Short Abstract:

In 2005 Don Kalb and Herman Tak published Critical Junctions: Anthropology and history beyond the cultural turn (Kalb and Tak Eds. 2005, Berghahn Books). The book was the first publication in anthropology using the methodological notion of critical junctions. How would this project look today?

Long Abstract:

"Critical Junctions: Anthropology and history beyond the cultural turn" (Kalb and Tak Eds. 2005, Berghahn Books) was the first publication in social anthropology that used the key terms of the ASA 2025 meeting. The book offered the methodological notion of critical junctions as an alternative to anthropology’s and history’s late 20th century interdisciplinary celebration of the cultural turn. Anchored in post-structuralism and ‘the End of History’, we rejected these new cross disciplinary fashions as an escapism from a lived material world of accelerating global capitalism and militarism. This is how we framed it in the early 2000s: “…the turning away from “the social” and the political, the relative neglect of praxis…the obsession with “meaning”…(this is) a form of analytic ‘deforestation’…”. The book discussed theoretical and methodological paths that had been broadly developed in the seminal conjunction of anthropology and history in the 1970s-80s but were then discarded. Like Eric Wolf, a key scholar in that conjunction, we pictured generative power as our key problematic, and explored dynamic, relational, and multi-scalar ways to capture its constitution, workings, suffocations, and uneven outcomes in space and time. This session, while commemorating that original project, will take the book into the debates, demands, and needs of the present. What would we say and do now if we were to write a book with a similar program? Where and how would we want to take it conceptually and methodologically if it were an intervention in the present?