The liberation of culture. Anthropology and after - Alberto Corsín Jiménez (CSIC, Madrid)  

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Abstract
‘An anthropologist’, once wrote Roy Wagner, ‘is someone who uses the word “culture” with hope.’ In recent years, the hopefulness of the anthropological project has demanded redefining our relations to “culture” as a boundary object. If the 1980s famously saw anthropologists take issue with the literary conventions of ethnographic reportage, questioning the reflexive licenses of its genres of representation, more recent work is looking at ways to refunction and reconceptualize the mise-en-scènes and material designs of the ethnographic encounter. If once the tools of anthropological invention were literary craft and metaphor, today they seem to gravitate towards scenographies of playful provocation and speculative design. Yet how is anthropology “getting a hold on” the shifting terrains and pressures of these new forms of fieldwork? What might this “getting a hold on” itself mean when the cultural and infrastructural boundaries between data, method and analysis are hardly distinguishable anymore? What if these shifting dynamics have reframed the problem-spaces of anthropology, such that ours is no longer the study of culture or social relations, not even the ‘invention of culture’ (as Wagner had it), but the reckoning-with its forms of liberation?

Bio
Alberto Corsín Jiménez is Reader in the Department of Social Anthropology at the Spanish National Research Council in Madrid. He is co-founder of the open access collective Libraria and the open source urban infrastructure of apprenticeships Ciudad Escuela. His publications include Prototyping cultures: art, science and politics in beta (ed. Routledge, 2017), An Anthropological Trompe l’oeil for a Common World (Berghahn 2013), Culture and well-being: anthropological approaches to freedom and political ethics (ed. Pluto, 2008), and The anthropology of organisations (ed. Ashgate, 2007). He is currently writing an ethnographic history of the free culture movement in Spain.