Paper Short Abstract:

Based on a symposium I co-convened in 2023, I discuss the institutional development of anthropology in Arab countries, its insertion into transregional contexts, and the necessity of coming to a real co-production of knowledge, shared research focuses, methodologies, and publication practices.

Paper Abstract:

In this paper, I present the result of a conference I co-organised in April 2023 with the same title, together with Irene Maffi, Abdallah Alajmi and Imed Melliti. In this conference over thirty scholars discussed the development, or lack thereof, of anthropology in all Arab countries, and ways forward. Whereas there are some publications on the development of social sciences in the Arab-speaking countries or studies on selected disciplines in several countries, the institutional development of anthropology, its insertion into transregional contexts, and the material difficulties of conducting research in some countries, are still largely understudied topics. Even less discussed is the necessity of coming to a real co-production of anthropological knowledge, in terms of shared research focuses, methodologies, and publication practices.

The symposium we organised and the resulting publications, in Arabic and English, aim to contribute to this emerging field of analysis in a collaborative way. In the first part of the presentation I focus on some anthropologists’ individual trajectories, which I consider particularly relevant for the discussion of the insertion of anthropology in local or national research landscapes. I then briefly overview national or subnational case studies to investigate the institutional development (or lack thereof) of anthropology in various countries. In the third and last section I discuss how selected themes are dealt with by scholars based in the region who in languages other than English, with the aim of broadening existing knowledge on the region and open up fresh perspectives on new avenues of research.

Paper Short Abstract:

Despite much critique of Africanist anthropology, the work of Africans themselves in producing and interpreting anthropological knowledge has been neglected. This paper explores the resources offered by the anthropological writings of the major Senegalese intellectual and politician Mamadou Dia.

Paper Abstract:

While the role of anthropology in shaping Western representations of Africa has been a generative area of enquiry, the work of Africans themselves in producing and interpreting anthropological knowledge has received comparatively little attention. This paper explores the intellectual resources offered by the anthropological writings of the major Senegalese thinker, activist and politician Mamadou Dia (1910-2009). While best known for his economic thought, Dia also engaged extensively with anthropology. This paper revisits this engagement, arguing that it provides not only a key to understanding Dia’s wider anti-colonial project, but also valuable insights for the construction of future pluriversal anthropologies. I focus on three significant phases in Dia’s trajectory. I first consider his formative encounter with anthropology in the 1930s and early 1940s, when as a primary school teacher in colonial Senegal, Dia conducted ethnographic studies of religious practices and funerary rites. I next analyse how, between the 1950s and early 1960s, Dia drew decisively on anthropological writings to develop his concepts of “African socialism” and the “human economy”. Finally, I discuss the place of anthropology in a series of works published after his release from political imprisonment in 1974, notably Émancipation des économies captives (1975) and Socio-anthropologie de l’Islam (1979). Anthropology was for Dia’s thought in providing a picture of African societies as dynamic and creative rather than governed by timeless tradition. Secondly, it drew attention to the concrete local realities which must, for Dia, be the starting point in the construction of a “new humanism”.

Paper Short Abstract:

This presentation analyzes the characteristics of Gonzalez’s anthropology, especially regarding the concept of Amefricanidade. Her work reflected on the impact of the Euro-androcentric tradition and the potential horizons that open up when we decenter from that tradition.

Paper Abstract:

Lélia Gonzalez (1935-1994) is known as an activist of Movimento Negro and as a Black Brazilian feminist for her early contribution to the analysis of the articulation of racism, sexism and class oppression in Brazilian history and society, and her concept of Amefricanidade. Today she is considered one of the most important figures of decolonial feminism in Abya Yala. Many Brazilian Black researchers (Ratts, Pons Cardoso, Lima and Rios) have contributed to recover her work in the last 15 years. Although Gonzalez presented herself as anthropologist, and she taught anthropology at the Pontifícia Universidade Católica, less attention has been paid to her figure as anthropologist. Gonzalez reflected on what it meant to be a Black working-class woman in an all-White university. In this presentation I’m interested in analyzing the characteristics of Gonzalez’s anthropology, especially regarding the concept of Amefricanidade. Re-reading her texts, we can observe how Gonzalez anticipated some of the contemporary debates not only in Brazilian anthropology, but also in world anthropology. She problematized the position of the object of study forced to be “regarded and talked” by the subject who is producing “scientific” knowledge. She is an example of how analysis emerging from political struggles and from the interconnections between social movements and educational institutions challenge hierarchical and colonial knowledge production. Her position outside the “dominant anthropology” can contribute to understand the “set of differentiating interventions of what counts as ‘anthropology’ and who an ‘anthropologist is’” (Restrepo and Escobar 2005: 102).

Paper Short Abstract:

Exploration of the particularities and challenges of an emerging French-speaking Quebec anthropology concerned with Indigenous peoples, in the context of the national affirmation movement of the 1960s-1970s, and the implementation of major infrastructure projects, particularly in northern Quebec.

Paper Abstract:

French-speaking anthropology in Quebec was institutionalized and developed at the same time as what is known as the "Quiet Revolution", a period of major social change, opening up to the world, modernization and major infrastructure projects, as French-Canadians asserted themselves as Québécois. Both within and outside universities, one of the most important fields of research in this nascent anthropology was Indigenous studies. We will explore the particularities of this field of research, in the Quebec of the 1960s and 1970s. It was marked by Marxist and structuralist approaches, and saw the creation of two important journals, Recherches amérindiennes au Québec (1971, renamed Revue d'études autochtones in 2022) and Études Inuit Studies (1977), which are still in existence. Despite their willingness, through learning Indigenous languages, research and collaboration with Indigenous students, translators-interpreters and "writer-informants" to help give Indigenous people "the tools they needed to liberate themselves", their public statements denouncing the lack or inadequate recognition of Indigenous peoples in the national independence movement, and their denunciation of a "colonizing" anthropology, French-speaking anthropologists faced a number of challenges in their relations with Indigenous people. They were in a peculiar position, as members of a people seeking to emancipate themselves from Canadian control, but at the same time participating in the maintenance of the colonial situation of First Peoples in the territory of Quebec.

Paper Short Abstract:

In this paper I explore the alternative temporal and historical frames suggested by a contact group in Chile. I propose we look outside of anthropology, to astrophysics, for a heuristic that is generative of an anthropology that can bend spacetime.

Paper Abstract:

In this paper I explore my ethnography of a UFO contact group in Chile, Rahma, who insist that we exist in a sort of separate temporal frame from the “real” time of the universe. In this parallel existence we are working to save ourselves from imminent destruction; in the “real” time we have already destroyed ourselves. Some of the aliens that contact the followers of Rahma are descendants of the adolescents that we as humans sent on a space mission in our future to the star cluster of Alpha Centauri. The aliens are future versions of us, and at least some of them have both human and alien DNA, having come back to the past from our future world, which they call Earth 2. When we deal with time-travel, multiple existential dimensions, and alternate histories, we are looking not simply at different epistemologies for understanding one´s past and future, but ontological configurations that do not fit with normative anthropology´s reliance on ontological realism as a basis for history. We must therefore seek or invent an anthropology that looks outside of itself to make sense of such temporally plastic extremes. In this paper I propose we look at the physics of dark matter, one of the most speculative fields of current astrophysics, for a “heuristic” generative of a pluriversal anthropology. This comparison shows that even in a hard science, like physics, one must devise modes of understanding the effects of “invisibles”, so to speak, in ways other than the normatively representational.

Paper Short Abstract:

In this mini-round table, Ewa Kepa, Santiago Orrego and Mark Whitaker and Pathmanesan Sanmugeswaran present their work and engagement with the panel's themes.

Paper Abstract:

In my speech, I will discuss the issue of conducting research from the perspective of the researcher directly involved in the process of making knowledge through making craft. I will present it as a researcher who participate in the process of reactivating traditional weaving in Poland.

Ewa Kepa

This presentation hopes to explore the methodological outcomes of mixing anthropology and design through the fabrication of zines as collaborative and multimodal field devices for exploring and representing urban worlds.

Santiago Orrega

Reconsidering a case of "trance-possession" that occurred in Sri Lanka the 1980s within a contra-colonial and pluriversal form of analysis, the authors will discuss how a co-operative ethnography involving variously positioned scholars and recent research is required to understand this case.

Mark Whitaker and Pathmanesan Sanmugeswaran