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- Convenors:
-
Fazil Moradi
(Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study)
Stefanie Bognitz (University of Johannesburg)
Send message to Convenors
- Discussants:
-
Zimitri Erasmus
(University of the Witwatersrand)
Monika Halkort (University of Applied Arts)
Umut Yildirim (Geneva Graduate Institute)
- Formats:
- Panels
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 21 July, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
Short Abstract:
This panel is committed to epistemological disobedience that allows for unauthorized anthropological knowledge to constitute ways of seeing and knowing. It goes against the grain of the anthropological entanglement in the "coloniality of knowledge" or the episteme of domination.
Long Abstract:
Anthropology is as much confronted with questions that haunt our time, as surprising challenges of deferred horizons call us to speculation. To state that anthropology was situated outside of the colonial horizon of modernity and beyond the imperial language is difficult (Mignolo and Schiwy 2003). This panel is committed to epistemological disobedience that allows for unauthorized anthropological knowledge and lived worlds to constitute ways of seeing, knowing, and telling. It attends to how the naturalized and legitimized anthropology is entangled in the "coloniality of knowledge/power" or the episteme of domination - that is, knowledge destined to control (Grosfoguel 2013). Thus, the panel is an engagement with how knowledge, lived experiences, everyday practices, and more-than-human are tied up with epistemologies in the lived world that is termed "field," an ethnographic enterprise rather than human condition that can give birth to theories. The questions we ask panelists to address are: Whose anthropology is this? Is doing anthropology otherwise or beyond binary conceptions of difference possible? This is of planetary importance as the worlds we inhabit are marked by accelerated movements of people, knowledge, sciences/technologies, ecological concerns, and global capitalism. As anthropologists we are of these movements, inhabiting multiple worlds all at once, while maintaining virtual connections where inside/outside no longer hold as fixed oppositions. Thus, by asking, whose anthropology is this?, we want to turn to decoloniality of anthropological knowledge, epistemic of domination, and openness to worldwide movements of epistemic pluralism, as we move toward deferred horizons.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 21 July, 2020, -Fazil Moradi (Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study) Stefanie Bognitz (University of Johannesburg)
Paper short abstract:
Introduction to the panel "Deferred horizons: Whose anthropology is this?"
Paper long abstract:
Introduction to the panel "Deferred horizons: Whose anthropology is this?"
Ioannis Kyriakakis (Hellenic Open University)
Paper short abstract:
In this paper I describe the difficulties I had to communicate my ethnographic experience of Christianity in Western Ghana to the environment of established academic anthropology and I discuss the reasons for that.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper I describe the difficulties I had to communicate my ethnographic experience of Christianity in Western Ghana to the environment of established academic anthropology. I claim that despite the radical criticism launched from time to time by anthropologists against western epistemological tradition, when it comes to academic procedures, this tradition is respectfully followed within anthropological departments. I am attempting to shed light on this contradiction, as well as to propose ways of overcoming it.
Christian Nyampeta (Goldsmiths University of London)
Paper short abstract:
Drawing from the artist's own projects and collaborative and cooperative activities, this audio-visual presentation traces the methods that allow to convene, to gather and to assemble beyond the spaces and the times that are officially sanctioned as learning environments.
Paper long abstract:
This audio-visual presentation commences with a reflection on a set of unadorned questions: How come my name is Christian? How come I speak French, English and Dutch? What is anthropology in Kinyarwanda? The presentation suggests a model of practice that makes apparent how such questioning compels a mobility across disciplines, boundaries and limits of the knowable. The presentation draws from the artist's own practice, which materialises in art, design, theory, but also in dance, botany, cooking, gardening, walking, and in collaborative and cooperative activities, such as his contributions to Another Roadmap for Arts Education Africa Cluster, a research network on the history of arts education undertaken within a network of educators, artists and researchers working in 4 continents around the world. Reflecting on the urgency of such models of working, the presentation indicates that these methods are in themselves ways of making relevant the intertwined histories and the realities that inform the inhospitable conditions of the present and to intervene by rethinking how to convene, to gather and to assemble beyond the spaces and the times that are officially sanctioned as learning ecologies.
The presentation identifies Christianity as the rhythm of modernity that facilitated the colonised subjects to move toward a cultural death, whereby the double conversion of Christianity and modernity produced enduring epistemological and ontological annihilation. The presentation concludes by returning to the artist's models as a movement from the intersubjective to the intrasubjective, as a mode that operates within dimensions of bodies, space but also of time.
Joana Vidal Maia (Iscte-IUL)
Paper short abstract:
This is an attempt of looking for clues to think about if and how gender relations in Brazil are part of a modern-colonial order, trying to reflect about overlaping systems of domination and epistemologies to build an anthropological research.
Paper long abstract:
An attempt to understand how the gender relations of the present take place as part and consequence of multi-layered historical and political processes suggests also thinking about these other layers and the way in which their meanings pass through the lives of women and men. In Brazil, it is possible to situate gender relations as part and consequence of colonial processes - Carneiro (2003) states that the colonial rape and its consequent miscegenation "is at the origin of all the constructions of our [brazilian] national identity". In this sense, it can be valuable looking for reflections since Mignolo's (2000) thesis about a modern-colonial order in Latin America - and, consequently, in Brazil. The author's idea thinks about reality today as part of many simultaneous dynamics that still happening under colonial rules and its reproduction. The hypotesis here is try to find clues to understand if and how gender relations are simultaneously as structured and structured by this modernity / coloniality. The concept of intersectionality (Crenshaw, 2002; Collins, 1990) is also valuable for this reflection by overlaping patriarchy with other layers of domination, such as race and ethnicity, social class, nationality and age. Finally, a question that poses is how to tranfer these theoretical reflections in epistemic and methodological processes that challenge modernity-coloniality while being integrated with the academic practices that have historically been sustained by this modern reason.
Sabine Teryngel (Philipps-University Marburg) Marlen Ott (Universität Kassel)
Paper short abstract:
Observing a growing interest in knowledge and its production in anthropological studies on climate change, resilience, and local adaptation, this paper critically challenges such an epistemological understanding of knowledge as place-based, isolated, static and held by an imagined, homogenized other
Paper long abstract:
This paper critically reviews current anthropological debates on knowledge production and climate change. It discusses power inequalities and the positioning of the anthropologist in ongoing research projects that are located in reception and observation studies, vulnerability assessments, and others. We observe that the way in which these projects engage with crucial questions in the emerging field of the anthropology of climate change, is a return to the use of arguments and methods brought up by early ethnoecological approaches. Just like its predecessor such ethnoclimatological analysis carries the risk of reproducing dangerous ideas of homogenous, solitary groups, and unreflected hierarchies between local/place-based knowledge and globalized scientific knowledge.
We aim to demonstrate the epistemological assumptions that are shaping the process of the anthropological inquiry about knowledge. Furthermore, we argue that research is influenced by utilitarian claims made in climate change adaptation projects and seldomly reflects on the control and accessibility over its research outcomes and their uses.
In response to this criticism, we argue for an anthropology transcending such binary conceptions of difference that needs to consider knowledge production as a process shaped by historical and current power structures. This requires the radical decolonization of anthropology, its methods and approaches, the exploring of alternative methodologies and the recognition of dynamic connections and thinking beyond the boundaries of and imposed by western science. Finally, the realistic reflection of the systematic structures in which our discipline and we as researchers are entangled must be visualized, not only theoretically, but also in research practice.
António Medeiros (ISCTE University Institute of Lisbon, CEI-IUL)
Paper short abstract:
State's imprint in popular culture should is to be questioned In Portugal. I take the results of a research on "desafio songs", a raunchy genre censored by past ethnographers, as a motto to question the marks left by 48 years of authoritarianism.
Paper long abstract:
A right-wing authoritarian regime endured in Portugal between 1926 and 1974, self-styled as "Estado Novo" after 1933. In the next two decades the regime was able to impose new forms of ethnographic representation on a national, regional and local scale, mainly based on modernist styling of the works of the pioneer generations of fin-de-siècle ethnographers. In the 1930s, a decade marked by an intense state propaganda in Portugal, the nationalization of the masses proceeded at fast pace, and was endowed with unprecedented resources. Then, a variety of book editions, contests, processions, performances, films, artisanal objects - and also products of mechanical - proposed new ethnographic representations, and conveyed quite effectively, inter alia, new cultural meanings and new senses of belonging. Today, we can check the effectiveness of those authoritarian projects and how they serve petitions of belonging which became hegemonic, especially at a local and regional scale. In the recent years, Portuguese anthropologists - trained in in departments that emerged after 1974 - systematically find the course of their researches the traces of the state's autocratic action in the production of popular cultures, a sort of ruins that can be questioned with greater or lesser reflexive awareness. I take the first results of an ongoing research on "desafio songs" in the north of Portugal, a pugnacious and raunchy genre invariably censored by past ethnographers, as a motto to interrogate the imprint of the authoritarian State in present day representation Portuguese culture in the north of the country.