Short Abstract

We explore the potential of anthropology in a multipolar world, where knowledge traditions are often exclusionary. What are the dynamics of academic spaces, and which hierarchies of knowledge do they mobilize? What kinds of moral horizons can we envision for the future of the discipline?

Long Abstract

This panel addresses the core of the conference’s theme by interrogating the possibilities of anthropology in a multipolar world. Beyond politics, markets, and ethnoreligious communities, knowledge traditions have been mobilized as homogenous, exclusive/excluding entities to support asymmetric power dynamics at the basis of this polarization. Our panel questions the extent to which this has been occurring within academia, and particularly within anthropology.

What defines the dynamics of academic spaces, and what kinds of social cleavages and hierarchies of knowledge (Buchowski 2024) are mobilized in the process? How are national, but also cultural, class, and other elements influencing disciplinary practices of standardization, normatization, normalization, and legitimization of anthropology as a discipline? How do epistemological underpinnings relate to infrastructural elements such as access to resources, international (in)visibility, local/regional laws, bureaucratic processes, and more?

Do these disciplinary dynamics shape anthropology as a common scientific project, as a multiplicity of independent projects, as sets of interdependent arenas or “confederations” (Papataxiarchis 2015), or yet something else? What kinds of moral horizons can we, and should we, anthropologists, envision for the future of the discipline? And how might such horizons coherently face movements that are both transnational and situated, such as the far right’s accelerating capture of the future?

We welcome papers discussing “encounters across difference” (Tsing 2005) within anthropology, marked by regional, epistemological, institutional, or social differences, aiming to problematize anthropology as a disciplinary space, whether unique or typical, polyphonic or based in solid core principles, characterized by asymmetric power relations or as a “cosmopolitan” space (Hannerz 2007), creative or reproductive, or other possible forms of characterization.

This Panel has 1 pending paper proposal.
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