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Paper short abstract

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.