- Convenors:
-
Alina-Sandra Cucu
(Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca)
Hadas Weiss (Centro em Rede de Investigação em Antropologia (CRIA))
George Baca (Dong-A University )
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- Discussant:
-
Deborah James
(LSE)
- Formats:
- Panel
Short Abstract
This panel explores the conceptual and methodological value of revisiting and reappraising earlier anthropological studies (including one’s own). We will critically contrast past findings and theories with contemporary trends to conceive of historical continuities, fractures, and change.
Long Abstract
The contemporary appears to be a time of accelerating change, when “all that is solid melts into air.” Fluid times stand in tension with anthropology’s specificity. A discipline that prides itself on unearthing the particularities of people framed in time and space, whose key methodology – ethnography – is an immersion in discrete, contemporary fieldsites – has always struggled to capture change. One way to meet this challenge has been to develop a historical analysis through revisits and reappraisals of the discipline’s time-bounded findings. From Weiner’s restudy of Malinowski’s Argonauts and Hutchinson’s restudy of Evans-Pritchard’s Nuer, through Collier’s and Li’s revisits of their old fieldsites, to Strathern’s reappraisal of Malinowski, and Abu-Lughod’s of Geerz, anthropologists have continuously developed earlier insights in relationship to broader processes.
Revisits and Reappraisals provide novel insights about transformations at different temporal, geographical, and analytic scales. Setting up a dialectical dialogue between past insights and contemporary trends allows us to question key insights from new perspectives, showing how seemingly timeless structures and deep-cutting relations change over time.
The panel aims to demonstrate the power of this approach. It seeks papers that revisit or reappraise earlier studies in anthropology (including one’s own), in order to reveal how their findings, frameworks, and approaches persist or no longer pertain to today’s world; how and why the phenomena they examined have changed; and what the differences between past and present circumstances illuminate about the reach and practical underpinnings of erstwhile theories and generalizations.