Paper short abstract:

Drawing upon my experiences as a scholar-activist, this presentation explores strategies by which anthropologists can grapple with both global and local socio-ecological crises both within and outside the university.

Paper long abstract:

In part this presentation draws upon my journey as a radical anthropologist inside and outside the university over the course of several decades teaching and acting as a scholar-activist. I entered the world of anthropology in 1970 around the time that anthropology was reinventing itself. I am a child of The Sixties who started to become radicalized, not within the bowels of the university, but the corporation while working as an aircraft engineer. I embarked upon a career in anthropology to comprehend the world around me and perhaps in some way to be part of a collective effort to improve it. While my career shift was an effort to escape the corporate world and find a locus for critical pedagogy and scholar-activism, in reality, while universities have always had ties with elite actors, under neoliberal or late capitalism they have become increasingly corporatized around the world, including Australia. This presentation explores strategies by which anthropologists can grapple with both global and local socio-ecological crises both within and outside the university. These include forming closer ties with kindred disciplines in HASS, making greater efforts to make macro-micro or global-local linkages in examining societies and institutions, becoming more involved in anti-systemic movements (including efforts to democratize and de-colonialize the university), and finding spaces outside the university where more critical praxis occurs than presently does so in the rarified ethos of the corporate university.

Paper short abstract:

This paper will discuss the recognition of the political potential of anthropology in Mongolia through the authors' experiences of the generative role that anthropological inquiry has had in shaping recent interdisciplinary research in Ulaanbaatar on mobility and social equity.

Paper long abstract:

The wide-ranging potential of ethnography to foreground detailed and varied lived experiences and anthropology's ability to draw out unique conceptual and theoretical reflections is a valued ethical and intellectual process in Mongolia, where anthropologists have been active in public life for some time. In a climate of a growing urban population in the capital Ulaanbaatar, unequal infrastructural access, a fluctuating economy and an ongoing distrust of politicians' motivations, state-led forms of data collection on economy, health, education and many other social spheres are often viewed by some Mongolians to be lacking or incomplete. Promised forms of economic growth that failed to materialise have left many disillusioned with market mechanisms or forms of economic modelling, giving rise to a wider public interest in the types of insights that a discipline like anthropology can offer that move beyond such confines. In the years following significant economic flux after 2013, anthropology has been seen as a vehicle to try and circumvent so-called 'gaps' in publicly available data, to find specific interventions that better reflect and grow out from emic-centric needs and wishes.

This paper will discuss this recognition of the potential of anthropology within Mongolia through the authors' experiences when publicly communicating ethnographic research on economy in Mongolia and through examining the generative role that anthropological inquiry has had in shaping recent interdisciplinary research in Ulaanbaatar on mobility and social equity.

Paper short abstract:

In the current paper we explore scenarios in which anthropology may move beyond its shackling to the institutions that continue to brutalise us, towards new possibilities to practice meaningfully, ethically and accessibly— both within and beyond the university.

Paper long abstract:

In 2020 Ryan Cecil Jobson made a stir with his article, ‘The Case for Letting Anthropology Burn’. Jobson chastises social anthropologists who ‘have grown comfortable with a language of crisis’ and eschew ‘decisive action in the face of matters of life and death’. Climate change is just one of numerous crises that have impacted the discipline in recent years. Anthropology, along with other HASS disciplines prone to critical analysis of hegemonic governance structures, continue to endure the relentless attacks of the neoliberal governments they critique. Anthropology departments around the world have been buffeted by internal discord in relation to their own normative power dynamics, including allegations and findings of exploitation, bullying as well as racial and gendered violence. The direct and radiated impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on anthropology departments constitutes a crisis that most of us are still experiencing. If Jobson was sincerely advocating for letting anthropology burn, then he may note with satisfaction that many departments are now fully ablaze. In the current paper we take this crisis as our point of departure and explore some of the scenarios in anthropology moves beyond its current state of perpetual crisis while defending the coherence and value of the discipline—from an institutional strategy of integrative complexity and interdisciplinary team-building and pedagogy to a wholesale retreat from the university, to organisations such as the AAS, EASA and AAA, new genres of disciplinary production, and other more emergent forms of anthropological practice in the “undercommons”.