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- Convenor:
-
Petr Skalník
- Formats:
- Panels
- Location:
- Sackler B
- Start time:
- 10 June, 2012 at
Time zone: Europe/London
- Session slots:
- 2
Short Abstract:
Anthropologists believe they often know better but they do not know how to make it known. What is needed is to resolve the tension between scientific knowledge and its intelligibility for non-anthropological public. Anthropology must change or face oblivion.
Long Abstract:
The anthropologists widely believe that their findings, both ethnographic and theoretical, are relevant far beyond the discipline. They have made major advances in the critique of the race and culture concepts and their recent theories about the changing role of kinship, gender, ethnicity and religion as they relate to politics are certainly relevant for the management of any society.These should be respected and used by wider societies, including the decision-makers.
However governments tend to ignore our discoveries, yet they continue making decisions to go to war or impose doctrines which are detrimental to humanity and could have been averted if anthropological opinion were listened to. Conversely the anthropologists and their professional organisations rarely come forward forcefully enough to make their positions known. Engaged and/or engaging anthropology is considered by many anthropologists as desirable but it is hardly practiced. The papers will address the dilemma of scientific knowledge versus its application in policies and social practice. The panel is to find out what kind of anthropology will be able to face successfully the neo-liberal challenge.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
Anthropology is ineffective in translating its perspective onto language of public debate. There are many, interconnected factors of the situation, among which the most important are: blurred boundaries of the discipline, blurred subject-object relations (engagement or activism) and vague distinctiveness of the discipline.
Paper long abstract:
The question whether anthropology might be an important element of the public debate (as i.e. opinion-maker) seemingly rely on its applicability, because the presupposition that support this view is misleading. It is worth to notice that if the discipline isn't easily applicable, or it doesn't provide prescriptions for solving practical problems, is not automatically perceived as worthless and excluded from the debate. Philosophy, archeology or history are the best examples. The thing is that those disciplines are more effective then anthropology in translating their perspective onto language of public debate. Why? The answer is multifaceted. First of all they have already well-established symbolic capital as consistent and thus reliable disciplines - anthropology blurs its boundaries to the extent that even for its practitioners makes the discipline vague. Vagueness isn't a perfect basis for being reliable. Secondly, why should we expect being treated as experts (objective scholars) if in most cases when anthropologists speak about some socially relevant problem he takes a side - thus mixes roles (at worst becomes an activist and thus, additionally, loosing a distance necessary for understanding). The third factor is a distinctiveness - we sometimes act as we were economists, political scientists, sociologists, etc. which we are not, and thus not only confusing our "audience", but also compete in the competition in which we are in a worse position in advance.
Paper short abstract:
Paper will address the dilemma of scientific anthropological knowledge versus its application in policy and social practices in Slovene post-socialist society. I will present also some personal experiences, which are a result of my personal practice of engaged and/or engaging anthropology in Slovene post-socialist society.
Paper long abstract:
The dilemma of scientific anthropological knowledge versus its application in policies and social practices is universal, i.e. imporatant for all societies. However, for post-socialist societies this dilemma is vital. With the introducition of Western capitalism - also neo-liberal one - these societies have been faced with several vital problems, unknown to economy, sociology, political science and other social sciences, but very well known to social and cultural anthropology. Some of these problems are, for example: problem of indigenization of Western capitalism; problem of moderniaztion of indigenity; etc. These problems could have been solved if anthropological knowledge and anthropological opinion were listened to. but in most caces that was not the case. The very same is true also for Slovene post-socialist society.
I my presentation I will discuss:
1. some most important problems in Slovene post-socialist society which remained unsolved, but could have been solved if anthropological knowledge and anthropological opinion were listened to;
2. what does it mean to practice engaged and/or enagaging anthropology in Slovene post-socialist society;
3. what does it mean in Slovenia to make anthropological scientific knowledge intelligable for non-anthropologists;
4. and why engaged/enagaging anthropology in considered by many Slovene anthropologists as desirable, but is very rarly practiced.
Paper short abstract:
Fei Xiao Tong was one of China's best known and respected anthropologists. This paper considers his development and impact as a modern Chinese public intellectual through a consideration of his popular, rather than academic, writing, lecturing and occasional broadcasting.
Paper long abstract:
Fei Xiao Tong was one of China's best known and respected anthropologists. His doctoral thesis, supervised by Bronislaw Malinowski at the London School of Economics, was published as Peasant Life in China (1939) established his reputation outside China. Intellectually Fei regarded himself as a mediator between Chinese culture and Western social science. He became politically active through the China Democratic League, a party of intellectuals like himself. The foundation of the People's Republic of China in 1949 brought him to understand, he said, that it was only in the process of 'serving the people' that personal and social change could take place. He began an active life of public service contributing to many commissions and academic bodies. During the Hundred Flowers period of 1956 he argued for anthropology and sociology as academic disciplines and for academics to contribute through their professional expertise to the public understanding of social and economic issues. Such a stance resulted in him spending a period undergoing 'political re-education' during the Cultural Revolution. However, Fei was eventually able to renew his academic work and became an influential figure in post-Mao China. This paper considers his development and impact as a modern Chinese public intellectual through a consideration of his popular, rather than academic, writing, lecturing and occasional broadcasting.
Paper short abstract:
During the last decade, anthropology has challenged the traditional conceptual binary sets used by many gender researchers and most development practitioners. This paper suggest the hypothesis that beyond misunderstandings and bias, gender concepts have lost their analytical role to become tools, that with a strong ideological background, are weapons of use in the political game. As a consequence, new challenges to these concepts are at risk of being denied or neglected in the technical and institutional agendas for a long period of time.
Paper long abstract:
During the 80s and 90s, Feminist Studies from the social sciences, in their attempt to denaturalize inequality, found a favorable ideological context for the consolidation of the different analytical categories they developed to understand power inequalities. Currently, some divisions like sex/gender, equity/equality, public/private, political/domestic, productive/reproductive have become unquestionable sets of concepts widely used by institutions and social actors, including many researchers and most practitioners from the development sector and policy making. Nowadays, new ethnographic evidence from different places of the world on the human-nature relatedness point to the Eurocentric rootedness of these binary sets, while the critical apparatus of the anthropological discipline is challenging their validity. These binary sets appear now as concepts by which western cosmologies understand and explain social and gender hierarchies and frontiers.
Anthropology is nowadays calling for a revision of these concepts, but such a revision, which currently remains in the academic sphere, has not yet been incorporated into the development sector or even into gender analysis as a sub discipline. This paper addresses some of the obstacles of such transference, by which new epistemological positions are moved from the academic realm to the implementation of development initiatives and to the discourse of most institutions. The paper points out how the old conceptual sets have become part of the strategies of most institutions, and how questioning them the own institutions would have to revise their institutional discourses. In sum, we suggest that once the institutions appropriate the concepts they are no longer analytical tools, but ideological weapons in nature ready to be used in the political arena.
Paper short abstract:
Post-socialist societies are becoming societies of increasing consumerism. Decision-makers in business are becoming more aware of the importance of »human factor«. The role of business anthropology is being not only in service of capital, but also in service of society and people.
Paper long abstract:
The anthropology being also an applied science is becoming a relevant tool for decision-makers in business. Post socialist societies have found themselves in a new era that is governed by capital. The market is open and expanding, the competition is growing and consumerism is increasing. Consumers are more and more informed and want to get the most for their money's worth.
Decision makers in business are starting to realize that without taking "human factor" into consideration they can't effectively communicate with consumers. And consumers will rarely buy things that will not bring them the expected value, satisfaction and fulfill their needs. The gap among producers/sellers and buyers/users occurs. That is the point where anthropologists can help crossing this gap with applying anthropological knowledge, theory and practice into the world of business and consumerism.
The role of business anthropologists is not only to fulfill the clients' needs but also to bring anthropology and its use closer to everyday life. In countries like Slovenia, where anthropology is a relatively young science and business anthropology is only ten years old, being a business anthropologist means also doing advocacy for anthropology. The role of business anthropologist is not only to bring anthropology closer to business world but also to everyday life; to show that anthropology is a science that is useful in all of the layers of everyday life and can significantly contribute to the quality of it.
Paper short abstract:
The paper discusses the non-existence of anthropology as an academic discipline in Cuba, for historical reasons, as opposed to a wealth of anthropological problems and the need for a knowledge which only anthropology can provide in Cuba’s present situation.
Paper long abstract:
Anthropology does not exist in Cuba, in the sense that an academic career of anthropology does not exist on any level. This is a consequence of the fall of the Soviet Union around 1990, which left Cuba in a state of orphanage, with a number of Cubans forced to interrupt their Ph. D. studies in the Soviet Union. At the same time anthropology exists in Cuba, not as an academic career, but as a conglomerate of anthropological problems, projects and solutions. Some anthropological disciplines continued after the fall of the Soviet Union and Soviet traditions, most clearly archaeology. An anthropological viewpoint appears most clearly in Cuba in a solid tradition of criminology and social medicine, and in an ecological approach to the study of social problems. One of the consequences of the fall of the Soviet Union was a process of decentralization in its political organization and its assets of traditional knowledge, on a municipal and community level, but lacking the technical and methodological instruments for studying the problems on these levels, which have been developed in Western anthropology. The problem really boils down to the question of what knowledge only anthropology can provide, in a situation of extreme nervousness on all levels, when it is evident that changes have to be made (and are made), but nobody knows exactly what changes are possible without sacrificing the conquests made through a prolonged revolutionary process, under the pressure of a rampant neoliberalism and under the weight of a yearlong blockade.