Contribution short abstract:

This paper analyzes DGSKA congresses (2014-2024) revealing trends and exclusions in knowledge production. It argues that German academia's institutionalization of decolonial theory neutralizes its transformative potential, reproducing hierarchies. A shift toward anti-colonial praxis is proposed.

Contribution long abstract:

Academic congresses function as resonance forums that allow us to empirically analyze trends, legitimations and exclusions in the production of knowledge. In particular, the German Society for Social and Cultural Anthropology (DGSKA) represents a privileged space to examine how German academia has processed, incorporated, and transformed the decolonial perspective. The period 2014-2024 is particularly significant, since 2014 marks the turning point when decolonial academic production reaches its historical maximum in publications and citations, paradoxically initiating its process of institutionalization and consequent depotentialization.

This paper proposes a critical analysis of a decade of DGSKA congresses as devices that reveal the limits and contradictions of the institutional appropriation of decolonial theory. My central argument is that while these academic spaces rhetorically embrace decolonial discourse, they simultaneously neutralize its transformative potential through mechanisms of selection, translation, and legitimation that reproduce geopolitical hierarchies of knowledge.

First, a critical mapping of how the “decolonial turn” has been incorporated into DGSKA conference agendas, panels and presentations during this decade is presented, revealing patterns of selection and exclusion. It then examines the tensions and paradoxes that arise as academic institutions in the Global North attempt to “decolonize” without substantially changing their power structures. Finally, a turn towards an anti-colonial praxis is proposed. In order to transcend the prevailing institutionalization of critical thinking within the European academic milieu