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- Convenors:
-
Jasmijn Rana
(Leiden University)
Esra Ozyurek (University of Cambridge)
Damani Partridge (University of Michigan)
Mihir Sharma (Universität Bremen)
Duane Jethro (University of Cape Town)
Send message to Convenors
- Formats:
- Panels Network affiliated
- Sessions:
- Thursday 23 July, -
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
Short Abstract:
Who is decolonization for now? This panel seeks to interrogate and clarify the means and ends of decolonization as it relates to research and education on race and ethnicity within European anthropology
Long Abstract:
In the Anthropology of Race and Ethnicity Network, we have been thinking intensely about the place and role decolonization plays in the anthropological enterprise. Through EASA Conferences and our network meetings, we have engaged in robust debate about the various features of this urgent scholarly concern, discussing what it entails when it comes to hiring practices, teaching, scholarly methodology, and realizing the challenges it poses and recognizing its various affordances. In this panel, we reframe the question of decolonization to signal an awareness of the increased use of the term, sometimes without serious critical reflection, to push the important impulses we believe it still carries. In that vein, we ask: who is decolonization for now?
Critically reflecting on the horizons of European Anthropology, and asking for whom these horizons should exist, we invite discussions about the particularities of situated knowledge production by scholars, activists, and scholar-activists. We ask to what extent some of the problems addressed by critiques of anthropology in the past might still be troubling and still need to be troubled. Where is anthropological theory produced and for whom?
We invite situated reflections on these questions based on research, praxis, and pedagogy: In which ways, to what ends, and by whom have discourses of decolonization been articulated? What have decolonial practices done, and not done? What does decolonization (re-)produce, enable, occlude, buttress, and de-limit? How do theorizations concerning race, ethnicity, and indigeneity work in relation to our non-academic interlocutors?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 23 July, 2020, -Paper short abstract:
Analysing the work on race, caste and ethnicity by a transnational anthropologist, I discuss the focus on positionality in discussions on coloniality of knowledge both within European and Indian anthropologies. I conclude by stressing the principle of social justice in decolonization impulses.
Paper long abstract:
Decolonization was a salient topic in the 2019 Indian Anthropology Congress in Pune: different speakers recognized the importance of the debate while some of them closely associated colonial practices in the discipline with white scholars in pre-independence India. Based on my on-going ethnographic research on the work and legacy of Indian anthropologist Irawati Karve (1905-1970), my paper reflects on issues concerning positionality and coloniality in the production of anthropological knowledge on human difference. While a doctoral researcher in Germany (1927-1931), Karve was the only researcher in a renowned anthropology research centre in Berlin who defied racial theories that suggested an intellectual superiority of Europeans; however, later, as a professor in an Indian institution, she applied racial biological theories and anthropometry to study underprivileged caste-, ethnic ("tribal") or religious (Muslim) groups, while reaffirming the privileged status of her own (uppermost) caste and religious (Hindu) belongings. Thinking with this case and in conversation with Faye Harrison's "Decolonizing Anthropology" (2010[1994]), my analysis underlines the author's view on the strategic decolonizing role of anthropologists with "multiple consciousness". However, I explore the decolonization-related limits of what Harrison calls a "native anthropology" and of essentializing risks of a knowledge politics that (over)emphasises national positionality. Thereby, I argue that a researcher's situatedness needs to be socially contextualized. I conclude addressing the necessity of anchoring anthropology's decolonization to the principle of social justice as an orienting goal, whereas we can consider the postmodern legacy of - but move a step beyond - focusing on the anthropologist's subjectivity.
Paper short abstract:
This paper builds on an ongoing ethnography about the effects of the post-asylum phase on Gambian migration and asks what kind of decolonizing anthropological and ethnographical practices are possible when the presence of the researcher in the field conveys multilayered forms of global inequalities.
Paper long abstract:
This paper asks what kind of decolonizing anthropological and ethnographical practices are possible when the presence of the researcher in the field conveys multilayered forms of global inequalities. This reflection is articulated on the first 4 months of a 8 months post-doc fieldwork (half in Italy, half in the Gambia) on the effects of the post-asylum phase on Gambian migration, and relies on interviewees with various interlocutors (35 so far between asylum seekers, Gambian families and youth, NGOs workers and government officers), participant observation in a family of a Gambian returnee and 2 focus groups with students of The University of the Gambia. Forced to use the Central Mediterranean Route because of the almost absent chance to obtain a travel Visa (Gaibazzi, 2014), Gambians became one of the top nationalities applying for asylum in Italy between 2012 and 2018. While the majority of them were not granted asylum in Europe, many others linger in Libya and Niger detention camps thanks to European border's externalization policies. This paper analyzes the weight of my racial, gender, national, past (former asylum worker) and present (ethnographer) professional identity in a fieldwork constructed by a violently unequal and racialized access to global mobility. Wondering how to proceed in the ethnography, I use the question "who is decolonization now" to try to disentangle some of the epistemological stakes embedded in such troubled fieldwork and ask how to critically engage with the geopolitical and historical conjunctures in which anthropological research is produced and consumed.
Paper short abstract:
Moving from a collaborative project with Mapuche artists and intellectuals, the paper elaborates on ethnographic and performative methodologies of participation and co-creation, exploring the possibilities and challenges of ‘decolonising methodologies’.
Paper long abstract:
In a context characterised by what was labelled ‘academic estractivismo’, the participative project MapsUrbe: The invisible City engaged in ‘decolonising methodologies’ (Smith 1999) by working collaboratively with young Mapuche artists and intellectuals in the urban context of Santiago, Chile. At the intersection of experimental ethnography (Irving 2007, 2017) and site-specific performance (Pearson 2010), the project addressed indigenous migration to the capital city. During the research process, subterranean historical narratives and subversive aesthetics emerged, questioning common representations of indigeneity and claiming for mixture and non-whiteness under the skin of the nation. Moving from the MapsUrbe project and two years of fieldwork, the paper elaborates on the articulation of meanings conveyed by ethnographic and performative methodologies of participation and co-creation, exploring polyphonic representations and the possibilities and challenges of ‘decolonising methodologies’. To what extent the collaboration between a white European anthropologist and indigenous and mestizo research participants can be labelled as ‘decolonial’? What do participatory research practices reproduce and/or question within the anthropological discipline? What do they allow to emerge within a particular context of (unequal) knowledge production, and yet which dynamics of power and inequality still result inescapable?
By critically reflecting on these questions, the paper discusses the particularities of knowledge and anthropological theory production, interrogating at the same time discourses of decolonisation. Moreover, it explores Fabian’s proposal of the ethnographer as a theatrical producer and a catalyst for ethnographic and political performances enabling more equal research relationships with our non-academic interlocutors.
Paper short abstract:
Research on EU policy largely disregards colonial histories, racialization and whiteness as constitutive of the structures of power of 'Brussels'. While drawing from an ethnography of EU cultural policies, I reflect on the critical impulses and limits of calls to decolonize anthropology of EU/rope.
Paper long abstract:
European integration is often narrated as a post-war peace project and economic integration project that emerged in the wake of the devastation brought by two world wars, Nazism and totalitarianism. Yet, European integration emerged also as an alternative to declining empires, and part of a broader process of the sedimentation and recycling of colonial legacies. Even though the European Union has extended its membership beyond former imperial powers, colonial legacies continue to echo in the contemporary policies and representations of Europe. Despite that, scholars working in and on EU policy and bureaucracy largely disregard colonial histories and decolonization, racialization and whiteness as constitutive of the policy worlds and cultures of power of 'Brussels'. Our knowledge production is underpinned by a politics of disregard, by "acts of ignoring rather than ignorance" that limit what one can and should know in allegedly post-racial Europe (Stoler 2009:255). While drawing from an ethnography of EU cultural policies and cultural diplomacy and my own acts of dis/regard of race and ethnicity, I will argue that calls to decolonize knowledge production in and on EU/rope carry important critical impulses on the often-disregarded link between 'race', racialization and EU bureaucracy. Yet, these calls to decolonize might also end up providing policy-makers and academics with subtler modalities of articulating domination and perpetuating coloniality, as new research is increasingly dependent on EU funding that favors Western European universities in its quests to position itself as a stronger 'global actor'.