Paper short abstract:

This paper considers the perpetuation of, and challenges towards, the intellectual illusion that people exist with incidental connection to the material world and explores the value of a discipline that draws people as materials into view. It asks: What is Anthropology for?

Paper long abstract:

If Anthropology was once the dubious, racist practice of ethnology, it certainly is not that any more. This paper asserts that Anthropology, rather than asking 'who are those 'others' over there?', should be attending to the future by asking not just 'who are we' but 'who do we (collectively) want to be?, together. In light of current planetary conditions, it appears apposite to dramatically reconsider what knowledge Anthropology wants to produce and where it wants to position itself as a discipline.

Most disciplines have been established by scholars schooled in perspectives that accept things exist in distinction from each other, and therefore, regardless of any material, physical or substantial challenges to this, continue to fashion the world into a place of separate entities, occupying and competing for space - with dramatic and destructive political and material consequences. This paper questions that perspective by demonstrating the material connections, associations and correspondences that bind people to each other and the rest of the material world.