Short Abstract

This panel invites scholars to tune their research to the complex harmonies and dissonances of a polarized world, improvising across scales and tempos to diagnosing power relations in knowledge production and creating new resonances between communities, perspectives, and knowledge for anthropology.

Long Abstract

Anthropology has a rich tradition of interrogating the societal and institutional contexts shaping its knowledge production. From colonialism, imperialism, National Socialism, and communism through their aftermaths—and into contemporary democracies and relational movements contesting capitalist paradigms—the field consistently questions its shifting roles. Anthropology, embedded in universities, museums, and community initiatives, serves as a critical interlocutor, tracing empirical and theoretical connections across diverse domains.

These dynamics crystallize in what Dzenovska (2018) refers to as “diagnostic modes of knowledge production”: cultural techniques produced by institutions, wherein centers of power define both “diseases” and their “cures,” diagnosing provinces, peripheries and centers against their own standards. Polarization thus emerges intra-actively (Barad 2007), not from neutral observation, but from the authoritative act of naming and measuring difference. In this context, can anthropology function as a pharmakon that, echoing Stiegler (2010), discerns “what makes life worth living”?

Such reflexivity goes beyond revealing co-constitution with state, institutional, and public frameworks; it provokes vital debates on complicity, agency, and the changing boundaries among researcher, institution, and community. Drawing on what Pierre Bourdieu called “epistemic reflexivity,” anthropology must remain vigilant in situating itself amid power hierarchies.

Our panel invites participants to engage creatively with the polarized landscape of Europe. How can we harmonize and synthesize perspectives, communities, media, and more-than-human agencies across a fractured continent? What if polarization is seen not just as rupture, but as a transversion—varied in scale, tonality, temperament?

On behalf of the Regional Group „Europe“ of the German Association of Social and Cultural Anthropology (DGSKA), we seek contributions from scholars across regions and disciplines who can ground research in specific chronotopes and bridge institutional, geopolitical, and socio-cultural terrain. We encourage work that observes, analyzes, and theorizes the impact of political polarization on ethnographic practice, as well as methodological reflections on future knowledge creation.

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