Immutable: Other Anthropologies and Anthropology’s Otherness: A Conversation on Disciplinary Futures. Part 2 Session 11 of the digital lecture series „Decolonizing Anthropology: A Self-Critical Appraisal of the Current State of Research and Teaching"; German speaking departments of social and cultural anthropology.
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Resource ID
32
Access
Open
Title
Other Anthropologies and Anthropology’s Otherness: A Conversation on Disciplinary Futures. Part 2 Session 11 of the digital lecture series „Decolonizing Anthropology: A Self-Critical Appraisal of the Current State of Research and Teaching"; German speaking departments of social and cultural anthropology.
Editor
boasblogs
Other contributor
Zillinger, Martin
Publishing institution
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Date of publication
04 July 2024
Terms of use
(CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) Namensnennung + nicht kommerziell + keine Bearbeitung
Abstract
Disciplinary Anthropology has been subject to recurrent waves of auto-criticism. At least since the mid-1960s, it has been grappling with its colonial legacies and related epistemic structures. These exercises in reflective self-reformation have taken several forms, including: 1) the historicization of the discipline and the investigation of its imbrication with various imperial projects and colonial practices; 2) the critique of universalist theory, and especially structuralism; 3) the disentanglement of race science, racism and biological anthropology from social and cultural analysis; 4) the development of various “reverse” anthropologies; 5) the embrace of non-European anthropologies and ontologies.
Running through these many efforts has been a concern with the discipline’s grounding concept, namely “otherness.” The notion that field-research is an exercise in self-knowledge achieved through a detour through otherness, and that anthropology is itself a “technique of homelessness” (Lévi-Strauss, Balandier) has been indicted as fundamentally Eurocentric. Yet, the concept and problematic of otherness, of the other and alterity (and the related German terms, Fremd(heit), Andere, Alterität), vary greatly across the different discursive traditions as well as the critiques of the discipline.
At various moments, a shift to the idioms of différance (via deconstruction), multiplicity and the otherwise (via the new ontologies and post-Kantianism more generally) have been offered as escapes from the colonial burdens still weighing upon most disciplinary anthropology. But this does not yet constitute an analysis of these distinct concepts and their respective entailments. That task remains to be undertaken. In this discussion, Rosalind Morris explores the intellectual histories within which otherness has been conceived in anthropology, and argues for the politico-ethical as well as conceptual necessity of retaining this concept at the discipline’s core.
Keywords
Decolonizing Anthropology
Cultural Anthropology
Social Anthropology
Decolonization
History of Ideas
Epistemology
Ontology
GND Keywords
Ethnologie; http://d-nb.info/gnd/4078931-7
Sozialanthropologie
Kulturanthropologie
Ideengeschichte
Wissenschaftstheorie
Dekolonisierung
Ontologie
DDC
300 Sozialwissenschaften/301 Soziologie und Anthropologie
300 Sozialwissenschaften/305 Personengruppen
300 Sozialwissenschaften/306 Kultur und Institutionen
300 Sozialwissenschaften/370 Bildung und Erziehung/378 Hochschulbildung (Tertiärbereich)
RVK
LB 31000
LB 26000
Language
eng
Publication type
MovingImage
File format
MP4
Publisher DOI
Duration
00:47:51