Paper Short Abstract:

This paper reflects on the ethical challenges anthropologists face when engaging with relational visions during ecological crises. In a meta-reflection, it questions the stakes we might have as we recount our interlocutors’ endeavours and what political and ethical positions might we claim.

Paper Abstract:

This paper explores the ethical and analytical challenges anthropologists face when engaging with relational visions during ecological crises. Drawing on 19 months of fieldwork with UK-based biodesigners—innovators developing biologically benign materials to reshape global systems of production, consumption, and waste—I explore how their systemic visions resonate with relational theories celebrated in anthropology. Yet, much like earlier globalization discourses (Tsing 2000), these visions also possess rhetorical charisma that risks obscuring hierarchies, frictions, and exclusions.

Through a meta-reflection, I interrogate my own impulse to align with and even replicate these relational claims in my ethnographic writing, particularly as my interlocutors often propose universalist solutions to crises originating in the global North and deploy top-down approaches in their designs.

Aligning with these visions forces me to confront a tension between my political and ethical commitments and anthropology’s traditional drive to critique power and valorise local diversity. Drawing on the concept of analytic non-neutrality, I argue for the acceptance of an “invested anthropology” that does not shy away from its political and ethical entanglements.

Ultimately, my advocacy is not for an activist anthropology (Graeber 2014), nor for morally grounded anthropology (Scheper-Hughes 1995), but perhaps for a more pragmatically minded and less pure anthropology when dealing with production in the Anthropocene. I argue for an invested anthropology in which taking personally the stakes of involvement might require tempering some of our discipline’s reflexive critique in favour of supporting action—any action—that could contribute to mitigating a global ecological disaster.