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Reinventing urgent anthropology: EASA Exec Plenary 
Convenors:
Monica Heintz (University of Paris Nanterre)
Sharon Macdonald (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
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Format:
Plenary
:
Whitla Hall
Start time:
29 July, 2022 at
Time zone: Europe/London
Session slots:
0

Short Abstract:

This plenary revisits the notion of urgent anthropology in the 21st century, by inviting scholars whose research is devoted to critical situations to position their research priorities independently of ‘urgent’ political agendas and of the past meanings of the term.

Long Abstract:

The term ‘urgent anthropology’ evokes the salvage anthropology of the turn of the 20th century, with its urge to document quickly endangered cultures through observations and the physical collection of their material culture. With the criticism of the Western perception of ‘vanishing’ cultures, the term and the method lost its momentum, before it came back after decolonisations to mean the study of behavioral change among societies undergoing rapid change. This applied anthropology sense has increasingly been interwoven with the first sense of salvage anthropology in most projects labelled ‘urgent anthropology’ in the past decades. Meanwhile, funding and institutional requirements to pursue research topics with rapid societal ‘impact’ also challenged anthropology’s ‘slow’ research based on long-term fieldwork and lifelong immersions in a society. As a result, ‘crises’ (such as Covid, the environmental crisis, the refugees crisis, wars, etc.) become urgent research focuses, with urgency taking on a political and moral priority relatively independent of other anthropological research priorities.

This plenary wishes to revisit the notion of urgent anthropology in the 21st century, by inviting scholars whose research is devoted to such critical situations to position their research priorities independently of ‘urgent’ political agendas and of the past meanings of the term. The temporality of anthropological research allows us to step back from ‘urgency’ to reconsider the basics of human sociability and commoning, aside from the erratic inscription of actions in time and space, in order to reinvent ways to circumvent the indeterminacy of the future.

Accepted papers:

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