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- Convenors:
-
Sergei Alymov
(Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology, Russian Academy of Sciences)
David Anderson (University of Aberdeen)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Sessions:
- Thursday 9 June, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
Several "waves" of decolonizing have given us a vision in which the power hierarchies of centre/periphery, "local"/"global", would be flattenedd. It is time to take stock of our understanding of the various "national" traditions and the imagined future(s) of world anthropology.
Long Abstract:
Anthropologists have discussed the embeddedness of anthropology in Western colonialism for decades (Asad 1973, Kucklick 1993, Stocking 1991), giving us a vision of the future in which power hierarchies would be flattened or erased. Current work on "Cold War anthropology" may serve as a pertinent example (Price 2004, 2008, 2016; Wax, 2009). The concept is starkly USA-centred and rarely takes into account activity of scholars from rival camps. Conveners of this panel claim it is high time to take stock of our understanding of the nature of relations between various "national" traditions and how they shaped our future (Bošković, Hann 2013). This panel seeks contributions from anthropologists as well as historians of anthropology, which reflect on historical, political, and epistemological contexts (Stocking) of production of anthropological knowledge, including but not limited to those of the Cold War epoch. We are interested in accounts of both confrontations and collaborations of anthropologists from different national traditions and ideological "camps". We are especially interested in still poorly researched histories of collaborations between scholars of the second and third worlds in Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America. However, one should not collapse ideological and geographical space: leftist anthropologists in the West and "revisionists" in the East encountered similar issues in dealing with establishment. Another important line of research we look forward to deals with similarities and differences of decolonizing tendencies in the East and West and the role anthropologists play in them.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 9 June, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
The Turkish Folk Literature and Folklore Department at Ankara University, the only one in Turkey at the time, was closed due to the racial-nationalist agitation against academics in 1948. Pertev Naili Boratav, the founder of the department, along with several other faculty members, was labelled ‘communist.’
Paper long abstract:
Boratav had to leave Turkey and worked in France until his death. With his departure, systematic theory-building and critical analysis in Folklore Studies came to a halt, but folklore turned up in other knowledge sites, formats, and venues. In the Cold War framework, folklore in Turkey was practiced in hard-fought interdisciplinary constellations and in state-supported ‘public’ contexts. While in this period Folklore Studies in Europe became less nationally focused; discussed new epistemologies and theories; and searched for new disciplinary identities, folklore in Turkey supported an entrenching relation to nationalism. In academia and politics, what is single-handedly labeled as the antagonism between nationalists versus communists had existed at least since the previous century, but it reached a paramount in the 1930s due to Turkey’s rapprochement with Germany. Ideological camps after the 1950s became sharper due to emergent neo-liberalism and Americanism. Particularly, folklore becoming an area of debate between the so-called ‘nationalistic’ Right and the ‘revolutionary’ Left in the 1970s, was a part of the greater geopolitical tension between the United States and the Soviet Union, which led to polarizations in the greater society and academia. Using the case of Ankara University’s Turkish Folk Literature and Folklore Department to illustrate on the politics of nationalism, I will focus on the political and epistemological contexts of production of folklore knowledge in the Cold War era and argue that the ostensible ideological camps reveal more similarities than distinctions. I am interested in the ways in which frameworks of ‘competing nationalisms’ impacted folklore knowledge. My aim is two-fold: Having scrutinized ‘competing nationalisms,’ I will critically examine folklore’s epistemic rules in Turkey after the 1950s to unravel the reasons why scholars guarded an indissoluble relation to nationalism. On a broader scale, I aim to decolonize the historiography of European ethnology, whose epistemic myopia ignored the unique history of folklore in Turkey and placed it at the margins of European ethnology. By focusing on folklore at Ankara University, I offer new and broadened perspectives on the international history of folklore that can transform both Turkish and European disciplinary narratives.
Paper short abstract:
The paper seeks to widen the concept of Cold War anthropology by considering the history of contacts and dialogue between Soviet and American anthropologists in 1945-1964. Focusing mainly on the Soviet side, it argues that the isolation of Soviet ethnography was never complete, although it was at its peak during late Stalinism.
Paper long abstract:
The paper considers the resuming of contacts between US and USSR scholars in the second half of the 1950s; Soviet participation in international anthropological congresses and its effects on theoretical developments in Soviet anthropology; the preparation, proceeding and consequences of the 7th International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (ICAES) and the Expert Meeting on the Biological Aspects of Race, held in Moscow in 1964. The paper argues that these events were instrumental in widening the confines of Soviet Marxism and introducing new research areas (such as psychological anthropology) in Soviet academia. Soviet ethnography presented itself as an alternative center of consolidation for both western progressive left-leaning anthropologist, and scholars from postcolonial countries.
Paper short abstract:
This paper deals with the changing transcontinental cooperation of a particular subgroup of cultural engineers: anthropologists or, following the contemporary socialist self-description, ethnographers.
Paper long abstract:
During the 1960ies, along with the decolonization of the Global South, it became common sense in socialist countries to link anthropology to the struggle for national independance, or in other words: to practice anti-imperialist solidarity by doing ethnography. German scholar Ursula Schlenther, since the late 1950ies employed at the Institute for Anthropology at Berlin´s Humboldt-University, put it like this: The "complex science" ethnography can "serve the liberation movements of the Asiatic-African and Ibero-American peoples as a historical science". Schlenther´s successor as the institute’ s director, Ute Mohrmann, summarized thirty years later: "Ethnography is a politically committed science. It shall apply the new results of ethnic history to the establishment of nations around the world and to scientific policies of nation-building and, in doing this, ethnography shall provide for the success of the "coalition of the rational" and for the solution of practical questions of life of the peoples". Schlenther (1959) and Mohrmann (1990) both underlined the role of social sciences in state socialism as clearly applied research. In fact, GDR scholars went to Africa for fieldwork trips in the framework of linguistic or archaeological or sociological or archival research or as councellors for the transfer of knowledge at universities, schools, and museums. GDR anthropologists cooperated with students and colleagues from and in post-colonial African countries on the grounds of an urgent demand for new master narratives and staff for national historiographies, policies of culture and languages. How did the demand for socialist and anti-imperialist solidarity influence the interaction of European and African anthropologists? Which effects did the experiences gained during thirty years of transcontinental cooperation have on the conceptualization and the popularization of Marxist-Leninist social sciences in general and of ethnography in particular? I will approach these questions by analyzing selected examples of African-German interactions in socialist anthropology as a professional field on the borderline of academia and politics. This paper is based on my postdoctoral research conducted in the frame of the research project No. 92024 "Akteurinnen, Praxen, Theorien", ad personam funded by the Volkswagen-Foundation from March 2017 to February 2019 at Humboldt-University Berlin.
Paper short abstract:
In my paper, I aim to examine the history of relationships between the pioneer of American anthropology Franz Boas and his Russian colleagues and friends of the period between 1897 and 1942.
Paper long abstract:
In order to understand 45 years of those relations, I employ two epistemically intertwined concepts. They are the newly emerged notion of "paper tools" (Klein 2001; Jardine 2017; Foks 2020) and the well-established but rarely applicable to the history of anthropology concept of Res Publica Literaria (see Casanova 2007; Daston 1991). If the first has a very strong material and pragmatic dimension in understanding knowledge production, the latter adds to it a tendency to expand our horizon beyond the national borders. As historians of science remind us, writing, sending and receiving letters were an essential part of producing scientific knowledge in intellectual circles of Renascence and early modern Europe and remained likely the same in later epochs. By merging these notions together, I argue that the voluminous collection of letters of Franz Boas, Waldemar Bogoras, Waldemar Jochelson and some American, Russian and Scandinavian anthropologists materially constituted the pre-war Arctic and Siberian anthropology as a certain Res Publica Literaria. The careful reading of those letters by generations of historians of anthropology not only revealed the networks of letters, friendship and conflicts but also shaped the genealogy of the field. In other words, the letters were a cosmopolitan means of transnational communication of like-minded scholars who epistemically constructed transnational ethnographic regions such as the Arctic. Such a very material meaning of knowledge production and exchange allows us to intersect the public and the private, the national and the transnational and as a result to re-imagine the intellectual life of Arctic anthropology. The research is based on my long-term archival work in AMNH, APS, SPF ARAN and other institutions and sums up the collective editorial work (together with Sergei Kan, Laura Siragusa and Alex Pershai) of the volume of correspondence between Boas and Russian anthropologists prepared for the Franz Boas Papers: Documentary Edition series, University of Nebraska Press (general editor Regna Darnell).
Paper short abstract:
Gellner was originally a refugee in Britain and he had no illusions about the nature of totalitarian regimes in the Soviet Union and „people´s democracies“.
Paper long abstract:
But as an anthropologist and philosopher he was intrigued by the changes behind the Iron Curtain, especially in social sciences that were officially under the spell of the dogmas of Marxism-Leninism. We do not know whether he wanted to find some openings in the ‚granite unity‘ of scholarship in the Eastern Bloc or just wondered what kind of brains work in the institutes and departments there. The paper will look at Gellner’s reading of knowledge products of Soviet and East European social science as well as Gellner’s overal views about them.
Paper short abstract:
This paper will present an ethnohistorical account of Arctic navigation with a special emphasis on the history of the study of hydrology and orography to the design and refashioning of the traditional Pomor amphibious boat – the koch’.
Paper long abstract:
Early Russian expansion and colonisation across North Asia was based on a refined knowledge of Arctic coastlines and internal waterways. This navigational knowledge was co-authored and co-enacted with indigenous craftsmen. The subsequent voyages of trade, conquest, and discovery were mediated by the round wooden koch’ – a flexible rudderless vessel which could portage easily between rivers and sit confidently in the ice. The koch’ gained a new lease on life in the second half of the 20th century, as it became an icon for Russian/Soviet ingenuity said to be parallel in form and function to the space craft. The new language of discovery and exploration pointed to an interethnic future where crafts and skills leapt stages of technical evolution to create a decolonising commonwealth of science. The paper will put set this recent future vision into the reality of rights claims in the circumpolar North.