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Long Abstract:
This panel is formed of sui generis papers that talk to similar themes.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 18 July, 2024, -Abdelaaziz El Bakkali (University of Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah)
Paper short abstract:
In the act of (un)doing with the anthropology arena, the educational sphere stands as a system of transnational experiences between African “growing decolonial critiques” and European “civilizing mission” to discuss effective leadership styles in educational anthropology, mainly.
Paper long abstract:
In the act of (un)doing with anthropology arena, the educational sphere stands as a system of transnational experiences between African “growing decolonial critiques” and European “civilizing mission.” In educational anthropology, research about effective leadership styles has recently become an area of growing concern, debate, and examination in many academic studies to respond to the growing casualization of labor and knowledge production. In many African countries, including Morocco, since independence, the educational system has flopped with many setbacks despite the reform stages, failing to approach the heart of this issue. Today, African educational stakeholders and pedagogical actors should redress the crux of the problem to allow learners access to a Western world of leadership and business with enough transferable skills and competencies. This paper examines effective leadership in the educational sphere, particularly in the Moroccan context. It attempts to unravel the opportune challenges facing the decolonial leadership progress in Moroccan educational institutions. Also, it tries to discuss some perspectives that foreground potential advancements in educational anthropology. The paper adopts a meta-analysis design, whereby a special examination of the various studies that have already been conducted came out with conclusions: perspectives and challenges. Owing to its descriptive, diagnostic, and generative nature, this method allows the researcher to explore the wide range of pitfalls and weaknesses that provide potential opportunities for alternative conclusions to be adopted in restructured approaches to leadership and school effectiveness in educational anthropology. This paper's major results and conclusions are to be qualitatively discussed and analyzed.
Julie Graff (Université du Québec à Montréal)
Paper short abstract:
This paper will reflect on an investigation into several artworks produced by Inuit for the 1967 Montréal World Fair, and the difficulty of documenting their circulation afterwards, while exploring alternative methodologies offered by Inuit scholars.
Paper long abstract:
Provenance research generally focuses on two primary sources: the artwork itself as a key document, if not the most important one, on the one hand, and the archives to trace back the object’s circulation through space and time on the other. What happens to provenance research then when the object is missing, and the archives are lacking? Understanding provenance research as reconstructing an object’s biography, I aim to explore this question by presenting my investigation into several artworks produced by Inuit artists in the 1960s, at the time of colonization of the Arctic, and exhibited by the Canadian government at the 1967 Montréal World Fair (known as Expo’ 67). In attempting to track down the artworks and their current location, however, I have quickly come up against the limitations of archives, whether regarding the uncertain provenance histories for entire collections of Inuit art in cultural institutions, or the absence of the artist’s perspectives on their work. Therefore, I wish to offer in the first place a critical reading of this failed attempt at provenance research, as to highlight how colonial relations impacted and still impact the way Inuit art has been discussed, curated, documented and circulated. I will then reflect on the possible ways to integrate these artworks, both present and absent, into an art history which focuses on Inuit agency and challenges settlers’ narratives, by mobilizing the recent works of Inuit scholars and curators.
Angana Kotokey
Paper short abstract:
The western anthropology has been successful in generating new models of nation-state through a small elite and educated intelligentsia of Kabul who have significantly contributed towards ‘Exclusive Nationalism’ in an already (dis)-integrated Afghanistan--through a process of ethnicization.
Paper long abstract:
Time and again Muslim societies across the globe have contradicted the modern notion of a Westphalia state, whereby they feel that the legal system does not correspond with Islamic tenets and values. Attempts by western powers to incorporate them within the fold of a modern state (as prescribed by the West) have often led to revolts, finally setting the rise of traditional powers in a state. ‘Anthropological studies’ on the political history of Afghanistan has been one of those kinds where an attempt towards institutionalization of the state was part of geopolitical interests of imperial powers who not just gave ‘form’ to Afghanistan’s territory but were also involved in deciding its ‘nationalism’—because for the West, the country lacked national sentiment and did not fulfill the standards of a political unit as visualized and defined by the Global North. This paper will discuss how this state structure as envisioned by western anthropologists overlooked real problems of the Afghan State (challenges that came from ethnic groups and religious leaders) because it was more concerned in developing a Western model of modern state. Further, the paper will also highlight that, over the past several decades, the west has been successful in generating new models of nation-state through a small elite and educated intelligentsia of Kabul who have significantly contributed towards ‘Exclusive Nationalism’ in an already (dis)-integrated Afghanistan—by incorporating such values that only led to a process of ethnicization in Afghanistan. The contributions of western anthropology in this regard will be analysed.
Nick Shepherd (Aarhus University)
Paper short abstract:
In this conceptually open-ended paper I set out to rethink the emergent narrative around the 'Anthropocene' from a global south perspective, drawing on decades of research in the Cederberg mountains of South Africa, and in particular the settlement of Elandskloof.
Paper long abstract:
In this conceptually open-ended paper I set out to rethink the emergent narrative around the 'Anthropocene' from a global south perspective, drawing on decades of research in the Cederberg mountains of South Africa, and in particular the settlement of Elandskloof. Elandskloof was a site of forced removals under apartheid, and was the first successful land claim on the post-apartheid era. It is embedded in a landscape that has a deep history of Indigenous occupation, was a site of colonial genocide and the establishment of a rural slave economy, and was comprehensively disrupted and reorganised by the racialised economy of apartheid. More recently, it has become a climate change frontier, with evidence of heating well above the global average. Basing myself in this time/ space, in which colonial frontier and climate change frontier collide, I interrogate the emergent narrative around the 'Anthropocene' as an event in historical time. What does it mean to talk about the beginning and end of epochs (or worlds, or ways of life)? How can we produce historically-situated accounts of the climate emergency, which understand the expanding colonial/ capitalist frontier as an 'emergency' resulting in world-ending violence? What would be involved in decolonising the narrative around the 'Anthropocene'? And what would the implications of all of this be for the inhabitants of Elandskloof?