Paper short abstract:

While anthropology excels in critically analyzing power-laden development and growth narratives, it is minimally engaged with activist agendas. This paper examines congruences, divergences, challenges and strategies for anthropological engagement of degrowth, wellbeing and decolonial alternatives.

Paper long abstract:

As the climate crises deepens and both socio-economic and development inequalities widen across the world, there is an urgent need to fundamentally change the way we engage with our planet, its fragile resources, one another, and all sentient beings. While anthropology excels in providing theoretically-grounded critical analysis of the interlinked crises through the deconstruction of power-laden development narratives, hegemonic neo-classical growth economics and neoliberal interventions and their effects, it sometimes struggles with activist agendas, with notable exceptions (Graeber, Hickel, for example). Degrowth, wellbeing and decolonial alternatives offer innovative pathways for imagining and reconstructing the world beyond capitalistic focus on endless unsustainable and inequitable growth. These alternatives are often grounded in indigenous cosmologies, such as Buen Vivir, Ubuntu or GNH-Buddhist perspectives that holistically conceptualize economic (and material culture) in equal weight with environmental, political and cultural-spiritual concerns. Though indigenous knowledge is a central concern for anthropologists, anthropological engagement with such alternatives has ironically been limited conceptually, and in terms of both critique and activism. This paper examines possible epistemological, institutional, cultural, political and other factors of disinclination, or solidarity, that impede and defer anthropological activist engagement, or critique of alternative movements and action. It overviews the congruences (subjects, approaches, methods) and divergences (theory, objectives, purpose) between anthropology and degrowth, wellbeing and decolonial alternatives. In the current crises, it is imperative that anthropology engages in constructive critical analysis, but also strategizes and actively participates in transdisciplinary alliances with other disciplines and alternative movements to repair, heal and rebuild our damaged planet.