Connections: New Spaces and New Networks; Concordia University,
Montreal, May 31 - June 3, 2010). For further information please
contact the panel organizer Mark K. Watson (Assistant Professor,
Concordia University, Montreal, Canada) at mwatson@alcor.concordia.ca
World Anthropologies: Tasks, Tensions, Futures
Since at least the 1990s the task of the World Anthropologies Network
has been to lay out foundational arguments for pluralizing and
diversifying what 'we' understand to be disciplinary knowledge. The
Network, as Ribeiro (2006) outlines, has consolidated three main
approaches: 1) to examine how knowledge - by which it is meant a
changing set of Western principles and practices - is transmitted and
received around the world; 2) to highlight, recognize and historicize
the plurality of anthropologies which operate in distinction from the
dominant mode of, so called, 'metropolitan hegemonies'; and 3) to
initiate new dialogues, conversations and activities between
anthropologists across inter/national, regional and disciplinary
boundaries in order to unravel and disempower the dominance of Western
anthropological discourse. Whilst the Network's concern for 'doing
anthropology otherwise' has antecedence in the Islamic Anthropology
movement of the 1970s and other historical events further back, I
propose this panel to contemplate the debate's relevance for the
forging or opening up of 'new spaces and new networks' today. What
does it really mean, for example, to do 'anthropology otherwise'? What
other questions are there to ask of the normalized approaches to
anthropology and models of epistemology that we, in the West,
reproduce in our work? What possibilities does the debate offer for
rethinking our basic assumptions of culture, society, knowledge and
life? What role do issues of power and rationality play in this
debate? Is this discussion just another or a more definitive re-
examination of anthropological practices? To what extent does it
promise long-lasting transformation? What does it mean, for example,
for the future of teaching anthropological theory and practice? How,
in other words, is the debate and the questions it asks to be applied?
Ribeiro, Gustavo Lins. 2006. World Anthropologies: Cosmopolitics for a
New Global Scenario in Anthropology. Critique of Anthropology 26(4):
363-386.
