Short Abstract

This panel calls for darker anthropology in an increasingly dark world. We ask, what shapes our (dis)engagements with genocide, suffering, and inequality? What are the affective, ethical, and institutional conditions required for anthropologists to confront the moral weight of the worlds we study?

Long Abstract

We live in an increasingly dark world – one fractured by violence, inequality, and indifference. This panel asks whether the attention of anthropology as a discipline, and as a moral and epistemic community, is where it should be. Is anthropology turning away from its darkest materials–genocide, dispossession, and deepening systemic harm–and towards seemingly safer and more manageable topics? And if it is, what does this turning reveal?

Where the debate on the anthropology of suffering and the good directed attention to how anthropology constructs its object, we inquire instead into the conditions that shape anthropologists’ choice to pursue or avoid “dark” projects. Taking seriously the affective labour of our craft, we ask: how to sustain the work of “a darker anthropology” without breaking under its weight? Do our discipline’s institutions, funding streams, and collective habits of attention support bearing witness or engaging? How, when both despair and denial are rife, do we do our work in ways that neither look away from the world’s violences nor collapse beneath them?

This panel proposes “darker anthropology” not as an indulgence in despair, but a commitment to a discipline capable of confronting, rather than evading, the moral weight of the worlds it studies. We invite contributors to redefine anthropological commitment through reflections on question such as: Where does our attention lie? How do disparate practices in our field hold together? What are the communal and institutional conditions that allow pursuing difficult ethnographies with emotional sustainability and intellectual honesty?

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