising ‘evidence-based’, quantitative material is

mechanically transposed by non-social anthropologists, to dismiss ethnography as

‘unscientiﬁc’. Predictably, socio-linguistics, where nuanced, embedded meanings vary

with context, are ignored. Such ﬂexibility cannot be bureaucratically measured. At

one CEU linguistics class, the non-Roma professor mocked the Roma students’

Romany language usage as ‘riddled with errors’. Had he not heard of ‘slang’or ‘argot’?

They walked out in protest.

While earlier generations had to argue for the value of anthropological research in

Europe, this is now recognised. Notwithstanding, ethnographic methods, developed

for studying humanity across the globe, face brutal fragmentation. Bizarrely, the

Chicago School of Sociology’s invention of the concept ‘participant observation’is

forgotten, albeit after Malinowski ‘pitched his tent’.

I draw on recent experience of doctoral committees and as external examiner,

where the key supervisors were not anthropologists. Common themes emerge. This

was especially poignant where the doctoral candidate had specialised in anthropology

but faced methodological and theoretical censure.

One candidate moved into a working-class community, embracing participant

observation, joining speciﬁc clubs and noting Malinowski’s‘imponderabilia of

everyday life’–with the residents’full enthusiasm. Despite the doctorate’s classiﬁca-

tion as social anthropological, the appointed supervisor was a political scientist lacking

experience of ethnographic research. The candidate was instructed to insert only

2 Most anthropologists have changed topics in the ﬁeld (Okely 2012: Ch. 3).

FORUM 21

tape-recorded one-to-one interviews. Insights and analysis from months of participant

observation were excluded because they were judged ‘subjective’, even unethical.

Another doctoral candidate, with both an anthropology BA and MA, had

comparable problems with supervisors: a gerontologist, the other a quantitative sociol-

ogist. The candidate was required to prioritise interviews in the study of older lesbians.

One interviewee happily denied ever having experienced homophobia. After the

recording, the researcher and interviewee fortuitously shared a journey on the London

Underground. The researcher then witnessed a shocking, homophobic bullying of the

interviewee by schoolboys. When writing up, the doctoral student analysed this

contradiction. But the supervisors insisted this ethnographic ‘anecdote’be deleted,

because it had not been tape-recorded.

Thus the primacy of the formalised interview has triumphed, contradicting classic

sociological research. Whyte’sStreet Corner Society (1943/1955) noted how Doc told

him to ‘stop asking questions’and just ‘hang around’(cited in Okely 2012: 76).

Seemingly, this is deleted from sociology’s history and decreed inappropriate for what

is standard anthropological ethnography.

As neo-liberalism invades universities, students, degrees and research funding are

increasingly diverted into Business Studies. Paradoxically, the value of ethnography

has been recognised in this specialism via the innovative Journal of Organizational

Ethnography. As keynote for its annual conference, I nevertheless witnessed the

students’struggle between the qualitative and quantitative. Presentations were pep-

pered with mechanistic ﬂow charts and numerical tables. Thus, although ethnography’s

potential is main-streamed beyond anthropology, its meaning and practice risks

misappropriation or distortion. Fortunately, a lecturer in a prestigious Business

Department thanked me for my presentation. His ongoing doctorate had been

critiqued as ‘non-generalisable’and references to Barthes and Bourdieu were queried.

Researching ﬁshermen’s craft, alongside photographic archives, the lecturer was

reassured by the anthropologist’s details of ﬁeldwork among Gypsies.

Gypsies, Roma or Travellers, ever more identiﬁed as a ‘problem’, have become the

object of massive preordained ‘inclusion’funding. Simultaneously, this anthropologist

has been ﬂooded with requests to examine doctorates on a now ‘trendy’topic, often far

from anthropology. Token name-dropping of anthropological monographs and

articles appear in the bibliographies, while the ethnography is shamelessly ignored,

even unread.

A health department doctorate on GRT drew on just eight interviews. A ‘phenom-

enological’stance decreed that only the recorded statements in a single encounter were

deemed relevant. Even the context of the meeting was disregarded. One interviewee

recalled waking from a coma in hospital. When the examiner asked why the analysis

had not confronted Gypsy/Traveller notions of hospitals as ritually polluting places

for dying, never recovery, the candidate believed that phenomenology excluded the

study of ‘culture’. Ironically, Gypsy/Traveller ‘culture’includes strategically adaptive

performance when interrogated by outsiders. At least there is some progress through

the decades. In 1969, Marek Kaminski was discouraged from research on Polish

Gypsies because his Krakow professor insisted they had ‘no culture’(Okely 2012).

Seemingly, ethnography is being misappropriated or marginalised by a revival of

scientism that prioritises quantiﬁcation and/or only brief encounters. This deﬁes

3 Granted, interviews can be crucial, but are rarely the sole ethnographic method (Smith et al. 2015).

22 RETHINKING EURO-ANTHROPOLOGY

Leach’s 1967 insistence (cited in Okely 2012: 13) that grounded ﬁeldwork reveals the

total System, whereas mass questionnaires may reproduce inbuilt errors.

Paradoxically, the supreme authority of in-depth participant observation is revered

by the powerful State. After the catastrophic Iraq invasion, CIA representatives

attempted to recruit anthropologists at the 2006 AAA, apparently to understand

‘culture’(Okely 2012: 35–6). Thus, for the invisible state hegemony, number-

crunching is less informatively powerful than inﬁltration by the one ethnographer. In

practice (Okely 2012: 36–7), the committed anthropologist enters as respectful ally,

rarely as traitor/spy. Anthropologists may even study terrorism (Zulaika in Okely

2012), but retain autonomy for more universal aims. Ethnography of the speciﬁc, in

Europe or beyond, can reveal aspects of humanity in general.

Judith Okely

School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography

University of Oxford

Oxford OX2 6PE, UK

J.m.okely@hull.ac.uk

References

Okely, J. 2012. Anthropological practice: fieldwork and the ethnographic method.

London: Bloomsbury.

Smith, K., J. Staples and N. Rapport (eds.) 2015. Extraordinary encounters,authenticity

and the interview. Oxford: Berghahn.

Whyte, W. F. 1943. Street corner society. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

ANDREW DAWSON

Mobility’s turns

Prompted by growing realisation that mobility was becoming a quintessential

experience of the age, the ‘mobilities turn’came to have a signiﬁcant impact in the social

sciences. And, especially through journals such as Mobilities, it became a meeting point

for disciplines, especially Sociology (Urry 2000), Cultural Geography (Cresswell 2006)

and Anthropology.

Anthropology’s concern with mobilities grew most clearly from the ‘Writing

Culture’debate, especially from critiques of the ‘ﬁeld’. The ﬁeld had, it was pointed

out, uses as a trope from which the discipline derived its authority. Also, exposing

the myth of the value neutrality of anthropological knowledge, the ﬁeld’s resonances

with political discourses were illuminated –from nationalism to other sedentarisms that

marginalise or ‘settle’mobile peoples.

Then, what started as critique developed into a more constructive endeavour. The

mobility turn called for re-ﬁguring of foundational concepts, including identity,

culture, society and place. These were now to be framed by mobile metaphors –

‘home’,‘routes’,‘ﬂow’,‘network’,‘(de/re)territorialisation, ‘network’,‘moorings’,

etc. –several of which owe a debt to the rhizomatic thinking of Deleuze and Guattari.

And, they were to be researched via mobile methodologies such as, most famously,

multi-sited ethnography (Marcus 1995). Above all, the mobility turn’s substantive

FORUM 23

scope was ambitious. It was concerned with all forms of mobility, from the physical to

the imaginative movement of both people and objects, and with the mobility implicit in

both apparently ﬁxed and intrinsically mobile social phenomena. Communities would

be rendered as ‘sites of travelling’(Clifford 1997). Conversely, what took place in

between departures and destinations was, in studies of transport and migration, no

longer to be treated as mere ‘dead time’(Vannini 2010: 112).

Had anthropology been reluctant to participate in this endeavour, it would not

have been surprising, for heightened mobility threatens a discipline raison d’être, the

study of authentic otherness (Hamilton 2002).

However, anthropology has embraced mobility. Recent years have brought a

proliferation of studies on every conceivable form of physical mobility, from walking

and all the way up to helicopter travel. Furthermore, this is beginning to contribute

to the development of anthropological theory. For example, ‘automobilities’, a large

body of work that consists substantially of ethnographies of Europe’s‘societies of

trafﬁc’and driven by key research centres in the region such as Lancaster University,

explores the role of cars as a key (vehicular) metaphor in culture, politics and history

(Lipset and Handler 2014). Also, and especially under the auspices of institutions such

as Oxford University’s Centre on Migration, Policy & Society, more traditional ﬁelds

concerned with mobility, such as Migration Studies have ﬂourished.

Unfortunately, however, this ﬂourishing has often been at the expense of early

ambitions. The mobility turn’s substantive scope has narrowed largely to concern with

‘the fact of physical movement –getting from one place to another’(Cresswell 2010:

19). More importantly, several of its conceptual ambitions have been thwarted. I offer

two small examples from Migration Studies.

The ﬁrst of these is the energy given in recent years to the generation of new

categories of migrant. This may offer the virtue of analytical clarity. However, one

suspects, much as the ‘ﬁeld’often functioned as a trope for particular anthropologists

to claim exclusive and unassailable knowledge about particular peoples and places,

category proliferation appears to be motivated as much by professional small empire

building. Furthermore, as a kind of ‘conceptual ﬁxing’, so to speak, it stands askance

to exciting possibilities promised by the mobility turn. For example, it elides the very

elusiveness of categories themselves and the possibility of understanding the processes,

of negotiation, exclusion and inclusion, by which different migrants ‘move’between

similar such categories that are created by states. Which asylum-seeker (‘forced

migrant’) does not, while moving partly in hope of gaining a more leisured life, actively

resist classiﬁcation as ‘leisure (or undeserving welfare) migrant’lest it forecloses her

chances of asylum? And, which leisure or lifestyle migrant does not think of herself

as a refugee from the rat race?

The second example I offer is the emergence of transnationalism. Heightened

mobility has produced new and complex forms of global connection and identiﬁcation

(Urry 2000). However, it is fair to say that the anthropology of transnationalism has

focused by and large on more familiar units of analysis, the transnationalism of

national, ethnic and (g)local communities. It would appear that anthropology has

overcome its mourning for the loss of authentic otherness that mobility may entail

(Hamilton 2002), but in a most regrettable fashion. Mobility has been rendered, not a

challenge to authentic otherness, but a means by which it can be reproduced on a global

scale. Or, to put it another way, the aim to represent ﬂow has been defeated by the

persistence of boundary.

24 RETHINKING EURO-ANTHROPOLOGY

Near to its inception, the mobility turn was heralded as a paradigm shift (Sheller

and Urry 2006). Currently, it is some way short of that. What’s to be done? The task

of mobilities anthropology ought to be to regain the zeal for a re-ﬁguring of

foundational concepts. In short, to use the words of a seminal mobilities scholar, the

study of mobility needs to get back to its routes (Clifford 1997).

Andrew Dawson

School of Social and Political Sciences

University of Melbourne

Parkville, VIC 3010, Australia

dawsona@unimelb.edu.au

References

Clifford, J. 1997. Routes: travel and translation in the late twentieth century.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Cresswell, T. 2006. On the move: mobility in the western world. London: Routledge.

Hamilton, A. 2002. Beyond anthropology, towards actuality (http://www.aas.au/

Working%20Papers/Conference/202002/Annetee_Hamilton%20paper.pdf)

Accessed 14 May 2015.

Lipset, D. and R. Handler (eds.) 2014. Vehicles: cars, canoes, and other metaphors of

moral imagination. Oxford: Berghahn.

Marcus, G. E. 1995. ‘Ethnography in/of the world system: the emergence of multi-sited

ethnography’,Annual Review of Anthropology 24: 95–117.

Sheller, M. and J. Urry 2006. ‘The new mobilities paradigm’,Environment and

Planning A 38: 207–26.

Urry, J. 2000. ‘Mobile sociology’,The British Journal of Sociology 51: 185–203.

Vannini, P. 2010. ‘Mobile cultures: from the sociology of transportation to the study of

mobilities’,Sociology Compass 4: 111–21.

MARK MAGUIRE

Global and EU security

When I look at social anthropology today, from the perspective of my own

research on security, I see extraordinary potential. I see the intellectual richness of

anthropology informing scholarship and activism, and I see the methodological and

ethical challenges that we need to face in order to realise this potential. The ‘bleeding

edge’topic of security brings a lot into sharp focus. Today, security discourses and

practices abound, provoking French philosopher Frédéric Gros to proclaim ours as

the age of security. Indeed, the modern formulation of security long since slipped its

moorings in international relations and travelled to previously foreign parts, colonising

policing, counter-terrorism and border control. Today, security apparatuses traverse

nation-states, disrupting the institutional division of labour, absorbing scarce public

resources, and all too often intruding violently into daily life. Alongside global

spending on weapons and wars, the amorphous homeland security market will be

worth approximately half a trillion Euros by 2020. Unsurprisingly, anthropological

research shows that security is often the cause of insecurity.

FORUM 25

Recently, a special issue of Cultural Anthropology illustrated the expansiveness of

security with contributions on nuclear affect, migration control, humanitarian governance,

environmental and bio-security threats. Concepts developed by US-based anthropologists,

like ‘securityscapes’and ‘vital systems’,growinpopularity,butmostprojectsarestilldiscon-

nected from one another. This isn’tnecessarilyasignofdisciplinaryweakness.Rather,an-

thropologists avoid the temptation that Frederic Jameson labels ‘premature clariﬁcation’.

Our dispersed efforts track the uneven (in)securitisation of asymmetrical landscapes already

replete with dense conﬁgurations of space, power and knowledge. To paraphrase Didier

Bigo –the close student of Michel Foucault who coined the processual term (in)securitisation

–respect for contexts and details are the hallmarks of anthropology, but this concentration

may marginalise us in international debates. That said, margins can be very productive places.

European anthropologists now inform the critical anthropology of security from

backgrounds in peace and conﬂict studies, migration research and urban ethnography.

Critical insights will be derived from attention to experience, context and ethnographic

detail. But we are also well placed to push beyond our frontiers. Anthropological

research has much to say to the Copenhagen and Paris security studies schools and

to surveillance studies scholars. Moreover, colonial histories, past conﬂicts and con-

temporary crises mean that the European security sector has signiﬁcantly less swagger

than its overseas counterparts. Interesting access routes and alternative discourses

present themselves, but methodological and ethical challenges abound. Can anthropol-

ogy offer more than that which is available in strategically situated ethnographies?

Forthcoming scholarship will doubtless attend to securityspacesandscales;itwilltrack

ideas, expertise or techno-science across distinct domains; and it should include research

programmes on themes such as security futures, evidence or the lack thereof. However,

we must once and for all cease to negatively contrast ethnographic knowledge (the really

real) with those more experimental (though nonetheless ethnographic) studies of dispersed

apparatuses, analytics and new assemblages. Social anthropology will need to go beyond

thick descriptions of lived experiences to explore expertise, analytics and styles of reasoning

that are characterised by dispersal and a disturbing thinness. Anthropology must continue

to tell context-rich stories for sure, but we also need new and critical conceptual work. We

should also expect to be circumstantial activists. To study the EU’shigh-techbordersor

multimodal biometrics in India or the Middle East means attending to the targeting of hu-

man life itself, to the countless lives wasted and to the lives lost in the name of security.

Mark Maguire

Department of Anthropology

National University of Ireland Maynooth

Co. Kildare, Ireland

mark.h.maguire@nuim.ie

HELENA WULFF

In favour of ﬂexible forms: multi-sited ﬁeldwork

Stockholm anthropology took an early interest in globalisation, and we soon

realised that this research perspective, more often than not, requires mobile and

multi-sited methods (Hannerz 2001). The traditional single-sited ﬁeldwork simply

26 RETHINKING EURO-ANTHROPOLOGY

did not sufﬁce to do justice to an increasing number of networks and institutions that

reached across more than one site locally, regionally and globally. In order to keep

capturing contemporary life, anthropology consequently had to extend its ﬁeldwork

repertory. Just like in single-site ﬁeldwork, it is the ﬁeldworker who selects the partic-

ular set of sites in multi-sited ﬁeldwork, and has to make the argument for this choice.

Famously coined by George Marcus (1986) in Writing culture, the concept

‘multi-sited ethnography’can thus be said to originate in US anthropology, but was

also quite extensively developed further in European anthropology (cf. Hannerz

2003; Falzon 2009; Coleman and von Hellerman 2011, among others).

Not everyone approved of the idea of working multi-sitedly, however. In Britain,

an especially ﬁerce critical stance sprung up against the writing culture agenda in

general and multi-sited ethnography in particular. This has mellowed in the younger

generations of anthropologists now employed at British universities. The critique

concerned time and depth in the ﬁeld. The assumption was that with more than one

ﬁeld site, there would not be enough time and thus a lack of substance. How time is

divided between different ﬁeld sites obviously varies. I have conducted three major

multi-sited ﬁeld studies: ﬁrst, on the transnational world of ballet; second, on dance

and social memory in Ireland; and third, on the social world of Irish contemporary

ﬁction writers. For each one of them, I have spent altogether more than the traditional

one-year-in-the-ﬁeld. One recurring experience has been that it was not until I arrived

in a new ﬁeld site that I learned about certain circumstances in the one I just left.

The ﬁeld studies in Ireland have been divided up in many frequent trips, going back and

forth, in the form of yo-yo fieldwork (Wulff 2007), which actually seems to be the way

many of us work in relatively nearby ﬁelds nowadays. As to the study of writers in Ireland,

key events happened infrequently, and watching people while they write all day does not

make sense. This means that a year’sstaywouldhaveleftmewithalotofemptysparetime.

Dublin has been the main site, but I have been going to a number of other places on the

island where literary events have taken place.Ihavethusdoneparticipantobservationat

writers’festivals, readings, book launches, prize ceremonies and creative writing workshops

(taught by the writers, also in schools and at university). This has been what Sherry Ortner

identiﬁes as interface ethnography,when‘most relatively closed communities have events

where they interact with the public’(2013: 26). Yet I am pleased to report that as part of

participant observation, there were many opportunities for informal conversation and activ-

ities with writers, not least at a writer’sretreat.Likeinanyﬁeldwork I have been closer to

some interlocutors than others, even been able to form friendships. As to the literary texts, I

conceptualise them as artefacts for social analysis (cf. Riles 2006; Wulff forthcoming).

I end on a caveat: Having done single-sited ﬁeldwork for my PhD on youth cul-

ture and ethnicity in an inner city area of South London in the 1980s, before I set

out on this series of multi-sited studies, I was familiar with the different phases of ﬁeld-

work, such as the time it takes to build trust (Wulff 1988). This was clearly of great ben-

eﬁt in my multi-sited ﬁeld studies. So the question remains: is one year in a single site

still the best way to learn the craft of ﬁeldwork?

Helena Wulff

Department of Social Anthropology

Stockholm University, 106 91 Stockholm

Sweden

helena.wulff@socant.su.se

FORUM 27

References

Coleman, S. and P. von Hellermann (eds.) 2011. Multi-sited ethnography: problems and

possibilities in the translocation of research methods. London: Routledge.

Falzon, M.-A. (ed.) 2009. Multi-sited ethnography: theory, praxis and locality in

contemporary research. Farnham: Ashgate.

Hannerz, U. (ed.) 2001. Flera Fält i Ett: Socialantropologer om Translokala Fältstudier.

Stockholm: Carlssons.

Hannerz, U. 2003. ‘Being there…and there…and there! Reﬂections on multi-site

ethnography’,Ethnography 4: 229–44.

Marcus, G. E. 1986. Contemporary problems of ethnography in the modern world

system, in J. Clifford and G. E. Marcus (eds.), Writing culture: the poetics and

politics of ethnography, 156–93.Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Ortner, S. B. 2013. Not Hollywood: independent film at the twilight of the American

dream. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Riles, A. (ed.) 2006. Documents: artifacts of modern knowledge. Ann Arbor, MI:

University of Michigan Press.

Q4Wulff, H. 1988.

Wulff, H. 2007. Dancing at the crossroads: memory and mobility in Ireland. Oxford:

Berghahn.

Wulff, H. (ed.) forthcoming. The anthropologist as writer: genres and contexts in the

twenty-first century. Oxford: Berghahn.

VALERIA SINISCALCHI

The anthropology of European economic spaces

Reﬂecting on economic anthropology in Europe pushes us to think about the place

that Western European economies have had in the history of the anthropological

discipline, considered either as a model from which to break away or as a source of

general laws of human behaviour (Siniscalchi 2012: 553).

But it also implies examining

the political and intellectual dynamics that are at the core of each attempt to deﬁne an

ethnographic or academic ‘European’entity, which is anyway always artiﬁcial. The

‘anthropology of the Mediterranean’characterises the 1960s period. Studies inside this

framework are probably the most ‘European’approaches on Europe: also if scholars

do not come all from Europe, the most part of them were trained in British social

anthropology. The framework of reference was Braudel’s work (1949) that saw the

Mediterranean as a space of exchange, trade and inﬂuences, in the long term. But the

ﬁeldwork was above all located in southern Europe (Spain, Portugal, France, Italy

and Greece; Davis 1977). The study of economies was important and permeated some

common themes –peasantry, property, the opposition between town and country,

social stratiﬁcation and patronage, honour and gender –also if there was no single

theoretical approach from the point of view of economic analysis. This ‘nearby’South

had the function of ‘exotic Other’, often represented as rural, underdeveloped, and not

linked to larger political and economic contexts (Boissevain 1975; Herzfeld 1987).

4 I have analysed more widely the landscape of economic anthropology on Europe in another text

(Siniscalchi 2012), which this current commentary refers to.

28 RETHINKING EURO-ANTHROPOLOGY

In the seventies, Wallerstein’s work (1974) became a reference for research on

economic phenomena, in the framework of ‘political economy’, and long-term history

was a fundamental tool of analysis of social, political and economic conﬁgurations. The

Mediterranean perspective lost its heuristic capacity and attention shifted more and

more to Europe. And the exotic South became the periphery or semi-periphery in

the ‘world system’perspective. Bourdieu and Foucault’s works had a strong inﬂuence

on economic anthropology, especially their attention to power and power relations. In

the nineties, research started to consider institutions, bureaucracy and relations with

the State as well as industrialisation and trade (Goddard et al. 1994). The dimensions

of practice, agency and power were present in different studies dealing with these topics

and with the distribution of public goods and services, above all in the perspective of

political anthropology (more than economic anthropology). At the same time, the ﬁeld

of economic anthropology in Europe appeared exceptionally fragmented (Siniscalchi

2002; Hart 2006; Hart and Hann 2011) with studies on corruption, legality and

illegality, post-socialist economies, crossing works on typical products and markets,

informal work, gender and industrial contexts.

My own ﬁeldwork projects, between Italy and France, have intersected these

ﬁelds, inﬂuenced in part by the works of the anthropology of the Mediterranean, in

part by studies of political economy, with a strong attention to power and the

dimensions of agency. Working on agricultural contexts, then on industrial districts

and ﬁnally on food activism, the focus of my research has been economic negotia-

tions, regulations and the ways of constructing economic spaces in the interstices of

Europe. Adopting the notion of ‘economic space’(Wallerstein 1981) as a soft

notion allows us to think about the economic transformations through different

ethnographic contexts.

Considering and analysing changes in the contemporary world is both a challenge

and a necessity for an anthropology of economic spaces. Centres and peripheries are

moving constantly and the creation of new forms of inequality must be studied as well

as the new power relations. This obliges anthropologists to pay attention to the links

between economy and politics, to the changing forms of work, the regimes of values

and to the new regulations concerning production, exchange and consumption. If

fragmentation still characterises the European approaches to economy today, in the last

ﬁfteen years, bridges between some central topics became more explicit from an

ethnographic and economic anthropology point of view. In this perspective, the study

of ‘food activism’–as different forms of mobilisation of producers and consumers

around the food system and food equality (Counihan and Siniscalchi 2014) –appears

more and more linked to the analysis of struggles in industrial contexts, particularly

in European contexts. In both cases, people try to rethink the forms of economic

exchange or property regulations, to modify the actual system of production, distribu-

tion and consumption, and to imagine alternatives to the capitalist economy. At the

same time, we need to look beyond the intellectual and political borders of Europe

and examine the connections and networks that link it to other parts of the world.

Valeria Siniscalchi

Centre Norbert Elias

Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales

13002 Marseilles, France

Valeria.Siniscalchi@ehess.fr

FORUM 29

References

Boissevain, J. 1975. Introduction: towards a social anthropology of Europe, in J.

Boissevain and J. Friedl (eds.), Beyond the community: social process in Europe.

La Haye: Department of Educational Science of the Netherlands.

Braudel, F. 1949. La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II.

Paris: Armand Colin.

Counihan, C. and V. Siniscalchi (eds.) 2014. Food activism: agency, democracy and

economy. London: Bloomsbury.

Davis, J. 1977. People of the Mediterranean.An essay in comparative social anthropol-

ogy. London: Routledge.

Goddard, V. A., J. R. Llobera and C. Shore (eds.) 1994. The anthropology of Europe.

Identities and boundaries in conflict. Oxford: Berg.

Q5Hann, C. and K. Hart 2011. Economic anthropology. History, ethnography, critique.

Cambridge: Polity Press.

Q6Hart, K. 2007. A short history of economic anthropology (http://thememorybank.co.

uk/2007/11/09/a-short-history-of-economic-anthropology/).

Herzfeld, M. 1987. Anthropology through the looking glass: critical ethnography in the

margin of Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Siniscalchi, V. (ed.) 2002. Frammenti di economie. Ricerche di antropologia economica

in Italia. Cosenza: Luigi Pellegrini Editore.

Siniscalchi, V. 2012. Towards an economic anthropology of Europe, in J. Carrier (ed.),

Handbook of economic anthropology, 2nd edn, 553–67. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.

Wallerstein, I. 1974. The modern world-system: capitalist agriculture and the origins of

the European world-economy in the sixteenth century. New York: Academic Press.

Wallerstein, I. 1981. Spazio economico. In Enciclopedia Einaudi, vol. XIII, 304–13.

Torino: Einaudi.

HANA CERVINKOVA

Trends in East/Central European anthropologies

I see optimistic trends in the anthropologies in/of East Central Europe (ECE),

which seem to be ﬁnally emerging from the post-Cold War shadows. In the ﬁrst two

decades after 1989, much anthropological discussion, both that which took place

among indigenous anthropologists and that between them and their Western

colleagues, evolved around different sets of dichotomies related to the politics of

anthropological knowledge production. The local debate, for example, focused on

the division between ‘traditional’ethnologists and ‘modern’cultural anthropologists

(Buchowski and Cervinkova 2015). The discussions between indigenous and Western

anthropologists, on the other hand, centred around the term ‘post-socialism’, which

served as a deﬁning concept through which East Central Europe was initially studied

by Western scholars and which became absorbed by indigenous scholarship through

the complex workings of the processes of cultural and academic hegemony following

the political, military, economic and ideological defeat of the communist regimes in

the former Soviet Bloc (Cervinkova 2012).

Gradually, a debate emerged, in which some of the leading ECE anthropologists

critiqued the dominance of concepts developed in Western academia over those that

30 RETHINKING EURO-ANTHROPOLOGY

emerged out of local anthropological and ethnological traditions (Buchowski 2004;

Kűrti and Skalník 2009). The struggle on the part of local scholars was essentially to

reposition East Central European ethnologies and anthropologies from playing the

roles of sources of data and ﬁeld research locations to more inﬂuential players in the

ﬁeld of knowledge production. Today, we can observe a new wave of anthropological

writing coming out of Eastern and Central Europe, one that no longer refers to these

dichotomies. This new trend is visible especially when we look at some of the original

ethnographies rich in content and theoretical conceptualisation produced by ECE

anthropologists who do not seem to feel the need to deﬁne their position along Post-

Cold War lines (Kościańska 2014; Main 2015; Mikus 2015; Pawlak 2015).

Another trend, which I ﬁnd particularly inspiring, is the developing tradition of

scholarship that explicitly grapples with issues of anthropological engagement and

anthropology’s public futures (Baer 2014; Rakowski 2015). It seems to me that it would

be useful to see these trends in ECE anthropology as a part of larger efforts in world

anthropologies to overcome the problems that stem from the mismatch between our

traditional methods and demands of conducting research relevant to global futures

(Fortun 2012; Appadurai 2001; Eriksen 2005). By positioning themselves inside world

anthropology debates, these ‘new ECE anthropologists’are part of the much-needed

process of anthropology’s de-parochialisation.

Hana Cervinkova

Section of Educational Anthropology and Cultural Studies

University of Lower Silesia, Wroclaw

Poland

hana.cervinkova@dsw.edu.pl

References

Appadurai, A. 2001. Grassroots globalization and the research imagination, in A.

Appadurai (ed.), Globalization,1–21. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Baer, M. 2014. Między naukąa aktywizmem: o polityczności, płci i antropologii.

Wrocław: WydziałNauk Historycznych i Pedagogicznych Uniwersytetu

Wrocławskiego.

Buchowski, M. 2004. ‘Hierarchies of knowledge in Central-Eastern European

anthropology’,The Anthropology of East Europe Review 22: 5–14.

Buchowski, M. and H. Cervinkova forthcoming 2015. On rethinking ethnography in

Central Europe: towards cosmopolitan anthropologies in the ‘peripheries’, in H.

Cervinkova, M. Buchowski and Z. Uherek (eds.), Rethinking ethnography in

Central Europe. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Cervinkova, H. 2012. ‘Postcolonialism, postsocialism and the anthropology of

East-Central Europe’,Journal of Postcolonial Writing 48: 157–65.

Eriksen, T. H. 2005. Engaging anthropology: the case for a public presence. Oxford:

Berg.

Fortun, K. 2012. ‘Ethnography of late industrialism’,Cultural Anthropology 27:

446–64.

Kościańska, A. 2014. ‘“The ordinary recklessness of girls…”: expert witnesses and the

problem of rape in Poland’,Zeszyty Etnologii Wrocławskiej 20: 99-112.

Kűrti, L. and P. Skalník (eds.) 2009. Postsocialist Europe: anthropological perspectives

from home. Oxford: Berghahn Books.

FORUM 31

Main, I. forthcoming 2015. Reproductive experiences of Polish migrant women in

Berlin, in H. Cervinkova, M. Buchowski and Z. Uherek (eds.), Rethinking

ethnography in Central Europe. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Mikus, M. forthcoming 2015. Civil society and EU integration of Serbia: towards a

historical anthropology of globalizing postsocialist Europe, in H. Cervinkova,

M. Buchowski and Z. Uherek (eds.), Rethinking ethnography in Central Europe.

London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Pawlak, M. forthcoming 2015. Othering the self. National identity and social class in

mobile lives, in H. Cervinkova, M. Buchowski and Z. Uherek (eds.), Rethinking

ethnography in Central Europe. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Rakowski, T. forthcoming 2015. Performances, collaborations, complicities. Art

experiments in rural Poland as ethnographic practice, in T. Sanchez-Criado and

A. Estalella (eds.), Experimental collaborations. Ethnography through fieldwork

devices. Oxford: Berghahn Books.

PAOLO FAVERO

The image in a digital landscape

In many parts of the world digital images are today truly ubiquitous. They ﬁlter

social actors’experiences of self and community, their memories and loves, their

everyday life battles and ways of relating to space. Anthropology and the social

sciences at large are indeed increasingly reacting to this phenomenon and the boost

of programmes in visual and digital cultures (at times in a combination) is an evident

sign of this. Today, we are well beyond the point of looking at images (or at the visual

in general) as a form of ‘thin description’, as Hastrup provocatively suggested in 1992.

However, we should not take the meaning of the present ‘visual hypertrophy’(Taylor

1994) for granted either. Rather we should use it as a ‘clue’for better understanding the

assumptions that inform our engagement with images. What do images mean and do in

a digital landscape? And what challenges do they pose to anthropologists and

ethnographers?

In order to answer such questions I ﬁrst need to take a step back and offer some

reﬂections on the conventional assumptions that have characterised our understanding

of this ﬁeld. To begin with I suggest that we must abandon old-fashioned notions of

the digital as the negation of a truer, ‘realer’experience of the world, as a detachment

from everyday life. This is the assumption that informed Nichols’sentence ‘the chip

is pure surface, pure simulation of thought […]without history, without depth,

without aura, affect, or feeling’(Q72000: 104). Instead, digital images (and the digital at

large) seem to increasingly anchor their producers and users in the socialness and

materiality of everyday life. This can be detected in the progressive shift of attention

to the mundane and the nearby that can be observed in mobile-phone photography

and that is exempliﬁed by the invasion of photos of mugs, pets on the couch and

half-eaten plates on platforms such as Instagram and Flickr (see Murray 2008). Or it

can be found in avant-garde practices such as interactive documentaries where users

are consistently urged to engage with what happens beyond the screen, hence closing

the gap between life ‘off-line’and ‘on-line’(see Favero 2013). These practices help

social actors in connecting different locations with each other turning, through the

32 RETHINKING EURO-ANTHROPOLOGY

shared used of digital images, scattered individuals into a potential community. Digital

images can therefore be looked upon as generators of new social relations and new

forms of participation in the material, physical and social exigencies of everyday life

rather than a move away from it.

This anchorage in material reality can also be addressed from a different angle. 3D

printers are today top-selling items both in the consumer market as well as among scientists.

Translating an abstract idea into a material object with thehelp of a (stereolytographic) image,

these devices invert the principle of virtualisation that has characterised much of our under-

standing of digital technologies. Rather than reducing a thing to a (virtual) ﬁle, here the digital

helps materialising the virtual. A parallel process is observable also in the ﬁeld of new camera

technologies. Following the broader trends that are sanctioned by ﬁtness bands, smart clothes

and watches, cameras too are today becoming increasingly wearable. Life-logging and action

cameras, for instance, foreground the act of image-making as a matter of embodiment. Made

up of a combination of lightweight materials, high-quality sensors, processors and stabilisers,

these cameras are to be worn by the user, positioning the body as the viewﬁnder through

which images are generated. These technologiesforceustoovercomeconventionalnotions

of intentionality and framing in image-making.Buttheyalsomarkashift,importantly,away

from narrow deﬁnitions of the visual ﬁeld. This insight can be strengthened by observing the

extent to which a large part of the information that we get from images today depends upon

metadata (images are increasingly consumed through timelines and maps).

The meaning of images in a digital landscape is hence increasingly generated at the

intersection of visual, digital and material culture. This requires from the scholar a

capacity to overcome conventional assumptions and to generate a new set of theoretical

dialogues. A new notion of ‘imageness’(Ranciere 2008) capable also of bridging the

present, the past and the future, is needed today.

These shifts also pose, however, new political and ethical challenges. Today’s

anthropologists cannot but engage with digital/visual technologies as topics of research

and as tools for conducting ethnographic research and for communicating research

results. Yet, they must also be wary of not falling into easy-at-hand celebrations of ‘dig-

ital utopia’(Rosen 2001: 318). Contemporary digital technologies (visual or not) aim to-

day at closing a circuit of information between the users (with their bodies, habits,

networks and spaces) and the producers of the technology. Nicely summed up by no-

tions of immersivity and symbolised by products such Apple’s watch, these practices

constitutes indeed a new Panopticon whose functioning we are urged to examine.

Paolo Favero

Department of Communication Studies

University of Antwerp

2000 Antwerpen

Belgium

paolo.favero@uantwerpen.be

References

Favero, P. 2013. ‘Getting our hands dirty (again): interactive documentaries and the

meaning of images in the digital age’,Journal of Material Culture 18: 259–77.

Hastrup, K. 1992. Anthropological visions: some notes on visual and textual authority,

in P. I. Crawford and D. Turton (eds.), Film as ethnography,8–25. Manchester:

Manchester University Press.

FORUM 33

Murray, S. 2008. ‘Digital images, photo-sharing, and our shifting notions of everyday

aesthetics’,Journal of Visual Culture 7: 147–63.

Nichols, B. 2001. Introduction to documentary. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University

Press.

Ranciere, J. 2008. The future of the image. London: Verso.

Rosen, P. 2001. Change mummified: cinema historicity, theory. Minneapolis, MN: Uni-

versity of Minnesota Press.

Taylor, L. 1994. Visualizing theory. London: Routledge.

EDVARD HVIDING

European anthropology in the contemporary Paciﬁc

Are anthropologists in Europe differently positioned than their colleagues in other

world regions in terms of analysing and contributing to the improved understanding of

current global challenges? There is widespread current concern in Europe, North

America and Australia about the future of anthropology as a university discipline

and as a prominent perspective in public debate. Anthropology departments are

merged into larger units, and our qualitative methods appear no longer to be distinc-

tively our own. In the public domain our dominant tenets of relativism and locally

grounded ethnographic detail may be deemed politically naïve and parochial, seem-

ingly without bearings for a world in crisis in terms of ﬁnance, poverty, climate,

ecology, demography and more.

I wish to argue against such pessimism. The global reach of anthropology’s

comparative perspective –in which anything, anywhere, is relevant for understanding

anything else, anywhere else –is more signiﬁcant than ever. To state this argument in

some detail, I draw on my own current engagements in crosscurrents between main-

stream anthropology and policy-making, and present some thoughts about the

contributions of anthropology to pressing challenges of our time, in particular that of

climate change. My examples are from the vantage point of the Paciﬁc Islands, a famous

region in and for the early rise of anthropology, but lately falling somewhat out of

fashion. Global climate change and its escalating effects promise to reverse this failing

attention to the Paciﬁc. The inhabitants across the imperial-ethnological ‘regions’of

Melanesia, Polynesia and Micronesia are in fact now experiencing, more than any other

part of the world, the impacts of sea-level rise, extreme weather, ocean acidiﬁcation and

other effects of global warming. Concurrently, Paciﬁc Islanders have increasingly been

deﬁning themselves as a diverse, interconnected indigenous collective of people living

across the great region of Oceania –a‘sea of islands’in the apt words of distinguished

Tongan anthropologist, the late Epeli Hau’ofa ( Q81993).

Inter-island mobility and far-ranging social and political relationships, across

languages, cultures and archipelagos, are of course emblematic of Oceania’s

cultural history, and have continued to be generative of indigenous models for

encountering and relating to worlds beyond, from early imperialism to present

globalisation (e.g. Sahlins 1993). In line with this, the once-classical ethnographic

region of Oceania, from which anthropological theory and method grew, today

has a presence in the global debates of climate change totally disproportionate to

the region’s modest population and small states. Powerful individuals like Kiribati

34 RETHINKING EURO-ANTHROPOLOGY

president Anote Tong and Marshall Islands minister of foreign affairs Tony

DeBrum continue to make media headlines, and their impassioned speeches aim

to install in the wider world, particularly its Western varieties, an impression of

gross injustice suffered by the innocent.

The Paciﬁc contributes the least to global warming, but is set to suffer the

most from its consequences. The moral imperative thus commanded on a global

level by representatives of the Paciﬁc Islands is strongly informed by the deploy-

ment of deep cultural imagery, often relating to the ocean and maritime travel, and

in this ﬁeld there is a particularly dense relationship between cultural heritage and

political innovation (Hviding and Rio 2011). In my own daily work as coordinator

of the European Consortium for Paciﬁc Studies (ECOPAS), an EU-funded

European-Paciﬁc network of research centres tasked with providing research-based

knowledge to inform the European Union’s cooperation with Paciﬁc Islands

nations (Borrevik et al. 2014; www.ecopas.info), I experience how a European

perspective of engaged anthropology, in direct dialogue with Paciﬁc colleagues

and grassroots activists, allows us to think differently on the current issues facing

the Paciﬁc than if we were to work in, say, an Australian university, where so

much more strategy and funding of research are tied to immediate Australian

foreign policy priorities.

At the time of writing, those priorities are actually given by a government

noted for ruthless cuts in university funding, as well as denial of anthropogenic cli-

mate change. While the European Union’s Paciﬁc interests are not entirely idealis-

tic but informed by the geopolitics of alliance with small but numerous Paciﬁc

island nations, EU priorities do locate climate change centre stage. The problem

of distance –whereby European anthropologists working in the Paciﬁc are institu-

tionally remote from the ‘ﬁeld’–becomes more of a privilege, then, whereby

Paciﬁc Studies European style can be developed as an anthropologically based

and ethnographically grounded research agenda rather free from interventionist-

styled political agendas of the major powers of the PaciﬁcRim.Thatanengaged

anthropology focused on geographically distant and post-colonially remote parts

of the world like Oceania can still be sustained to some degree in Europe, and that

it can be represented by major centres of Paciﬁc research from which the European

Commission seeks knowledge, suggests that sustaining a globally comparative

research record has the promise of addressing any emerging world challenge.

Building ethnographically based case studies from the very frontline of climate

change (e.g. Rudiak-Gould 2013) cannot be anything else but relevant and

pertinent, way beyond the inner circles of anthropology. In a time of global crisis,

our discipline may, along these lines, hope to avoid internal crisis, instead attaining

a state of ‘usefulness’without breaking with the enduring criteria of good anthro-

pological practice. No discipline can, like ours, work in, with and for the people of

the entire world. It is urgent that we do so.

Edvard Hviding

Department of Social Anthropology

University of Bergen

5020 Bergen

Norway

Edvard.Hviding@uib.no

FORUM 35

References

Borrevik, C., T. Crook, E. Hviding and C. Lind 2014. European Union development

strategy in the Pacific. Brussels: European Parliament/Directorate-General for the

External Policies of the Union. A Study Commissioned from ECOPAS.

Hau’ofa, E. 1994. ‘Our sea of islands’,The Contemporary Pacific 6: 148–61.

Hviding, E and K. M. Rio (eds.) 2011. Made in Oceania: social movements, cultural

heritage and the state in the Pacific. Wantage: Sean Kingston Publishing.

Rudiak-Gould, P. 2013. Climate change and tradition in a small island state: the rising

tide. London: Routledge.

Sahlins, M. 1993. ‘Goodbye to tristes tropes: ethnography in the context of modern

world history’,Journal of Modern History 65: 1–25.

36 RETHINKING EURO-ANTHROPOLOGY

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Introduction: Disciplinary cartographies and connectors

Article

Dec 2019

Francisco Martínez

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.

What is European about European anthropology?

Article

Dec 2019

Thomas Hylland Eriksen

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.

A “Stranger” Researching Narratives in Southern Slovakia: Hungarian Minority Research by an Anthropologist Who Is Not “At Home”

Article

Full-text available

Dec 2017

Yuko Kambara

This paper considers methodological questions regarding cultural/social anthropological research in multiethnic fields. Specifically, I attempt to reconsider the possibility of anthropological research by a “stranger” based on a research that I—a Japanese anthropologist—conducted in southern Slovakia. Anthropology originally developed as the study of other cultures; in some European countries, however, most anthropological research is conducted by anthropologists who are “at home”. For Slovak and Hungarian researchers, the Hungarian minority has been a common research target; therefore, many inhabitants, both ethnic Hungarians and Slovaks, have already experienced social research as subjects. Some interviewees get use to present a narrative expressing how they think about a certain topic. This research condition points to a fundamental question in the interviews of anthropological research. In this paper, therefore, my research experience is described to analyze reflexively my research position in the field. In fact, it is difficult to theoretically define the boundary between “at home” and “stranger”; the difference depends on the context of each study. Anthropologists need to interpret their narratives by considering the results of participant observation and reflexivity in the research. “Stranger” anthropologists might have the advantage of noticing informants’ reflexivity in their narratives. This discussion can, in turn, become part of an ongoing process by which inhabitants’ interactions with researchers create new master narratives in the field.

The Matthew Effect and Symbolic Capital in Anthropology and Beyond

Article

Jan 2022

Michał Buchowski

Images of north-east Asia in expeditional and author's photo projects: strategies for visualization of research objects in the II half of the 19 th - the beginning of the 20 th century

Article

Full-text available

Jan 2022

L.B. Stepanova

Yakutia is a region, where 40% of territories are located in the Arctic zone; it belongs to a geographic zone with extreme natural and climatic conditions, where traditional types of farming continue to prevail. Today, the modern processes in the field of ethnic selfidentification and revival take place in it considering its geopolitical significance, as well as the study of their historical past, and are of particular relevance, where not the last role is played by visual and anthropological resources that are currently preserved in institutions of historical memory (museums, libraries, archives). The visual image becomes a key unified means of influence. Using the example of the Yakutsk region, the article examines the aspect of the visual development of the north-eastern territories of the Russian Empire as a form of scientific knowledge developed by Russian academic science in the process of their study. The systematic use of artistic practices (pictorial recording, photography) in the scientific and methodological tools of the research carried out subsequently had a great practical result, and had formed an impressive layer of visual anthropological materials. The paper examines the main visual images representing a multi-ethnic region.

Problematising Boundaries and ‘Hierarchies of Knowledge’ within European Anthropologies

Article

Full-text available

Sep 2020

Alessandro Testa

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.

Between Boundary-Work and Cosmopolitan Aspirations: A Historical Genealogy of EASA (and European Anthropology)

Article

Full-text available

Sep 2020

Damián Omar Martínez

This article presents a historical genealogy of EASA and European anthropology. Performing a heuristic exercise of ethnographic 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

Article

Full-text available

Nov 2020

Alessandro Testa

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 methodologi-cal impasses. It also represents the prolegomena to a longer and more substantial critique, which will be published later.

Welcoming sound: the case of a noise complaint in the weekly assembly of el Campo de Cebada

Article

Full-text available

Apr 2018

Jorge Martín Sainz de los Terreros

This article deals with the relationship between a sonic entanglement and its ruling in a weekly assembly. In doing so, material participation is foregrounded through focus on this specific entanglement and the ways in which it is enacted within the context of a weekly assembly of a citizen-led project. Based on ethnographic work developed in el Campo de Cebada – a temporary use open-air urban site – I describe the case of a noise complaint, and how relationships around it are deployed in multiple directions. Different heterogeneous actors play specific roles in the development of a controversy, and the assembly of the project in question deals with them in order to govern them. The paper is organised around three moments: (1) the emergence and formation of a sonic entanglement; (2) the bestowing of legitimacy on the weekly assembly to deal with a controversy lacking legal standing; and (3) the process of ruling that sonic entanglement by the legitimised assembly. In studying this case, I explore how activist projects are complex heterogeneous assemblages that are developed, governed, and ultimately benefit from the enactment of what I call the ‘politics of welcoming’. I argue that those politics of welcoming – against politics of confrontation – are based on the management of timing through several governance mechanisms that allow stretching, lengthening, delaying, shortening or slowing time. Among those mechanisms, but not limited to them, we find radical openness, under-definition, re-definition, subjective perception, interpretation, exception and postponement.

Automated futures and the mobile present: In-car video ethnographies

Article

Oct 2017

New technological possibilities associated with autonomous driving (AD) cars are generating new questions and imaginaries about automated futures. In this article we advance a theoretical-methodological approach towards researching this context based in design anthropological theory and sensory ethnographic practice. In doing so we explain and discuss the findings of an in-car video ethnography study designed to investigate the usually unspoken and not necessarily visible elements of car-based mobility. Such an approach is needed, we argue, both in order to inform a research agenda that is capable of addressing the emergence of automated vehicles specifically, as well as in preparation for understanding the implications of automation more generally as human mobility is increasingly entangled with automated technologies and the future imaginaries associated with them.

Civil Society and EU Integration of Serbia: Toward a Historical Anthropology of Globalizing Postsocialist Europe

Chapter

Full-text available

Sep 2015

Marek Mikuš

Few would dispute that the eastern enlargement of the European Union (EU) has significantly transformed much of “(East) Central Europe.”1 However, the scope of anthropological inquiry into this process did not correspond to its practical significance. Moreover, what work there is examines the region’s integration mostly through the prism of identity, focusing on issues such as dynamics and interplay of local, national, and European identities (e.g., Bitušíková 2002; Golanska-Ryan 2006; Horáková 2009; Obad 2010; Straczuk 2012; Vidmar Horvat 2012).2 This idealist scholarship tends to study integration solely in terms of nesting or crosscutting meanings of identification and belonging, treating these as if they existed in isolation from power relationships and systems of domination with which they are mutually constitutive. Such analyses also neglect politicoeconomic, institutional, and governmental forms and practices through which the integration process operates and which it engenders. We learn much about the semiotic histories of identities (for instance, socialist or imperial) and their transformations and role in the present context of an attempted European identity construction, but what seems inadequately addressed is the history of European integration itself—as a power-laden, evolving material and discursive practice with social causes and outcomes. Even if we focus on identity, this necessitates asking why certain forms of identification are invoked or promoted in a historical conjuncture, by whom, through what kinds of practices, for what purposes, and with what outcomes.

On rethinking Ethnography in Central Europe: Toward Cosmopolitan Anthropologies in the "Peripheries"

Chapter

Full-text available

Sep 2015

There have been many studies with “rethinking” in the title.1 Edmund Leach’s collection of essays probably comes first to mind as a book that influenced anthropological thinking in the Anglo-Saxon world and beyond. The authors of this volume do not have the ambition of changing the course of thought in anthropology and the individual chapter authors do not spend much time trying to “understand what is happening in social anthropology” and they do not “go right back to the beginning and rethink basic issues …” (Leach 1961: 1, original emphasis). Neither do any of them enter “the game of building new theories on the ruins of old ones” (Leach 1961: v). In a rather modest way, they present findings from their ethnographic fieldwork conceptualized through contemporary anthropological concepts, bringing ethnographic accounts from their research field and interpreting issues they find important for the understanding of societies and peoples they study. Rethinking Ethnography in Central Europe is is literally an account of ethnography in Central Europe, but contextualized through a particular historical perspective on anthropological studies on the region and in the region. This book represents the “tip of an iceberg” of a new wave of writings in Central European anthropological scholarship.

Not Hollywood: Independent Film at the Twilight of the American Dream

Book

Feb 2013

Sherry B. Ortner

Anthropological Practice: Fieldwork and the Ethnographic Method

Book

May 2020

Judith melita Okely

Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference - New Edition

Book

Dec 2008

Dipesh Chakrabarty

Anthropology of race: Genes, biology, and culture

Book

Jan 2013

John Hartigan

What do we know about race today? Is it surprising that after a hundred years of debate and inquiry by anthropologists, the answer not only remains uncertain but the very question is so fraught? In part, this reflects the deep investments modern societies have made in the notion of race. This volume arises out of the fracturing of that consensus and the attendant recognition that asserting constructionist stance is no longer a tenable or sufficient response to the surge of knowledge claims about race. © 2013 by the School for Advanced Research. All rights reserved.

Toppling typologies: Developmental plasticity and the environmental origins of human biological variation

Chapter

Jan 2013

Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century.

Article

Jun 1998

Prologue: In Medias Res TRAVELS Traveling Cultures A Ghost among Melanesians Spatial Practices: Fieldwork, Travel, and the Disciplining of Anthropology CONTACTS Four Northwest Coast Museums: Travel Reflections Paradise Museums as Contact Zones Palenque Log FUTURES Year of the Ram: Honolulu, February 2, 1991 Diasporas Immigrant Fort Ross Meditation Notes References Sources Acknowledgments Index

The anthropologist as writer: Genres and contexts in the twenty-first century

Book

Mar 2016

Helena Wulff

Writing is crucial to anthropology, but which genres are anthropologists expected to master in the 21st century? This book explores how anthropological writing shapes the intellectual content of the discipline and academic careers. First, chapters identify the different writing genres and contexts anthropologists actually engage with. Second, this book argues for the usefulness and necessity of taking seriously the idea of writing as a craft and of writing across and within genres in new ways. Although academic writing is an anthropologist's primary genre, they also write in many others, from drafting administrative texts and filing reports to composing ethnographically inspired journalism and fiction.

Othering the Self: National Identity and Social Class in Mobile Lives

Chapter

Sep 2015

Marek Pawlak

The intersections between national identity and social class play a pivotal role in constructing mobile lives, in particular, among migrants following Poland’s accession to the European Union (EU). Their identity strategies—embedded in the complex ideological interdependencies as well as the co-national relations and positioning within a group of migrants—create an interesting context for research and analysis. In this chapter, I focus on specific ways of othering the self and co-national s among Polish migrants living (mobile) lives between Poland and Norway. I argue that, in the migratory situation, the process of othering entails particular power relations and imaginaries grounded in the East–West divide, which in turn imply the idea of either a proper or embarrassing migratory lifestyle.