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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:
- Friday 24 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 Friday 24 July, 2020, -Paper short abstract:
The European agenda for gender equality in higher education is organised by the imaginary of progress, drawing on a neo-colonial racialised scale of gender (in)equality. How does that undermine and/or enhance anti-racist and decolonial claims in an Irish university?
Paper long abstract:
The hegemonic narrative states the push for gender equality in higher education has gained momentum in Europe since the beginning of the XXI century. Many UE countries are actively engaged in redesigning national policies to promote equality and diversity as a means of achieving excellence. Comparative reports and info graphs populate the 'evidence-based' debates on the matter. However, once the availability of gender data becames a measure of equality, narrowing its format and definition, gender equality is captured by 'femvertising' and branding exercises. It not only sustains a 'polite racism', to use Sara Ahmed's term but endorse an opportunistic promise that equality will be equally spread, that diversity is a colourful non-threatening overruling of unconscious bias, and that conflict will be surpassed by focusing on attraction and retention of the 'most talented people'. In addition, surreptitiously organising time and space, gender equality is portraited as one unilinear transformation progress, in which expressions like journey, path, roadmap, trajectory, and stages create a supposedly consensual preferred destination that will only be reached with a concerted effort from leadership and SMART goals. The inclusion of 'intersectional' as a policy keyword is itself read as a positive advancement, once again playing into the progress-imaginary that denies coevalness and limits the possibilities for transformation by accommodating a 'canned' consensus, as Rita Laura Segato would name it. Based on ethnographic research conducted in Ireland, this paper focuses on the possible mutual tentacles through which gender equality and decolonial claims touch and shape each other in academia.
Paper short abstract:
Social movement networks in the Basque Country provide ethnographical evidence of intersections between groups promoting gender equality, ecological awareness, migrants’ sociopolitical participation and Basque culture and language. However, there is criticism of failure to include a non-white perspective and take decolonialization beyond theory.
Paper long abstract:
This proposal gives account of the relations between the Basque feminist movement and other sociopolitical groups in Rentería (Gipuzkoa, Basque Country). It is part of a wider project of the University of the Basque Country: “New solidarities, reciprocities and alliances. The emergence of collaborative spaces of political participation and redefinition of citizenship”. The main aim is to analyze the emergence of intersections between different movements: feminist, GLTBI, anti-racist and inclusive, Basque cultural and linguistic, ecologist.
The focus is the building and opening of a Women’s House (Emakumeen Etxea) (summer 2019) and the design and implementation of activities. The ethnographic research commenced in 2018 and consisted in observing planning sessions and participating in meetings, as well as research into other organizations linked to this initiative and working towards the participation of migrants, ecological awareness, linguistic diversification and communicative strategies.
One of the concerns of the women involved in the planning process was the inclusion of non-Basque or Spanish members of the community. They adopted different strategies to this end, without great success. This paper explores the criticism directed at the Basque feminist movement and its defence of the Basque nation by self-defined racialized women and the possibilities or limitations this places on the emergence of synergies between the feminist movements and those promoting cultural diversity as well as defending the Basque language and identity.
This issue cuts to the heart of our undertakings as feminist anthropologists, working within a purportedly decolonial theoretical framework while recognizing the difficulties for putting theory into practice both as anthropologists and as feminists.
Paper short abstract:
Through examples from transnational research on Afro-Brazilian practices, this paper seeks to shift the role of the anthropologist as the authority who explains the culture of "the other" to the one of a mediator who opens paths for it to circulate.
Paper long abstract:
In 2020 a religious community of Afro-Brazilian Candomblé performed an artistic ritual in the main hall of one of the most prestigious European museums for contemporary art, the Martin Gropius Museum in Berlin. This paper draws upon the concept and mythology of Exu, West-African god of communication, who opens (and blocks) paths, for presenting my recent research activities involving Afro-Brazilian cultural practices in Brazil and Europe. The aim is to discuss possibilities of turning scientific investigation from an individual theoretical endeavor into a collective means of decolonisation, by prioritising non-Western epistemologies and situated knowledge production. My research turned me into a mediator connecting artistic, religious and academic institutions and individuals across continents – despite being a “Euro-Brazilian”, i.e. a white outsider in my field of research and, at the same time, an immigrant in Europe. From this experience, I propose to shift the role of the anthropologist as the authority who explains the culture of “the other” to the one of a mediator who opens paths for it to circulate. Academic privileges may turn into valuable tools in the service of the communities involved: to legitimate their claims, translate information, adapt presentation forms, increase their visibility while fostering transcultural understanding. Can we move from critical discourses on postcolonial anthropological practices to their practical, collaborative reparation? How can our privileges as European academicians contribute to it?
Paper short abstract:
The paper explores the critique of sovereignty as mobility control, developed in West African migration movements in Europe since the 1990s.
Paper long abstract:
The appropriation of the legitimate means of mobility has become naturalised as a key attribute of modern stateness (Torpey 2000; Mongia 2018). In the 1990s West African migrants organising in France and Germany developed a radical critique of the coloniality of the European border regime. Their critique of territorial sovereignty as mobility control exposed the asymmetrical, racialised appropriation of mobility by Western European states in connection with broader processes of dispossession and accumulation. Drawing from the long historical memory of West Africa's relations with Western Europe, West African migration struggles continue today mobilising this critique. This paper re-reads documents of the 1990s movements in combination with insights from fieldwork and activism I did in Germany with West African migrants 2016-2019. I show first how the West African perspective questions the Eurocentric "methodological statism" (Mongia 2018) and "Westphalian imaginary" (Grovogui 2002) of migration research and border ethnographies. Secondly, and more broadly, it proposes a program for transnational solidarity going beyond migration justice.
Paper short abstract:
Soviet Indigenous politics have to be considered through the concept of land dispossession (Coulthard 2014). This will allow us to understand why a numerical approach in determining Indigenous status was especially important to the state both in the Soviet times and in contemporary Russia.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper, I consider Soviet Indigenous politics through the concept of land and territorial dispossession (Coulthard 2014) to understand why a numerical approach was used to determine Indigenous status. In Soviet times, a special category was created: small peoples of the North. This numerical approach was applied exclusively to the peoples of the North and Siberia (Sokolovskiy 1998). Soviet Indigenous politics specifically focused on peoples who led a nomadic and semi-nomadic lifestyle, and who conducted their economies in vast territories. I argue that the Soviet state was interested not only in their lands, but it was also important for the state to make these peoples legible (Scott 1998). The result of this policy was the forced sedentarization and resettlement of the Indigenous peoples, and the creation of residential schools.
At present, the categorization of Indigenous peoples in Russia is based on the definition of "Indigenous small-numbered peoples." As in the Soviet period, the Russian policy toward Indigenous peoples is constructed around a numerical approach. Currently, only those ethnic groups whose number is less than 50 thousand people have Indigenous status in Russia. Two factors continue to play a key role in the determination of Indigenous status: number of population and place of residence (Donahoe et al. 2008, etc.). In order to understand contemporary Russian politics in relation to Indigenous peoples, it is necessary to address the Soviet Indigenous politics and to understand the continuities and ruptures in State-Indigenous relations from the Soviet period to today.
Paper short abstract:
Two Amerindian mummified bodies are shown in glass display cases in Carmo Archaeological Museum (Lisbon) without any mention to ethical questions posed by the exhibition of Indigenous human remains. A project of theory, art, and activism questions historical unbalances, facing decolonial challenges.
Paper long abstract:
The Carmo Archaeological Museum (in Lisbon) was created in the 19th century to save national archaeological heritage. Other items were added to the collection, including the mummified bodies of two young Amerindians of the Chancay culture (from Peru), acquired during a diplomatic mission of one of the museum founders to South America (1878-1879). Today, the bodies are exhibited in display cases with little contextualization, in the centre of a room designed in 2001 to replicate a period library, surrounded by a display with Chancay artefacts, bookshelves with 19th century Archaeology, Geography and Anthropology books, a statue of a Portuguese king and a series of golden framed portraits of prominent museum board members of that era (all males, white men, and old aristocrats/bourgeois people). The exhibition of Indigenous bodies as objects prolongs the historical narrative that legitimized the colonial order. As artists and academics, we have proposed to the Carmo Museum to develop a project with critical research about these issues, which was met with several limitations. This presentation will expose the challenges of working with/against the institution, the decolonizing goals and limits of the project, problems of representation posed by a culture without living descendants, and the outcome of the project. This artivist (art + activist) project — called THE TIME OF THE HUACAS — included performance, video art and an independent publication (the unofficial guide to Carmo Museum's Room 4). It was done with the participation of Amerindian artists, museum professionals and visual/museum theorists.
Project website: https://sites.google.com/view/otempodashuacasenglish/about
Paper short abstract:
: In this paper, I talk about some tactics that I employed from the beginning of my doctoral studies to deal with the colonial roots of anthropology as a discipline. Specifically, I explore some of the choices I made as a brown anthropologist working on whiteness in Europe.
Paper long abstract:
During my fieldwork in Berlin among non-governmental actors working with refugees on sexuality, I have encountered various difficulties for which I was not prepared. While the interlocutors usually have little time to talk to me, my access to their working environment as a participant-observer has not been a real possibility so far. Moreover, they usually looked confused even when I explained my research to them in detail. After all, I was an anthropologist, shouldn't I better talk to refugees themselves about what they think of the topic of sexuality? In this paper, I will talk about how my fieldwork experiences have been teaching me the very present colonial entanglements of the discipline of anthropology. Although there are many examples of other sorts, the "archetype" of anthropology (Gupta and Ferguson 1997) remains, to a large extent, white anthropologists going "elsewhere" (Trouillot 1991) and working "on" people of color. On the other hand, anthropologists of color are expected to work on "their own communities" (Gupta and Ferguson 1997). Some of the difficulties I have been encountering throughout my fieldwork are partly due to the fact that brown anthropologists working with white interlocutors do not fit into this categorization. I will discuss the choices I have been making in relation to these issues. I will conclude by referring to the challenges that arise from such choices and the need for calibrating our ethnographic gaze to better "anthropologize" white subjects without assuming their worlds to be better known to others.