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Paper short abstract

Amid the rise of a far-right oikumene and its version of multipolarity, this paper examines anthropology beyond the metropolis. From Brazil, it analyzes bolsonarismo’s impact on post-redemocratization anthropology and compares approaches to the far right in Brazil and the Global North.

Paper long abstract

Anthropology has long been shaped, at both institutional and discursive levels, by geopolitical processes - from colonialism and decolonization to the Cold War and neoliberal globalization. Internally, it has been differentiated across projects of nation-state formation, theoretical lineages, and anthropologists’ embodied positionality. Today, this entanglement is being reconfigured under a new geopolitical dispensation marked by the global rise of a far-right oikumene and a deepening crisis of liberal-democratic orders. This conjuncture unsettles established anthropological commitments and demands renewed reflexivity regarding the discipline’s political and epistemological stakes. It has displaced the South–North axis that structured earlier debates on decolonization and multipolarity, while reactivating the ideological divide between left and right. Within this configuration, multipolarity has itself been appropriated by the right through the language of “zones of influence.”

This paper examines these shifts from Brazil’s standpoint. It revisits anthropology’s repositioning in public discourse after redemocratization and analyzes the challenges posed by the rise of bolsonarismo as a mass movement. It asks how this phenomenon has strained anthropology’s dominant alignment with human-rights-based and multiculturalist grammars of alterity. The argument unfolds through a dialogue with Karl Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia, particularly his notions of perspectivism and relationism. How can anthropological critique help resist the erosion of liberal democracy in Brazil while remaining attentive to the limits of liberal humanism and multiculturalism? And how does the anthropology of the far right in Brazil converge with, or diverge from, frameworks predominant in what was once called the “Global North”?

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By citing concrete cases, the paper emphasises that pursuing a system of ‘world anthropologies’ is a worthwhile goal, despite the unavoidable obstacles that emerge at the intersection of political conflicts in a polarised world and within an anthropological community.

Paper long abstract

Creating a decentralised system in the global field of anthropology remains a challenge today. Disparities in economic and socio-cultural capital contribute to maintaining historically established hierarchies among different scholarship systems, whether continental, regional, or linguistic. The stereotype of academically driven, insightful knowledge produced in ‘centres’ versus empirical knowledge from the ‘peripheries’ persists despite efforts to defy it. The role of English as the lingua franca of science reinforces the dominance of Anglophone perspectives. Although awareness of these hierarchies has increased, progress is slower than advocates of ‘world anthropologies’ would like. There is an ignorance of parallel knowledge systems developed outside national, linguistic, and thematic boundaries. Sherry Ortner, referring to a single anthropological tradition, observed: “The field appears to be a thing of shreds and patches, of individuals and small coteries pursuing disjunctive investigations and talking mainly to themselves” (1984: 126). Recently, local and global conflicts have led to the construction of anthropological isolates surrounded by ideological iron curtains, the politicisation of the discipline, polarisation within the scholarly community, and the exclusion of certain scholars because of their origin or political views. All these hinder the development of a cosmopolitan anthropology resulting from the multidirectional flow of knowledge, informed by various traditions and produced by individuals with different worldviews. Is there a prospect for a non-hierarchical, non-exclusionary anthropology that shares some values or adheres to overarching research paradigms? Some examples from the anthropology of Europe suggest that it is an unreachable goal that, despite all odds, anthropologists should continually pursue.

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After reviewing earlier debates concerning the anthropological field in (post)socialist Eastern Europe, the paper moves beyond insider/outsider tensions to consider uneven disciplinary landscapes generally. Ethical cosmopolitanism has to be realistically reconciled with cumulative science.

Paper long abstract

The paper addresses the need to overcome hierarchies and create a level playing field for the production and dissemination of anthropological knowledge generally (perhaps even universally). In Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), decolonization debates must take account of the complex history of this region as well as evolved differences between comparative social anthropology and the “ethnological” traditions found in most continental European countries. Diagnoses of “hierarchies of knowledge” (Buchowski 2004) followed the end of the Cold War. If not polarization, there was definitely some friction between indigenous scholars and researchers from metropoles such as Cambridge alleged to be “orientalising” CEE and neglecting indigenous voices. Insider/outsider tensions are significant in many parts of the world but, after revisiting this particular discussion concerning CEE, this paper moves beyond the issues surrounding “anthropology at home” to explore enduring structural inequalities in the era of accelerating globalization. It engages pragmatically with the “project of expansion” recommended by Andrew Sanchez (2023). His proposals for equalizing intellectual communities are evaluated with reference to one community of scholars in CEE (in Budapest) and found to be unrealistic, perhaps utopian. The metropoles are not fading away. Is imperative to work out new forms of cooperation on an egalitarian basis. However (bearing in mind the panel’s invitation to consider “moral horizons”), multipolar cosmopolitanism in the anthropological field can be ethically problematic and difficult to reconcile with the criteria for a science that should be academically cumulative as well as politically progressive.

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This proposal situates a series of reflections on the tensions between taught anthropology—encompassing its epistemic, theoretical, methodological, and moral dimensions—and the anthropology actually practiced, particularly outside the academic sphere.

Paper long abstract

This proposal situates a series of reflections on the tensions between taught anthropology—encompassing its epistemic, theoretical, methodological, and moral dimensions—and the anthropology actually practiced, particularly outside the academic sphere. In these professional contexts, the diversity of anthropological practice and its varying modes of labor are often not clearly articulated within the formal curriculum. Instead, they appear as a "forgotten fraction" of what anthropologists actually do or are capable of achieving. This issue is especially significant within the Latin American context, which serves as the primary framework for this reflection.

These points lead to a compelling question central to this symposium: the exploration of the "core commonalities" shared by formal educational spaces and the professional experience of "working as an anthropologist." What anthropology is and means—as well as how it is shaped through both professional practice and academic placement—often involves worlds that are configured as one, yet characterized by contradictions, tensions, and points of distension.

My interest lies in reflexively addressing the dissonance between pedagogical instruction and professional experience. Rather than providing definitive answers, I aim to explore the potentialities and scopes of these tensions. This perspective is enriched by considering concrete cases and comparative analyses across different "anthropologies." Naturally, this exercise accounts for historical backgrounds, the national and regional development of the discipline, and the internal and external politics of anthropology.

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The proposal raises a critical reflection on the paradox that anthropology faces today in non-metropolitan contexts. We argue that possibilities for thinking about anthropologies beyond the metropolis do not emerge from the discipline's normalized interior but from its margins.

Paper long abstract

The proposal raises a critical reflection on the paradox that anthropology faces today in non-metropolitan contexts: even in a multi-polarized world, a significant portion of the dominant anthropologies produced in the peripheries continues to conform to the world-system of anthropology, which is hegemonized from the United States.

Rather than opening spaces for theoretical or political experimentation, these dynamics tend to reproduce agendas, languages, and problems defined elsewhere, creating a landscape of standardization in which, in substantive terms, the canon tends to be reproduced.

The symposium also questions the possibility of projecting common values for the discipline into the future. Such a project, tested in global spaces like the World Council of Anthropological Associations, silences and invisibilizes all the conversations that took place from the peripheries, which contextualize a unique international anthropology and propose to inhabit anthropologies in the plural.

Faced with this scenario, the presentation argues that the possibilities for thinking about anthropologies beyond the metropolis do not emerge from the normalized interior of the discipline, but from its margins, its institutional outskirts, and from intellectual practices that do not entirely fit into the hegemonic regimes of validation.

It is about exploring in those displacements the possibilities of imagining articulations without going through the world system of anthropology.

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How can we prepare the next generations to deal with the growing list of ‘wicked’ problems our planet is facing, threats characterised by uncertainty in knowledge and values? I analyze the outcome of an experimental university course that methodologically fosters students’ “practical wisdom”.

Paper long abstract

How can we meaningfully prepare the future generations of anthropologists to deal with the growing list of ‘wicked’ problems Planet Earth is facing, threats characterised by uncertainty in both knowledge and the values at stake (AI being one of the more recent challenges on the horizon)? My involvement in the governance of anthropology at the international level, first at the European (EASA) and then at the global (IUAES, WAU) level, made me think critically about what is actually being taught in anthropology programmes worldwide and how this is being done. I got together with some like-minded colleagues and we obtained funding from the Wenner-Gren Foundation to research this. Our project, termed ‘Antro Radikoj’, aimed to inventarize the current state of teaching anthropology, with a particular focus on ‘decanonizing’ the curriculum, and creating openings for ‘alter-native’ pedagogies. To a certain extent, this entails a return to the traditional roots of anthropology, which was all about communicating the knowledge and wisdom anthropologists had observed in other cultures, often Indigenous ones, across the world. I critically analyze the outcome of an experimental university course that methodologically fosters students’ “practical wisdom”, asking the right type of questions and being open to different perspectives. This alternative model to the dominant educational focus on merely conveying knowledge may be better attuned to the current AI-dominated era and to what anthropology as a discipline needs to survive in it.