Short Abstract

We seek to connect ethnography on mobilities, translocation, and movements in and beyond South Asia to disciplinary analysis and critique. How do we think across locations? How do we conceptualize South Asia as a context for research, and how does the regional frame move anthropology forwards?

Long Abstract

Anthropological work on South Asia tracks diverse movements, mobilities, and translocations. We trace the movements of relatives, students, workers, and research participants. We engage with social movements traversing regional and global contexts and follow ideas, politics, and identities, including castes, ethnicities, and nationalisms. Globalization and de-globalization push us to consider objects, affects, and representations that move, alongside things that resist translocation. We welcome analysis of the movement of energy, water, agricultural produce, labour, capital, audio, visual and social media, among other materialities. What processes, events, and conditions animate movement or bring about changes of direction?

Empirical research moves us to disciplinary reflection: in what way does anthropology on South Asia move forwards today? The mobility of concepts across regions has been vital for colonialism, capitalism, and for “comparative anthropology” across generations. Which moveable concepts and contrasts retain relevance today? How are these intertwined with the (re)moveable infrastructures of universities, states, and markets? How has South Asia anthropology moved and contributed to European and global understandings of self and society?

German anthropology is incrementally diversifying who participates in producing knowledge about South Asia. We encourage scholars to engage with the epistemic foundations of research, to think through the portability of concepts, and the role of academic ecologies. What kind of empirical and ideological object is “South Asia” for European anthropologies today? How do the interests of these fields move one another? What connects disciplinary analysis and critique to individual and collective constitutions of “the field”, “home”, and the South Asia region?